Why Have You Forsaken Me (continued)?

God challenges Job to engage in authentic trust in the face of real loss. Solomons and Flores offer these comments.

“There is always evidence to feed and confirm distrust.  Trust similarly feeds and confirms trust.  Because trust always involves risk, there is never any airtight proof of the wisdom of trusting.  This point cannot be made too emphatically, particularly in the face of the insistence that people have to earn our trust.  If we insist that others prove their trustworthiness before we trust them, our distrust, no matter how tentative, will more likely provoke the downward spiral of distrust than allow room for building trust.  Trust begins with trust.” (Building Trust, page 37).

By the end of the book it may be that Job is ready to risk trusting God regardless of the benefits or costs.  John Polkinghorne, theoretical physicist and Anglican priest, talks about testing and trusting: “…we know that there are whole realms of human experience where testing has to give way to trusting.  That’s true in human relationships.  If I’m always setting little traps to see if you’re my friend, I’ll destroy the possibility of friendship between us” (Einstein’s God, page 258).  Perhaps God longs for Job to stop setting trust traps and to start taking some risks in the relationship.

Does that Hebrew word, “chinnam,” drive me toward grace or despair?  Perhaps it drives me through despair to grace.  That seems to have been the experience of Martin Luther as he reports it in his preface to his lectures on the book of Romans.  It is the assessment William Young offers in The Shack: “I suppose that since most of our hurts come through relationships, so will our healing, and I know that grace rarely makes sense to those looking in from the outside.”

And if we are not required to lose everything in order to love God for nothing, then perhaps it is the spiritual discipline of surrendering everything to God that takes the place of this radical loss.  Perhaps this is the real and deep spiritual function, for example, of giving away our wealth.  If we can do that, then perhaps we are better equipped to love God for God rather than for ourselves.

Another lament psalm is more familiar to Christian ears.  It begins this way: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  We hear Jesus shout these words from the cross on Good Friday.  We hear most of the psalm chanted at the altar is stripped on Maundy Thursday.  

In order to come to terms with this lament from the cross, we should know that any Old Testament reference on the lips of a rabbi was intended to call to mind the whole context of the psalm and not just the verse that is spoken out loud.  So Psalm 22 is a back and forth internal dialogue offered by one who is suffering.  Verses 1 and 2 are complaint.  Verses three through five affirm God’s faithfulness to Israel in the midst of past suffering.

The psalmist returns to complaint in verses six through eight.  “I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people…”  The language of the external enemy returns here.  Then comes another affirmation of trust in verses nine through eleven.  The back and forth rhythm continues until it is broken by an extended doxology in verses twenty-two through thirty-one.  The psalmist asserts that God has responded to him in the midst of his trials:

“For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted;

he did not hide his face from me,

but heard when I cried to him.

(Verse 24)

In the lament psalms, the psalmist is not looking for answers to theological questions but rather for “transformation of the present situation” (Newsom, Interpretation, page 249).  This is how we can hear Jesus’ words from the cross as well.  Job’s intention, however, is different.  He doesn’t use his complaints as psalms of lament.  Let me quote Carol Newsom here.

“Job’s act of resistance to this religiously sanctioned violence is to violate the form of the lament…The ravaged body serves as the basis not for compassionate appeal but for accusation.  Rather than engaging in self-examination and repentance, as the lament urges, Job envisions a witness who would testify before God concerning the wrong done to him” (Newsom, Interpretation, pages 247-248).  

If Job is to be identified as the enemy, the adversary—the accused—then he wants his day in court with God in the defendant’s chair.