A SUFFERING JOB PEOPLE
This week as I read through the book of Job, I was overwhelmed, again, by stories of afflicted black and brown people in America.
Ahmad Arbury and Breonna Taylor are just two more names I add to a long list of needless, reckless, and racist attacks on People of Color in our country.
As a white woman, I try to wrap my head around these senseless deaths, but I always feel like my mourning comes up short. My words are never adequate. My tears never match the tears of my black brothers and sisters.
There is an African proverb that says, “Seso se baba mongwai wa sona” which reads “the sore itches to the one who has it”. The outsider cannot accurately discern the intensity of the itch or the actual pain the sore holds. The outsider can only infer from their own experience and attempt to understand, but they may never truly comprehend the pain of the owner of the sore.[1]
In the story of Job, we see Job surrounded by “friends” who attempt to comfort him in his pain. The story of Job goes something like this: God allows a righteous man, Job, to be attacked by Satan; Satan’s attacks prove disastrous; Job loses his children, his wealth, and is overcome with illness. Job’s friends and wife try to comfort him, but their comfort is always concurrently implicating him of unrighteous acts. Job continues to plead his innocence, and the words his friends spoke to “comfort” him instead add to Job’s pain.
Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave and eventual civil activist canonized Job as, “the divine comforter, Job”[2]. And many African American hymns express the narratives of Job.
As Sadler explains,
Job functions as the story of another people who have lost everything and learned to question everything about their God and their fortunes. Having been stolen from their lands and brought to a new land where they experienced unimaginable brutality, enslaved Africans’ narratives are often inspired by and beholden to the story of Job… Job’s tale provides a vocabulary for suffering.[3]
Or as Dussel explains, there is a “collective Job, a Job-community. A suffering, persecuted, crucified Job-people”[4].
As a white person in America and as a part of the collective white culture, I fear that we approach our “suffering, persecuted, crucified Job-people”, our black and brown brothers and sisters, and make a lot of the same mistakes that Job’s contemporaries made. I have underestimated the “itch” of their suffering. I have looked for clues that discredit their narrative. I have said painful words that indict rather than encourage; I have attempted to comfort with platitudes that brought sorrow when my friends needed my silence. I have been silent when my friends needed my voice.
Dear white brothers and sisters, let us not make the same mistake of Job’s friends.
May we learn from the suffering of our black brothers and sisters and help to carry this burden for them. While I do not know what that fully looks like, I will continue to try to listen to the profound suffering of a “Job-people” and may we try to heal the profound sore they have been inflicted with.
And to my black and brown siblings in Christ, I will try to do better.
- Emily Thien
[1] Madipoane Masenya, “Job”, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora, eds. Huge R. Page Jr, Randall C. Bailey, and Valerie Bridgeman (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 239.
[2] Rodney S. Sadler Jr., “Job: An African American Perspective”, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora, eds. Huge R. Page Jr, Randall C. Bailey, and Valerie Bridgeman (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 241.
[3] Rodney S. Sadler Jr., “Job: An African American Perspective”, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora, eds. Huge R. Page Jr, Randall C. Bailey, and Valerie Bridgeman (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 242.
[4] E. Dussel, “The People of El Salvador: The Communal Sufferings of Job”. In Job and the Silence of God, ed. R. MacKenzie, (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1983), 61-68, referenced in Rodney S. Sadler Jr., “Job: An African American Perspective”, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora, eds. Huge R. Page Jr, Randall C. Bailey, and Valerie Bridgeman (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 242.