Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today’s reading from the book of Job is a fairly good distillation of the whole book. Job’s misery impels him to complain, to lash out, and ultimately to ask God a series of rhetorical questions, such as ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ One of the great themes of this story is Job’s failure to fully comprehend God’s responsibility, actions, and indeed the nature of God’s very person, in the light of suffering.

What the Scripture and tradition teach us is that God is both hidden to us and revealed, both mysterious and intelligible. Of course, Job’s story brings home the former reality, in which God rebukes Job (and us) for supposing that he understands God, that he comprehends God’s doings.

The early church fathers wrote of God’s various dimensions, trying to make sense of both realities. St. Basil spoke of God’s ‘essence’ and his ‘energies’. The word essence simply refers to the sense in which God is other, unknowable, even invisible to us – a profound mystery. On the other hand, God’s energies are the ways in which God reveals himself to us in action and self-manifestation. In other words, we know God through his action and revelation. But in terms of who God is essentially: that we cannot know.

This traditional teaching caused early Christian theologians to describe God with ‘apophatic’ language, essentially describing God by what he is not. God is invisible, intangible, unknowable, inapprehensible.

Why would these ideas matter to us? Who cares about such nice distinctions? I bring this up in the context of Job, because it reveals how we all tend to shape God according to our image, to imagine we comprehend what God is like, or what God thinks of various things. We take God and turn him into a mouthpiece for our personal wishes, plans, ideologies, actions, or whatever – in the same way a politician takes the vast complexities of the world and transforms them into a personal slogan. It is very easy for us to miss God and to put up our own idols instead.

What’s the solution? Ostensibly, getting to know God as we are able, through his revelation and action. Prayer is a particularly potent pathway, provided we learn wait for and encounter God’s presence, without trying to manipulate him to suit our thoughts or feelings.

A beautiful illustration of this Job story is Terrence Mallick’s film Tree of Life. The Job-character, a mother who loses her boy in the war, asks God the same big question: Why? In response, God’s answer to her falls within a stunning creation-of-the-universe scene accompanied by the judgement-day words of the Requiem Mass: ‘full of tears will be that day’. In the end, the mother’s questions are never resolved. Instead, she begins to discover God’s love in new and unexpected ways. It is a kind of devotional exercise to watch, quite overwhelming, and a valuable representation of this question.

Yours in Christ,
Justin