The rings of grief: Job and Eliphaz

Job 4:1-9

There’s a splendid chart I came across at some point in my life that looks something like this...

 It’s titled “Ring Theory.” There’s an inner circle, small, confined, and then several rings growing further and further out. In the inner circle is the aggrieved or afflicted. This is the person who is affected primarily by a loss. Then a step further out is significant others, parents, siblings and the like. Then a step further is true friends. A step further is colleagues. The last ring is lookie loos, which I think is Australian for people who slow down their cars to check out accidents or something like that. In this chart comfort goes in and on the bottom are the words dump OUT with arrows pointing away.

            The purpose of this chart is to demonstrate the appropriate way that we are to deal with grief in the case of any profound loss—maybe a death or maybe a personal loss of some other kind. The appropriate way to address all grief is inside-out, starting with those most closely affected and moving outward. This might seem obvious, but in subtle ways people do not get this. The principle is that those closest to the loss—a spouse, parents, maybe children—get to share their grief with ALL those further out. And the next ring gets to share their grief with friends and neighbors further out in the circle and so on. But nobody gets to share their grief in the other direction. No true friend gets to lay their emotional burdens on the family; no acquaintance or stranger gets to use an event as an excuse to dump their own issues on friends or family members. We’ve all seen this happen. If you haven’t it might be because you’re the person who does it.

            This is why I’m always nervous opening up the mic at funerals to whomever may come up. Most people who get up to talk at a funeral—90% at least—do a great job of honoring the person who died and they express emotions appropriately without laying their emotional burdens on those closer to the situation, but there’s sometimes that person who stands up and who, for whatever reason, lacks the emotional intelligence to understand on which ring they are standing. It’s a friend or acquaintance who plays up their emotions over those closer to the loss, or it’s even a close friend or extended family member who feels the need to tell the family how they should be feeling.

            The reason I bring this up today is because Eliphaz the Temanite is a friend of Job’s who does not understand his place on the rings of grief. Rather than sitting with Job, listening in his anguish, and mourning alongside him, he reverts to his stock answers to why there is suffering in the world and he’s ready to share them with Job, like it or not, because that’s what he believes a good friend should do. In that moment Eliphaz shows he lacks the emotional intelligence to sit with Job in his grief. Instead, he searches for answers, blaming, of course, Job himself. Even if he wasn’t blaming Job, this is inappropriate behavior.

            To understand this another way, Eliphaz preaches the law in the moment when Job needs the law the least because he’s already incredibly aware of the ramifications of law. He’s lost everything; he has no more ground on which to stand. If anyone understands the cost of living it is Job. Eliphaz reads the situation as one where we reap what we sow, failing to understand that it is precisely because of Job’s blamelessness that he finds himself in this position. It is because he was a great man that Satan rips everything away from him. We saw as much in the first chapter. There’s nothing hidden about the situation. Satan, who had been wandering about the planet, decided that this man whom God had lifted up as a truly good man is the kind of man that must be put to the test.

            Eliphaz doesn’t understand this because he’s not willing to let anything question his stock answers. Eliphaz is a man who claims a strong faith; he’s the guy with all the answers; but he lacks the understanding of what faith really is. It’s not answers. Faith is not certainty in your understanding of who God is or how God works. Faith is actually demonstrated perfectly by Job when he loses everything because he turns not to his theological assertions about God. He turns to the real God, the living God, and he does it not with certainty but with doubt. Doubting why?

            In my work I find myself somewhat regularly in those moments of profound sadness with families and friends of loved ones, especially those who have died unexpectedly or experienced some kind of traumatic loss, and I cringe at the need some of us have to be fix-it people in those circumstances. People tell me all the time that they don’t know what to say when somebody is desperately grieving, and so they tell me that couldn’t do what I do.  I’ve never said this but perhaps I should start, because I’m often thinking it—thinking that “Yes, you can’t do what I do because the trick is to say nothing… except maybe I love you and I care about you… now let’s sit together in your pain.” Sitting with somebody that’s in pain is the toughest and most necessary thing most of us will ever be called to do as human beings.

In those moments we don’t need to be completely silent. Rather none of us need to teach people how to grieve. Instead, they get to direct us. Everybody grieves in their own way and their own time. My job, as a pastor, is to help them figure out for themselves what healthy grieving looks like, and I often do that by simply being a person representing God-in-the-flesh for them. They can’t see Jesus, but maybe they’ll see me.

            Of course, any human being can do this. This is something all of you can do, and some of you do it exceptionally well. When a person is grieving a loss you help them reflect simply by being there. You don’t need to be wise; you just need to be. Helping people cope with grief is 90% showing up and, to do my best Yogi Berra, the other half is shutting up.

            The Job we find in our reading today is a man in the earliest stages of immense grief. He is processing out loud, which is usually quite a good thing to do, and he’s doing it by questioning the God who created him and supposedly held his security in his hands. Some people don’t like the idea of shouting at God, but let me tell you: God is a lot more reliable in God’s reactions to being shouted at then people are. Sometimes people don’t like that much, but God can usually take it. At least for a little while.

            Job is in no place to hear what Eliphaz has to say for several reasons. 1. Eliphaz is on the outside of his rings of grief, 2. Even if Eliphaz were right that the reason Job has lost everything is because of his behavior there is no simple fix; it’s not like being good from this point forward would bring his family back from the dead, so this feels more like rubbing it in than meaningful help. We don’t need people to lord over us their own righteousness in our moments of loss. Nobody cares for that, least of all God. And 3. Eliphaz is not right. He misreads the situation, probably because he’s projecting his own insecurities on Job.

            Don’t be Eliphaz. Don’t let your faith in God turn you into such a well of certainty that you must correct others’ alleged misgivings in a time when they need you to be a reflection of God. Listen first. Reflect first. Sit with the Jobs of the world. This is hard work, especially for fix-it people, because it means going into a situation not to fix it but with the purpose of suffering alongside. You can’t fix it. Eliphaz couldn’t fix it. All you can do is show up.

            The weird thing is that that’s also the best thing you can do. Strangely, it’s enough. It’s not going to fix it, but it is going to make it better, a little bit at a time. Job has a long journey ahead of him at this point. More discernment is needed, but he could have been aided by a friend who actually cared, who understood his place. Understand yours. Be Jesus Christ to a hurting world. That’s a helluva thing to be and you all have it in you. Be Job. Not Eliphaz. Neither path is easy but one of them is good.