The Blameless Sufferer
Comparative commentary by Ursula Weekes
The prologue and epilogue of the book of Job are written in prose and offer a divine perspective, repeatedly telling the reader that Job was blameless and upright. But the poetry that dominates the book conveys his lived experience of suffering and isolation.
Why, in the mid-fourteenth century, did Edward III of England include Job as a subject for the murals of his jewel-like royal chapel in the Palace of Westminster? In the scene where Job and his wife receive messengers, they are portrayed seated side by side, every bit like a medieval king and queen. Edward III was married to Philippa of Hainault who bore him thirteen children over twenty-five years. Edward’s long reign saw devastating outbreaks of the Black Death, especially between September 1348 and June 1349, when an estimated sixty percent of London’s population died of the plague, including two of the king’s children. Around this time the mural painting of St Stephen’s Chapel began. Job, therefore, was an exemplar of Christian kingship in the face of personal and national grief caused by the painful sores of plague.
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix’s painting of a Baby with Umbilical Cord resonates on multiple levels with Job’s journey of suffering. In chapter 1, Job’s response to losing everything is to remember he was born with nothing and therefore he owns nothing by right (1:25). But by chapter 3, Job is desolate. He feels utterly hedged in by God (3:23) who has become unfamiliar to him, inverting Satan’s taunt in 1:10 that the ‘hedge’ around Job is a special protection from God. Job longs for the day of his birth to be covered in darkness and wiped from history.
But Dix’s painting has a yet deeper affinity with Job. As Job’s suffering progresses beyond the despair of chapter 3, he begins to perceive the need for a mediator between himself and God. He understands this figure first as an arbitrator (9:33), then as an advocate–intercessor (16:19–20), and finally as his living Redeemer (19:25). This is why, in the fourth century, Jerome could describe Job as a prophet of Christ (Letter 53, section 8). Moreover, Job, the blameless sufferer, was seen to foreshadow the perfect innocent sufferer Jesus, who by his sin-bearing death becomes the Saviour.
In his compositional choices, Dix seems similarly inclined to make deliberate connections with the figure of Jesus. By portraying the baby from above, placed on a white cloth, he invokes fifteenth-century German Renaissance paintings of the Nativity by masters such as Hans Memling, where the Christ Child lies alone on a cloth laid directly on the ground. The experience of his son’s birth seems to prompt a meditation on both creation and incarnation. It is the kind of existential spirituality that Dix would make explicit in a 1965 interview (a year before he died):
when I was a boy, when we had Bible Study, I always imagined to myself exactly where that might have happened in my homeland. (Schmidt 1981: 269)
Just as Dix sees his baby’s struggle as somehow interlaced with Jesus’s humanity, so the early church fathers perceived Job’s suffering as a window onto Jesus’s ultimate suffering.
The Italian illuminator of the eleventh-century manuscript of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, clearly considered Job a type of Christ (and by extension, and in accordance with Gregory’s emphasis, a type of the Church). This explains the similarity of his pose to images of the seated risen Jesus with his hand raised in blessing. Moreover, the scribe who wrote the text added some of the red ink used for the chapter numbers to Job’s hand, as a prefiguration of Christ’s stigmata.
The parallels between Christ and Job are many. Like Job, Jesus had three friends with him as he faced the cup of God’s wrath in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:36–46; Mark 14:32–42). Like Job’s friends, though in a different way, Jesus’s friends failed him—falling asleep and then deserting him. More profoundly, although Job may not have been sinless (we see him scrupulously making sacrifices at the beginning of the book), the story suggests that it was on account of his blamelessness that he was chosen for suffering. And in the necessity of Jesus’s death on the cross, Christians see one ‘who had no sin’ being ‘made sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Corinthians 5:21). Looking at the cross in Job’s company, we look into the heart of human history, where justice and mercy meet and where undeserved suffering becomes the foundation of undeserved blessing.
References
Jerome. ‘Letter 53, To Paulinus’. 1989. Trans. W.H. Freemantle, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2, vol. 6, ed. by P. Schaff and H. Wace (Edinburgh: T&T Clark)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. 1999. Ottonian Book Illumination: An Historical Study (Turnhout: Harvey Miller), pp. .205–07
Quash, Ben. 2013. Found Theology (London: Bloomsbury), chapter 4
Schmidt, Diether. 1981. Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, 2nd edn. (Berlin: Henschelverlag), pp. 269–70
Ticciati, Susannah. 2005. Job and the Disruption of Identity: Reading Beyond Barth (London: T&T Clark)
