SEARCHING FOR GOD IN TIME AND SPACE - Job takes leave of direct speech-response dialogue with his interlocutors and searches for God in space and time. This lesson suggests that if God might only be found, the sufferer could gain a hearing and things would be set right and put back together again.

WHERE IS GOD? - Verse three in literal translation is, "who will give that I might know where to find him?" Job half prays, half wishes where he can find God. The sufferer longs for a tribunal where his case can be taken up. This would be utopia for him, yet it is "no place" since he cannot find it. But all is shrouded in a terrifying hiddenness of divine action and purpose. [1]

HEIDEGGER’S ILLUSTRATION - A carpenter goes into his well-furnished workshop with his tools. Everything used-wood, nails, hammer-he takes as a given. That is, until the hammer head snaps off the top. For the first time the carpenter becomes truly aware of the hammer. Suddenly its wholeness becomes visible in its brokenness; the hammer becomes inescapably present to the carpenter precisely because of its absence. Job can presumably speak fluently of God’s justice and the moral order of the world. But like the carpenter, only when Job discovers the brokenness of justice and the absence of the God of justice does he possess the urgent, knowledge of justice and of God. [2]

Did you enjoy playing "hide-and-seek" as a child (or as a parent with a child)? Which did you like more-hiding or seeking? Recall a time in your faith experience / journey when it seemed that God was playing hide and seek with you. How did that specific experience get resolved?

If you were to bring a malpractice suit against God for the bad way things turned out one day, what would be the charges? What compensation would you want?

Job wants his day in court. If he can only find where God hanging out in the universes, his puny problems would be resolved. What may keep us from finding God sometimes? Lack of humility? Faith? Refusal to look where we know God might be?

Please refer to the homily on this passage on DPS for this Sunday.

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[1] Gerald J. Janzen, Interpretation Series: Job (John Knox Press, 1985), page 168.
[2] Cited in The New Interpreter’s Bible IV (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), page 513.