Cascade! Divine?
Photo by Kalen Emsley on Unsplash
Two seasoned, discerning critics of our environmental crisis have written something of a manifesto concerning the urgent need for better, more responsible policies that care for the earth. Their statement is entitled, An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity (2022). Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen see that the coming climate disaster is apocalyptic in scope. And they play with Al Gore’s understated term “inconvenient,” as they see that coming disaster as much deeper than “inconvenient.” They fully understand how the environmental crisis is systemically related to a host of other human crises as well. Thus they offer the eye-catching phrase, “multiple cascading crises” (p. 4).
Their index of coming crises is much more than “inconvenient”; it is reality-altering in the most comprehensive ways:
The decline of key natural resources and an emerging global resource crisis, especially in water;
The collapse of ecosystems that support life, and the mass extinction of species;
Human population growth and demand, beyond the earth’s carrying capacity;
Global warming, sea-level rise, and changes in the earth’s climate affecting all human capacity;
Universal pollution of the earth system and all life by chemicals;
Rising food insecurity and failing nutritional quality;
Nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction;
Pandemics of new and untreatable diseases;
The advent of powerful, uncontrolled new technologies;
National and global failure to understand and act preventively on these risks (p. 10).
They see that such crises will evoke the formulation of a new economic order:
If we don’t transcend a growth economy, there are hard times ahead. And if we do manage to construct a new economic order, there are hard times ahead. Hard times are coming for everyone, even though some people are more responsible for social and ecological problems than others and some of those people will be able to evade the consequences of those problems, at least in the short run.
The task of creating new systems is daunting, in large part because of challenges posed by the nature of the human animal, combined with most people’s denial of what it means to be an animal. We have faith in the better angels of our nature but realize that those better angels alone won’t save us from what we call “the temptations of dense energy,” which have come most recently in the form of fossil fuels. We conclude that there are no workable solutions to the most pressing problems of our historical moment (p. 10).
I have in particular latched on to their remarkable phrase, “multiple cascading crises.” What follows here is a reflection on a particular biblical text that was called to my mind by that phrase. I exposit this text in a playful way so that I do not intend to draw a conclusion or teach a lesson, but only to live with this innocent-looking text to experience the cumulative force of such a cascade that reaches for Job in the proportion of a tsunami.
The text of Job 1:13-19 is part of a “folk tale” in the Book of Job that frames the poetry that follows. The “folk tale” gives us a glimpse of the governing power of the creator God which is concealed from Job. God is unnamed in these verses though verse 16 allows a conventional phrase, “the fire of God.” It is often noted that in the prologue and the epilogue of the Book of Job, God is called by the Israelite name, YHWH. That naming of YHWH anchors the Book of Job in the Israelite tradition, even though in the poetry Job God is not so identified. In any case, behind the narrative is the governing force and will of the creator God who makes covenant with Israel.
These narrative verses are terse, disciplined, and focused on the dramatic repetition in a four-fold manner. The four decisive moments occur quickly in sequence. After the first crisis (vv. 13-15), the second is while the messenger “was still speaking” (v. 16). And so the third (v. 17), and so the fourth one (v. 18). They are in sequence but almost simultaneous in their reporting, so that the listener has no chance to catch a breath between the arrival of the several messengers of bad news. The prose narrative clearly intends that we should experience the “cascade” of calamities that come directly and abruptly upon the family and property of Job. In the background is the bet of Satan with God that these destructive “touches” will cause Job to curse God (1:11). Later on in chapter 2, after that bet of Satan has failed, Satan ups the ante, betting that a “touch” on Job’s body will lead him to curse God. As the matter unfolds, Job comes very close to cursing God in 3:1-26, but not quite!
Our interest, however, is fixed on the four afflictions on Job’s family and property in this first test of Satan’s bet. The disciplined repetition of the sequence of crises wears away at Job’s faith and the fabric of his social world. The narrative proceeds step-by-step to let the cadences of repetition have their full sway.
Each of the four episodes, quick as they are, has a clear beginning and ending:
The beginning:
A messenger (Job 2:13);
another (v. 16);
another (v. 17);
another (v. 18).
The ending:
I alone have escaped to tell you (v. 15);
I alone have escaped to tell you (v. 16);
I alone have escaped to tell you (v. 17);
I alone have escaped to tell you (v. 18).
The assault:
the Sabeans (v. 15);
the fire of God v. 16);
the Chaldeans (v. 17);
a great wind (v. 18).
In the four cases we have an alteration of an
historical enemy;
“natural cause”;
historical enemy;
“natural cause.”
The two alternatives of “history” and “nature” are equivalent. Both exist and operate according to the governance of the creator God. In context it was Satan, in concert with God, who initiated this cascade of crises.
The result:
oxen and donkeys carried off; servants killed (Job 2:15);
sheep burned up, servants consumed (v. 16);
camels carried off, servants killed (v. 17);
sons and daughters—young people—dead (v. 19; see v. 13).
The sequence is framed by “sons and daughters” in verses 13 and 19. In both cases they are children of privilege, “eating and drinking” (vv. 13, 19).
The cadence of the report with “killed, killed, killed, dead” and “carried off, burned, carried off, struck” sounds fully and decisively, not unlike the dull thud of a bell tolling. We get no comment or elaboration. Indeed, all we get is the report that Job, in a tone of resignation, defies Satan’s bet:
Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord (Job 1:21).
In the poetry that follows we can trace Job’s response to this cascade of crises that in chapter 2 is reinforced with Satan’s heavy “touch” of,
loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head (Job 2:7).
