Two days ago we watched the wager. Job has now lost everything, his three friends have arrived and delivered their first speeches, and this is his reply to Bildad — who has just told him that Theos does not pervert justice and that if he is upright, his prayer will be heard.
What happens
"I know well that it is so; but how can a man be justified before Theos? Should one wish to contend with him, he could not answer him once in a thousand times… He removes the mountains before they know it; he overturns them in his anger. He shakes the earth out of its place… He alone stretches out the heavens and treads upon the crests of the sea. He made the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the constellations of the south. He does great things past finding out, marvelous things beyond reckoning. Should he come near me, I see him not; should he pass by, I am not aware of him… Even though I were right, I would not answer him, but should rather beg for what was due me."
What to notice
Job's first three words concede everything: omnam yada'ti khi khen — "truly, I know that it is so." He is not disputing his friends' theology; he grants it in full, and then shows that granting it destroys him. Then the question, one of the most important in the Bible: u-mah yitzdaq enosh im El — "how can a mortal be in the right with Theos?"Job asks in despair the question Paul will spend Romans answering. Here it is not a doctrinal enquiry but a man discovering he has no standing to sue. The hymn in the middle is the strangest part: "he does great things past finding out" is very nearly word for word what Eliphaz said in Job 5:9. Job takes the friends' praise-hymn and repeats it back as a complaint. One line to keep: dorekh al-bamotei yam, "he treads upon the heights of the sea" — the verse standing behind the walking on the water, appearing here inside a list of reasons Job cannot get an answer. And Job 9:11 names his actual condition: should he pass by, I would not know it.
Psalm 88 is unique. Every other lament in the Psalter turns somewhere — a but I trust, a yet I will praise, a vow to give thanks. This one does not. Its last word in Hebrew is machshakh, darkness, and there is no resolution before it.
The selected verses
Psalm 88:10–11."Daily I call upon you, Yahweh; to you I stretch out my hands. Will you work wonders for the dead? Will the shades arise to give you thanks?" Psalm 88:12–13."Do they declare your hesed in the grave, your faithfulness among those who have perished? Are your wonders made known in the darkness, or your justice in the land of oblivion?" Psalm 88:14–15."But I, Yahweh, cry out to you; with my morning prayer I wait upon you. Why, Yahweh, do you reject me; why hide your face from me?"
What to notice
The questions in the middle are not rhetorical piety; they are an argument, and a shrewd one. Will the shades rise to praise you? Is your hesed declared in the grave?The psalmist is telling Theos that a dead worshipper is no use to him — the same move Hezekiah makes in Isaiah 38:18–19. And the last selected verse is the day's exact pairing with Job: lamah Yahweh tiznach nafshi, tastir panekha mimmeni — why do you hide your face from me? Job says should he pass by, I would not know it; the psalm says I know he is there, and he has turned away.Two forms of the same absence. That the Church keeps this psalm in the book at all, unrelieved, is worth noticing: there is a liturgical text for the state in which nothing improves.
Six verses earlier Luke wrote the hinge of his gospel: "when the days for his being taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem" — literally, he set his face. Everything from here to chapter nineteen is that journey, and these three encounters are the first thing on the road.
What happens
"Someone said to him, 'I will follow you wherever you go.' Jesus answered him, 'Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.' And to another he said, 'Follow me.' But he replied, 'Master, let me go first and bury my father.' But he answered him, 'Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the reign of Theos.' And another said, 'I will follow you, master, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.' To him Jesus said, 'No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the reign of Theos.'"
What to notice
The first man volunteers and is neither accepted nor refused — he is told what the accommodation is like. Foxes and birds are named because they are not impressive animals. The comparison is not with kings but with vermin and sparrows, and even they are better housed. The second answer is the hardest sentence in Luke: burying a father was the most binding filial duty in Jewish practice, and the law permitted even a priest, otherwise forbidden all contact with a corpse, to defile himself for a parent (Leviticus 21:1–3). Jesus overrides an obligation the law itself protected, and no gloss makes it comfortable. The third has a precedent, and the precedent gives it its edge: when Elijah threw his cloak over Elisha, Elisha was at the plough, and asked "let me kiss my father and mother goodbye" — and Elijah let him (1 Kings 19:19–21). Luke's third man asks for exactly that, in the same posture, and is refused. Jesus is stricter than Elijah, and Luke's readers knew the story. And the image is precise: a man with his hand on the plough, looking at what is behind. A plough is steered by keeping your eye on a fixed point ahead; turn your head and the furrow goes crooked.
How They Fit Together
The bleakest set of the month, and it is honest to say so
This is the bleakest set of readings in the month, and it is more honest to say that than to soften it.
Job's position is not that Theos is unjust — he explicitly refuses that: I know that it is so. His problem is procedural, and it is worse than injustice would be. There is no venue. A man cannot cross-examine someone who removes mountains before they know it, and Job's picture of an appeal is precise and hopeless: even if I were in the right, I would have to plead rather than argue. And then Job 9:11: should he pass by, I would not know it. The complaint is not that Theos is against him. It is that Theos cannot be located.
Psalm 88 states the other half of the same condition. Its singer has no doubt about where Theos is; he simply reports that the face is turned away, and — uniquely in the Psalter — never recovers. The Church put it in the book anyway, and it says its last word in the dark. That is a considerable act of editorial honesty, and anyone who has spent time in that country knows what it is worth to find the psalm already written.
Then the Gospel, which offers no relief and is not trying to. Three men approach with reasonable positions, and each answer removes something: the volunteer is told there is nowhere to sleep, the mourner is told the funeral will proceed without him, and the man who wants to say goodbye is refused a courtesy Elijah granted. Nothing here is a recruitment pitch.
But notice what the passage is attached to, because it changes the register. Luke has just written that Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem — and we know from three passion predictions this month what waits there. The man with nowhere to lay his head is not describing a lifestyle. He is describing a route, and he is six verses into walking it. The severity of the three answers is the severity of somebody who has stopped having options himself. Which is why the plough is the right last image: a furrow is cut straight by fixing on a point ahead and refusing to turn the head, and the whole travel narrative from here to Jerusalem is Luke showing a man who does not turn his head. Job cannot find him; Psalm 88 cannot see his face; and Luke's Jesus is already walking, in one direction, toward the place where the face will be visible and it will be terrible.
The day offers no consolation. What it offers is company: two texts that say the dark is real, and one that says somebody is going through it ahead of you.
A Question to Sit WithPsalm 88 does not resolve. It asks why the face is hidden, and then it stops, and the last word is darkness — and somebody decided that belonged in the prayer book. I have generally treated my own flat stretches as a failure of nerve or of effort, something to be fixed before I am fit to pray properly. This psalm says otherwise: it was written down, kept, and set to music, unrelieved. If the dark did not need to be resolved before it could be prayed, what would I say tonight that I have been waiting to feel better before saying?