“Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upwards” (Job 5:7).
The first time I encountered this verse from the Book of Job, I was struck by its beauty. I imagined a massive bonfire blazing in the darkness. I also saw tiny particles breaking away from it that were just as bright as the fire from which they had emerged. They were sparks that, to use the words of the poet Dylan Thomas, did not walk gently into the great night, but instead burst forth with vitality and rebelled against the death of light.
I found the words of the verse on a day so heavy and painful that I felt their poetry deep in my heart. Like any true metaphor, they revealed things that words cannot express, hiding them in the white spaces where meanings take root.
One of these meanings was that my suffering was acknowledged. Not only seen, but described in all its fragility and dignity. I think it was precisely this that moved me: the fact that where I saw only weakness, the poetry saw dignity. It was like a comfort: “Don’t be sad! We all suffer, but in our suffering, we rise like sparks that shine in their flight towards the night.”
Beyond the poetry
However, the beauty of the Bible goes beyond the poetry of its words. If we were to stop at the poetry alone, Scripture might offer us some comfort, but we would miss something far more significant, even vital, that it bestows upon us. To access that meaning, however, we need to apply a few principles of interpretation that are as simple as they are easy to ignore.
An essential aspect of the verse in question is that these are not the words of God or the book’s omniscient narrator, but the words of Eliphaz the Temanite, the first of Job’s friends. This is important because Eliphaz’s statement is a partially true observation about life that he turns into an ideological weapon against Job.
From partiality to the absolute
Eliphaz is an intelligent man, and this is precisely what makes him dangerous. He doesn’t invent things, and he doesn’t lie in the strict sense of the word. However, he does something else that is wrong: he takes a truth—that suffering is part of human life—and extrapolates it until he has transformed it into an orderly system. According to this system, God is just, and His justice is seen in the way He distributes good and evil. Therefore, if you are suffering, no matter how deep your pain is, surely you have made a mistake just as deep. Conversely, if you repent and turn back to the good, things will be set right.
Eliphaz’s logic is extremely appealing. It is only natural that it should be so because this logic is synonymous with control. If I understand why someone else is suffering, I automatically know how to avoid the same fate. The world becomes intelligible, God becomes predictable, and I remain safe as long as I behave well and follow the rules. However, if we look closely at Eliphaz’s theology, we see that it is a sophisticated form of self-defence dressed in the garb of compassion, but born, in reality, of anxiety.
Eliphaz is contradicted
Reality is the first to contradict Eliphaz, and the Book of Job explicitly validates this: often, good people suffer terribly without ever having done anything to deserve it. Job is the paradigmatic example. He knew he had not sinned, and remarkably, God knew the same thing.
At the end of the book, something happens that few readers could have anticipated. It is something that Eliphaz’s system cannot comprehend. God tells Eliphaz bluntly that he has not spoken rightly about Him. To Job, who had rebelled and cried out in the night, demanding an explanation with almost scandalous boldness, God acknowledges his righteous speech. How is this possible? Because, despite his anger and bewilderment, Job had maintained an open and honest dialogue with God. In contrast, Eliphaz, with all his theological orderliness, had spoken about God, not with Him.
Two ways of not responding
However, not even Job has the final word. This is perhaps the most important and uncomfortable observation in the entire book.
There are two symmetrical temptations when faced with suffering, and most of us gravitate towards one of them. The first is Eliphaz’s temptation: to explain everything; to reduce mystery to formula; to turn another’s pain into proof of their guilt, and implicitly, into a guarantee of our own safety. The second temptation is the opposite: to claim that suffering is meaningless and absurd; that a good God would not allow it; and that therefore either God does not exist, or He is not good. Both are, at their core, avoidance strategies and unreasonable responses. The first crumbles under too much order, while the second dissolves in too much chaos.
An inhabited mystery
The Book of Job offers none of these easy solutions, which is precisely why it is considered one of the most courageous books ever written. Job leaves us with a mystery, but not a cold one; rather, it is an “inhabited” mystery, in which Someone is present. God Himself appears in the midst of the whirlwind of existence and speaks. Though He offers no explanations, nor justifications for their absence, He reveals Himself. And, in a transformative way, this proves to be enough. Job receives no answers, yet the presence of God proves more valuable than all the answers put together.
Gregory the Great, who wrote one of the most profound patristic commentaries on the Book of Job, saw the image of sparks bursting forth as representing the toil and burden of humanity. However, he did not view this as an inescapable fate, but rather as an upward path. With an intuition that transcends his era, he said that the weight of this life may be precisely what elevates the mind and heart towards the heights if we learn to accept it as something other than an injustice. If we receive it with patience and open eyes, suffering may indeed be the beginning of the path.
Job’s cry, carried to its conclusion
Of course, this hope remains fragile and uncertain if we only consider Job. The Book of Job formulates the question with painful clarity. However, it is the Gospel that offers us the concrete answer.
Jesus Christ is the only man who ever suffered despite being innocent. Not a single charge can be brought against Him, and yet His life was filled with deprivation, pain, betrayal, abandonment, condemnation, and a violent death. On the cross, Christ took Job’s cry to its ultimate conclusion, even further than Job himself: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Through Christ, God Himself descended into the very heart of our condition. And He emerged from it. His victory continues to transform our understanding of what can and cannot be the final word in our human experience.
This does not mean that we now understand why we suffer, nor does it make the pain any easier to bear. Yet, we know with Whom we suffer. And, however excruciating and devastating it may be, suffering no longer has the right to have the final say in our story.
I return to the bonfire, whose sparks burst forth and illuminate the darkness for a moment before vanishing. The Gospel adds something to this image that it alone cannot contain or sustain: the knowledge that the darkness into which the sparks fly is not endless. There is a Light older than any darkness; a Light that even darkness itself could not overcome.
