Many years ago, I struggled with this same line from Job. In fact, it was a running feud. I was outraged by God allowing Satan to test his faithful servant. How capricious, how callous to let such atrocities befall one who was innocent – and with no word of explanation. I refused to accept this could be justified.
Eventually I had to admit testing does seem part of the human journey. Even Jesus, the sinless One, was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested. In the ultimate test on the Cross, His response also was effectively Job’s “Yea, though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” Both Abraham and Our Lady had been so formed and graced in faith that they could accept the unthinkable: “Yea though He slay my son, yet will I trust Him.” What is it about testing that is needed in the purification and sanctification of our hearts?
The answer emerged from the second aspect of Job that outraged me. During a 30-day Ignatian retreat, I was given Job’s crisis for meditation. Here’s how I read the passage: After being pushed to the brink of insanity, Job demanded an answer from God. The response (heard through my wounded heart) was, “How dare you question Me? You have no power to make the sun rise or to create the universe...” And Job’s response, in my mind, was hang dog capitulation: “You’re right. I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. I’ll be quiet.”
My retreat came at the end of some devastating losses. Like Job’s friends, my interior voices spouted ignorance and old lies that this was my punishment for guilt. Like Job, my cries hit a wall of silence – no tenderness, no word, no response from God. My old pattern was to shut my mouth and give up. Instead, I rebelled – and wanted Job to as well.
I had to repeat the reading for a few days until I finally understood. When Job burst out with, “I knew you then (i.e. before my trials) only by hearsay; but now, having seen you with my own eyes, I retract all I have said, and in dust and ashes I repent,” he spoke not in defeat, but in awed love. Job was a faithful servant who kept the law, but was not an intimate of God. As his trials thrust him into vulnerability and powerlessness, he cried out, carped, cajoled and cursed his birth. But he never stepped out of relationship with God. In fact, he dropped into the depths of his heart where God waited to embrace him.
How can anyone articulate this encounter with the living God? All those poetic images that expressed God’s love and delight in every aspect of creation were actually tiny glimpses given to Job of God Himself . They were no longer hearsay but experience. Everything changed. As Job stood on the knife edge of faith, he could have renounced his belief in a loving God for lack of evidence. Instead, he stood for the first time without any illusion of power, self-sufficiency or control. He chose to bow in trust before the God his heart now knew and loved. Blessings flowed.
When Abraham made this choice, his son began a line of descendants as numerous as the stars. When Our Lady chose to still believe the Lord’s promises to her would be fulfilled, even as she witnessed her Son’s torture and death, she opened her heart to the joy of the Resurrection. When Jesus trusted His Father from the Cross, even while feeling abandoned, He was raised to eternal life, bringing Redemption to all.
It was in this line of divine trust that Rabbi Heschel cried out: “Yea though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” In our darkest hour, may we dig deep and proclaim these words with utter conviction.
(Cheryl-Ann Smith is director of Madonna House Toronto.)