Gutiérrez On Job: Part 3, Prophecy and Worship

A third insight that I'd like to share from Gustavo Gutiérrez's book On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent has to do with the relationship between prophecy and worship.

As the subtitle of the Gutiérrez's book indicates, he is looking for ways to properly speak about God in the face of human suffering.

Unsurprisingly, given that he was a founder of liberation theology, Gutiérrez argues that our language about God must be prophetic in nature. Our language should be in solidarity with those who are suffering and align with God's preferential option for the poor and victimized in the world.

Gutiérrez shows that Job himself makes this journey. Though Job is suffering himself as the book continues Job begins to reflect less on his own suffering than upon the sufferings of others, the poor in particular. Even in the midst of his own pain Job's theology becomes other-oriented, focused on the suffering of others. You can see this focus in a passage where Job offers up what is, perhaps, the most stinging prophetic rebuke in the bible of those who exploit the poor:
Job 24.2-14
Evil people steal land by moving the boundary markers.
They steal livestock and put them in their own pastures.
They take the orphan’s donkey
and demand the widow’s ox as security for a loan.
The poor are pushed off the path;
the needy must hide together for safety.
Like wild donkeys in the wilderness,
the poor must spend all their time looking for food,
searching even in the desert for food for their children.
They harvest a field they do not own,
and they glean in the vineyards of the wicked.
All night they lie naked in the cold,
without clothing or covering.
They are soaked by mountain showers,
and they huddle against the rocks for want of a home.

“The wicked snatch a widow’s child from her breast,
taking the baby as security for a loan.
The poor must go about naked, without any clothing.
They harvest food for others while they themselves are starving.
They press out olive oil without being allowed to taste it,
and they tread in the winepress as they suffer from thirst.
The groans of the dying rise from the city,
and the wounded cry for help,
yet God ignores their moaning.

“Wicked people rebel against the light.
They refuse to acknowledge its ways
or stay in its paths.
The murderer rises in the early dawn
to kill the poor and needy;
at night he is a thief.
The indictment of the rich here is searing. This speech is as harsh if not harsher than anything we find the prophets. And in this we see how Job's speech about God--his theology, his God-talk--finds its way forward by becoming properly prophetic, aligned with the plight of the poor and those who are suffering.

That much you'd expect from a liberation theologian. But Gutiérrez goes on to say, and this is the part that interests me, that prophetic speech is not enough. The language of justice is unable to capture all that needs to be captured when we talk about God.

What else is needed?

Gutiérrez argues that we also need the language of contemplation, mystery and worship. We see this in Job at the end of the book when Job, after his encounter with God, moves from prophetic speech to worship. This movement is important as Gutiérrez suggests that the language of justice, if left by itself, becomes vulnerable as speech about God. For two reasons in particular.

First, the language of justice if left alone can slip back into the theology of retribution that Job has been rejecting throughout the dialogues with his friends. To be clear, we need to be careful here. We do want justice. But we need to be careful lest we reduce the Kingdom of God to the bringing of punishment upon evil-doers. Justice alone provides no room for grace, love, and mercy.

And this relates to the second concern about the naked language of justice. Namely, the preferential option for the poor isn't rooted in the virtue of the poor. The poor aren't preferred because they are Righteous Angels of Light. The poor are preferred because of God's love. If this is forgotten the oppressed can come to see themselves as God's divine agents and, in seeking justice and redress, the victims can become the perpetrators.

And yet, we need to be careful here because if the language of worship--the language of God's grace and love--becomes disconnected from the language of prophecy, disconnected from the suffering of others, it becomes ineffectual, pietistic, idolatrous and irrelevant.

So what we have here is a dialectic, with the language of worship keeping the language of prophecy rooted in God's grace and love and the language of prophecy keeping the language of worship connected to the suffering of others.

Gutiérrez writes:
This new awareness in turn showed [Job] that solidarity with the poor was required by his faith in a God who has a special love for the disinherited, the exploited in human history. This preferential love is the basis for what I have been calling the prophetic way of speaking about God.

But the prophetic way is not the only way of drawing near to the mystery of God, nor is it sufficient by itself. Job has just experienced a second shift [after his encounter with God]: from a penal view of history to the world of grace that completely enfolds him and permeates him...[But] in this second stage the issue is not to discover gratuitousness and forget the demands of justice, but to situate justice within the framework of God's gratuitous love...