Even now, Job will not curse God. Job offers three responses to this cascade of trouble.
First, he complains bitterly and at length. He does not doubt that the troubles come from God. He is, moreover, deeply inured in the retrograde notion of “deeds and consequences.” He vigorously denies he has done anything to evoke such consequences.
Second, he offers a compelling defense of his own innocence (31:1-40). And nowhere in the Book of Job is his innocence brought into question.
Third, Job is finally addressed by God in the whirlwind. He has been eagerly asking for and demanding an encounter with the Holy One as an opportunity to defend himself (see 31:35-37). The confrontation offered by God, however, takes Job completely by surprise. The creator God has no interest at all in Job’s case. God will not defend the justice or injustice of God’s treatment of Job. Instead, God will, in boastful bombast, assert God’s own powerful preemption that reduces Job to trifling presence before God. The great doxologies of Job 38-41 in God’s own mouth are not designed to persuade Job as much as to overwhelm him. And overwhelm him they did! In his first, feeble response Job will not defend himself and makes no answer at all (40:3-5). He is quick to see that a defense of himself is an irrelevance in this context of God’s overwhelming self-assertion. In his second response we are given an enigmatic reply that defies our decoding (42:1-6).We are able to see, nonetheless, that in his response Job repositions himself before the creator God and accepts his status as a penultimate creature for whom his cocksure confidence in the “deeds-consequences” ethical system is seen to be an irrelevance. Job’s ethical self-confidence is blown away by the awesomeness and wonder of creation as God’s creaturely work. Thus after complaint, Job accepts repositioning. In that new posture he is commended as “speaking what is right” (42:7-8). He is restored to wealth and prosperity (42:12-14). We may wonder, in his belated restoration, how he thought about the four-fold assault on his life. Surely in his aging wellbeing, he could still vividly recall his pain and loss that could never be covered over by restoration.
My thought is that we should not permit the rest of the Book of Job to let us retreat too quickly from the cascade of crises 1:13-19.We may linger there a while in the recognition that crises do come upon us in inexplicable ways that violate every code of explanation we could muster. At the end of Job’s fourth episode, the narrator is silent. And Job is silent. And we are left speechless before the cascade of troubles that strikes us, always yet again as incommensurate to our actual living. Or so we readily conclude.
For the moment let us entertain the interface between this four-fold cascade of crises and the index of crises enumerated by Jackson and Jenson. Like that ancient four-fold assault, our cascade of crises comes without explanation or justification. And like that four-fold assault, ours end in dread-filled loss that is beyond our reckoning.
Perhaps we could imagine ourselves making a response not unlike that of Job:
- Like Job, we can complain. We can complain against the fiscal and technological powers that cause our cascade; but then we notice our own complicity with them in benefitting from the cascade. We are not likely to blame God for these troubles as we are too wise and knowing for such innocence. No weather-reporter will credit God with bad weather, scientifically informed as they are. But occasionally a weather-reporter will slip to say, “This is a storm of biblical proportion.” This is surely a soft euphemism for “God caused,” but no scientifically educated weather reporter will say that. But still! We are haunted by a hidden, powerful mystery that is beyond our ken whom we may suspect has agency. It is an awkward, timid suspicion, because it violates our best Enlightenment learning. That trace of suspicion, however, will not easily and finally go away, and so we are pressed to euphemism. Thus first, we complain about the cause of the cascade and we think we mostly know whom to blame.
- Second, like Job, we may do a morality check to determine our innocence in the matter. And if we lack a systemic view of things, we may conclude that we are innocent and not implicated concerning the cascade of crises. However, we are not so easily acquitted, because our common collusion in such matters is easy enough to see. Thus we do not receive the word from the whirlwind with an easy conscience.
- But third, like Job, we are addressed by holy mystery amid the cascade. We are brought up short with our lack of understanding and our own sense of awe:
O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
(“How Great Thou Art,” The United Methodist Hymnal, 77)
If we receive that stunning wonder of the cascade, we may indeed arrive at awe appropriate to our status. As a consequence, we may then come to a fresh awareness of our penultimate status in the universe and for an instant turn away from our Promethean self-deception of mastery. Such a “turning away” from our illusion of mastery could amount to refusing to trust ourselves to technological mastery and control, and return us to our proper role alongside the other creatures. While we need not think the cascade of crises is designed pedagogically, we can nonetheless learn from it and accept a more modest role in the management of God’s creation. So it was for Job as he was left in a new state of wellbeing, “full of days” (42:17) when,
the Lord blessed the latter day of Job more than his beginning (Job 42:12).
None of that, to be sure, is on the horizon in our dramatic, symmetrical text of 1:13-19. In that text, we have only the bare outline of the cascade of crises. That text is the beginning point for Job to “come to himself” and accept his proper place in God’s creation. We also might use our cascade of crises for such learning. I do not need to tell you that such learning will require a good pedagogy that can only come in the context of faith.
As I reflected on Job in his Promethean self-assurance and in his fresh repositioning in penultimacy, I was led to the beginning of Paul’s ode to agape-love. As you know, Paul writes:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing (I Corinthians 13:1-2).
In our technological capacity, we have the knowledge to “remove mountains.” When such mastery lacks love, it goes awry. Paul’s bid is that everything is different when there is self-giving love. We have no explicit evidence that Job turned to agape love, but we may imagine that he mutated in his passion for mastery, control, and possession. No wonder he was more blessed in his latter days!
Walter Brueggemann
June 20, 2023
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
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