On Job and friendship in suffering

Everyone reads Job for its commentary on God’s sovereignty through suffering. I, however, would like to go against my first instinct to follow suit and instead take on a different project: examining what Job teaches us about being a friend to one who is suffering.

The thing about Job’s friends is that they were almost right. Their words were almost true (by true, I mean in agreement with God’s response to Job later on), and their actions, likewise, were almost comforting. They did, after all, come sit with Job, who had a contagious skin disease, in a pile of ashes, in total silence for a full week. How many of us have ever gone to such lengths to comfort one of our friends?

It seems fairly clear to me that Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu truly had good intentions. They genuinely wanted to help Job in his suffering. But their monologues go awry, not only failing to be of any consolation to Job (or to persuade him that his self-righteousness is wrong), but also require penance, which God instructs Job to make on their behalf.

That penance, though, does not apply to Elihu. I have trouble determining, first of all, where the first three were in the wrong in speaking; and secondly, what made Elihu’s speech different. Were the trio wrong in browbeating Job for questioning God’s reasons for allowing his misery, or for chiding Job’s self-righteousness? Elihu did the same on both counts. Was it that they, in their own way, made the same misstep as Job in presuming to know anything about why God might have been treating Job as such?

This latter option seems likely (although I still don’t understand how Elihu differed). What, then, do we draw from this about how to stand, or sit in ashes, alongside our grieving friends?

First, the book of Job seems to discourage trying to explain God’s actions – in Job’s case, particularly, because the actions themselves were not God’s, but the devil’s which God allowed. (My corollary, however, is that we should not draw from Job that all bad things which befall us are from Satan, as I am more inclined to believe, as C.S. Lewis suggests in A Grief Observed, that some of our misery is at the hand of God in His role as the Great Surgeon. This, however, veers back into the topic of God’s sovereignty, which I may very well post on later, but is tangential to my project now).

I am undecided as to whether Job encourages or discourages correcting our friends should they take a faulty mindset towards their grief in the midst of it. But I am certain that above all else, we should be willing to sit with our friends in their ashes, mourning with them, even if they have boils, and even in silence.