The world of retribution--and not of temporal retribution only--is not where God dwells; at most God visits it...

The poet's insight continues to be value for us: the gratuitousness of God's love is the framework within which the requirement of practicing justice is to be located.

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6 thoughts on “Gutiérrez On Job: Part 3, Prophecy and Worship”

  1. This is neat, but I'm confused when I read it alongside the conclusion of Job itself. I think the actual text is even more interesting, wintery, ironic and perhaps playful in a very serious way. I don't see a word of praise from Job at all, but rather a judgment, directed at the wicked, which also falls on the just and the poor. And then the praise (and abnegation of all humans) comes not from Job, but from Bildad, one of the worthless friends. Where to go from here? Does Gutierrez acknowledge this, or is he simply reading sloppily?  Here it is, from 24:15 to 25:6:

    The eye
    of the adulterer watches
    for dusk;

        he
    thinks, ‘No eye will see me,’

        and he
    keeps his face concealed.

     In the
    dark, thieves break into houses,

        but by
    day they shut themselves in;

        they
    want nothing to do with the light.

     For all
    of them, midnight is their morning;

        they
    make friends with the terrors of
    darkness.

     “Yet
    they are foam on the
    surface of the water;

        their
    portion of the land is cursed,

        so that
    no one goes to the vineyards.

     As heat and drought
    snatch away the melted snow,

        so the
    grave snatches away those who
    have sinned.

     The womb forgets them,

        the worm feasts on them;

    the wicked are no longer remembered

        but are
    broken like a tree.

    They prey on the barren and childless
    woman,

        and to
    the widow they show no kindness.

    But God drags away the mighty by his
    power;
        though
    they become established, they
    have no assurance of life.

     He may
    let them rest in a feeling of security,

        but his
    eyes are on their ways.

     For a
    little while they are exalted, and then they are gone;

        they
    are brought low and gathered up like all others;

        they
    are cut off like heads of grain.

    “If this is not so, who can prove me false

        and
    reduce my words to nothing?”

    Then Bildad the Shuhite replied:

    “Dominion and awe belong to God;

        he
    establishes order in the heights of heaven.

     Can his forces be
    numbered?

        On whom
    does his light not rise?

     How
    then can a mortal be righteous before God?

        How can
    one born of woman be pure?

    If even the moon is not bright

        and the
    stars are not pure in his eyes,

     how
    much less a mortal, who is but a maggot—

        a human
    being, who is only a worm!”

  2. "And this relates to the second concern about the naked language of justice. Namely, the preferential option for the poor isn't rooted in the virtue of the poor. The poor aren't preferred because they are Righteous Angels of Light. The poor are preferred because of God's love. If this is forgotten the oppressed can come to see themselves as God's divine agents and, in seeking justice and redress, the victims can become the perpetrators.

    And yet, we need to be careful here because if the language of worship--the language of God's grace and love--becomes disconnected from the language of prophecy, disconnected from the suffering of others, it becomes ineffectual, pietistic, idolatrous and irrelevant.

    So what we have here is a dialectic, with the language of worship keeping the language of prophecy rooted in God's grace and love and the language of prophecy keeping the language of worship connected to the suffering of others."
    This passage is an excellent point and it brings out what I find most troubling about many liberation theologians.  The language in books like Cone's "God of the Oppressed" and "Black Liberation Theology", at least to my ears, has the prophetic word of justice but is lacking that language of love.  I'm glad to see this brought out in Gutierrez.  Thank you for this, Richard!

  3. This is really helpful. I've wanted to get to this book for some time, and this is motivation to speed up the process.

    Also, I find this to be a more palatable alternative (or expanded vision) than the a/theism set of posts from a few weeks back. The dialectic of prophecy and worship keeps the love of God and neighbor in proper proportion and depth without collapsing one into the other or losing the irreducible substance of one in favor of the other.

  4. I think your criticism of James Cone is exactly right, and I fear that too many liberation theologians have failed to hear Gutierrez's advice on this point.

  5. Very good. This dialectic is exactly what I've sensed as missing in so much of my struggle with applying justice and grace.
    T

  6. Offered without comment:

    http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/jesuit-archbishop-recounts-strong-stand-of-pope-francis-against-liberation

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