My Eyes Have Seen You

The book is resolved by an encounter, not by an explanation. Before God, Job does not receive the answer he demanded, but he receives God himself, and that is enough for him: he passes from knowledge by hearsay to vision. Then God overturns everything: he blames the friends who thought they were defending him, justifies Job who had sought him in revolt, and restores the righteous man to a full life. The Church reads this book in the light of Christ, the suffering righteous one above all, in whom Job’s question finds at last its answer.

My eyes have seen you

The encounter with God works in Job a change deeper than all words. He does not say: now I understand, but: now I see you. “I knew you only by hearsay, but now my eyes have seen you.” Job 42:5 All his life, Job had believed in God from afar, on the word of others; the trial led him to a direct, burning, personal knowledge. It is not suffering that saved him, but the encounter to which it led him. Then he retracts, not his complaints, which God does not reproach him, but his claim to judge what surpassed him: “I retract and repent, upon the dust and ashes.” Job 42:6 This repentance is not that of a guilty man, it is the humility of one who has seen God and measured his own smallness.

God blames the friends, Job intercedes

Then comes the most unexpected reversal. It is not the pious friends who are approved, but Job the rebel. God addresses Eliphaz: “you have not spoken of me with what is right, as my servant Job has done.” Job 42:7 The friends, who thought they were defending God, had given a false image of him, an accountant-judge who punishes to measure; Job, by crying out his revolt to God instead of resigning himself to a lie, had spoken truer. And God asks that Job pray for them. The tried righteous man, instead of triumphing over those who overwhelmed him, intercedes: “the Lord restored the fortunes of Job while he was praying for his friends.” Job 42:10 It is by praying for his accusers that Job is restored, as if his trial bore all its fruit only in opening onto forgiveness.

The restoration of Job

God then gives back to Job double what he had, new flocks, seven sons and three daughters, and long years: he dies old and sated with days. This happy ending might seem to prove the friends’ doctrine right, as if virtue were finally paid. But it is the reverse: Job is not rewarded for a bargain, he is justified after having loved God gratuitously, even into ruin, expecting nothing in return. The restoration does not come to prove that piety pays; it comes to say that God does not forsake the righteous, and that the last word of the story is not misfortune, but life. The wager of the prologue is won: man can love God for himself, and that love, God does not leave without answer.

Job and Christ

The Church has always read Job as a figure of Christ. Job is the righteous man who suffers without having sinned, abandoned by his own, overwhelmed with ills, and who yet does not leave God: he announces the Righteous One above all, the innocent handed over to suffering and death. What Job sought without finding, a defender who lays his hand on God and on man, Christ is in person, the one mediator, God and man. His cry, “I know that my Redeemer lives,” the Church sings as the hope of the resurrection, fulfilled on the morning of Easter. The Cross illuminates at last what the book left open: the suffering of the innocent, far from being a punishment, can become the very place of salvation. Christ, moreover, sets aside forever the doctrine of the friends when, before the man born blind, he refuses to see in misfortune the proof of a fault: “Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God may be revealed in him.” John 9:3 Finally, Job praying for his accusers prefigures Christ interceding for his executioners. The New Testament itself keeps the lesson: “You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the end the Lord brought about for him.” James 5:11