Insult me as well

Children who are deported or who die at sea fleeing the horrors of their own country. Tortured people. Elderly at any moment homeless, poor and alone. Parents who witness the slaughter of their children. Cancer patients who are no longer able to access free treatment in time. How many Jobs suffer next to us, very close to us. Like the biblical Job they are hit in a very few minutes, like in the book of Job a messenger in the form of TG doesn't have time to tell a tragedy that the next one arrives.

Sometimes it seems, as in Job, that evil attacks only one man. The unforgettable Job by the Yiddish writer Joseph Roth and his outburst come to mind bitter to his wife: «What do you want, Deborah, the poor are powerless. God doesn't throw stones at them from heaven, they don't win the lottery and they have to bear their fate with resignation. He gives to one and takes away from the other… Ah, things go badly for the poor if he has sinned and things go badly for him if he is sick… Against the will of heaven there is no power that holds. He thunders and thunders, he arches over the whole earth, before him there is no escape: thus it is written»

But the biblical Job does not resign himself at all. Overwhelmed by the tragedies that befell him, the loss of his patrimony, the death of his children, his own illness, at first he reacts with silence. Sitting in the dust, he is silent. Silence is the most effective and extraordinary description of suffering. It is no coincidence that, apart from rare cases, the survivors of the shoah have remained silent for decades. There is a total impossibility of describing pain in words. When he manages to do so, Job cries out to God for his protest, he asks for explanations of his silence, of his distance, the reason for the evil, man's eternal question. God becomes the great defendant in a trial where Job is the public prosecution and his three friends who have come to console him are the lawyers who defend God with the arguments of traditional theodicy: who, instead of consoling, exacerbate the pain and leave the question of evil unanswered . Finally, God answers. And he concludes his speech by giving wrong to the three friends who believe they have defended him, "you have not said straight things about me like my servant Job": because Job's cry of revolt, his contestation is true prayer. And he adds in fact: "My servant Job will pray for you": because it was precisely by shouting and arguing with God that Job demonstrated his radical trust in him.

The ending written by Christ is different. Christ does not construct any theodicy: his answer to the problem of evil is solidarity in evil. If with Adam's sin the world has become the antechamber of hell, God lets himself be murdered by men, captured by Satan and descends into our hell to unhinge its doors with his divinity. Job insults God and finds the Crucifix. The Man of Sorrows has taken his place: to make him enter, by his hand, into his resurrection.


Flaminia Morandi
NP April 2023