Dying and the Virtues

Matthew Levering

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780802875488
• eBook ISBN: 9781467449571
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In this rich book Matthew Levering explores nine key virtues that we need to die (and live) well: love, hope, faith, penitence, gratitude, solidarity, humility, surrender, and courage.

Retrieving and engaging a variety of biblical, theological, historical, and medical resources, Levering journeys through the various stages and challenges of the dying process, beginning with the fear of annihilation and continuing through repentance and gratitude, suffering and hope, before arriving finally at the courage needed to say goodbye to one's familiar world. 

Grounded in careful readings of Scripture, the theological tradition, and contemporary culture,  Dying and the Virtues comprehensively and beautifully shows how these nine virtues effectively unite us with God, the One who alone can conquer death.

CHAPTER 1

LOVE

Job’s Challenge to His Creator

Joseph Ratzinger has argued that “man’s longing for survival” arises from “the experience of love,” in which “love wills eternity for the beloved and therefore for itself.”¹ Love makes us yearn for everlasting communion with the beloved. But as we are dying, can we be sure of God’s enduring love for us?² Across the chasm of death, does love lead to everlasting divine-human “networks of relationship and love,” or is love something that we experience now, but that God will take away from us forever, so that human love is ultimately destroyed by death?³

Inquiring into the endurance and power of love (divine and human), I focus in this chapter on the book of Job. The Jewish biblical scholar and theologian Jon Levenson suggests that the central question of the book of Job is whether Job can indeed “rely on God’s much-acclaimed faithfulness to rescue from Sheol—not at the end of days, to be sure, but in his own time of lethal torment.”⁴ According to Levenson, the book of Job is about whether God will show his real care for Job by rescuing him from mortal suffering. Levenson notes that Job’s friend Bildad thinks that Sheol is solely “the place of those who do not know God” (Job 18:21), not the place of God’s servants. On this view, for Bildad and most importantly for the author(s) of the book of Job, Job’s vision of “hopelessness and gloom” cannot be the “universal human destiny,” because “Sheol” names only a terrible earthly fate, namely an early and miserable death (70). If so, then the tension of the book of Job consists in whether God will show his love for Job by sparing him from going down to “Sheol” in this earthly sense.

Levenson accepts the later Second Temple and rabbinic doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, and his Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel offers a subtle and valuable defense of that doctrine. According to Levenson, however, “in the Hebrew Bible, death is malign only to the extent that it expresses punishment or otherwise communicates a negative judgment on the life that is ending” (72). Levenson therefore holds that to die at the end of a long and praiseworthy life is not a problem for the Hebrew Bible, and neither is it a problem for the book of Job, which concludes happily with Job recovering from his mortal illness and living 140 more years. The final verse of the book of Job is that “Job died, old and full of days” (Job 42:17). Levenson concludes that Job died “fulfilled” and facing “no future terrors or miseries whatsoever” (73).⁵

It would seem, however, that in the face of impending death, Job actually faces nothing whatsoever, let alone “future terrors and miseries.” If no personal existence awaits humans after their death, as in Levenson’s view the book of Job holds, then surely death simply annihilates Job once and for all. But Levenson argues that to think along those lines is to miss the way in which personal identity was constructed in this period of ancient Israel’s history. Since personal identity was linked tightly with one’s extended family, the survival of the family sufficed to enable the person to face everlasting death with equanimity. In Job’s case, in his final years he obtained an entirely new family that overcame the deaths of his seven sons and three daughters. Levenson explains the difference between our perspective on death and that of the book of Job (and of ancient Israel generally): “To us, the shadow of death always overcasts to an appreciable degree the felicity that the books of Ruth and Job predicate of Naomi and Job at the end of their travail. We look in vain for some acknowledgment that the newfound or recovered felicity is not absolute, since death is. The authors of these books thought otherwise” (119).⁶ On this view, death remains a threat for the book of Job, but it is a threat only insofar as it raises the possibility that the family (not the person) will come to an end.

Levenson admits that the evidence of the Psalms shows that individual Israelites did indeed experience existential terror in the face of death, but he contends that in Genesis and throughout the Hebrew Bible, “the great enemy” is “death in the twin forms of barrenness and loss of children,” not the death of the individual person (120).⁷ I recognize that the book of Job ends on a happy note by having Job die in old age with a prosperous family surrounding him. Nonetheless, I think that the book of Job actually confronts head-on, with real terror and agony, the problem of personal death understood as annihilation.⁸ My contention is that Job challenges God precisely on the grounds that it would be unloving and unjust for God to annihilate (or to permit to be annihilated) a human being such as Job, who obeys God and who yearns for an ongoing relationship with God. At stake in the book of Job is whether God truly loves Job, and whether Job’s love for God (and neighbor) ultimately means anything at all.⁹

Thus I do not think that Job’s main concern is either the sudden death of his “seven sons and three daughters” (Job 1:2), leaving him temporarily without heirs, or even simply the fact that he suffers terribly. It is mortal suffering and its seeming consequence—annihilation—that most bother Job. Admittedly, he remains able to appreciate that at least death brings suffering to an end: “There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease together; they do not hear the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there, and the slaves are free from their masters” (Job 3:17–19; cf. 7:1–4, 15–16). But this is not much comfort. Rather than complaining about his lack of heirs, furthermore, Job hardly speaks about his relatives except to notice that they do not honor him now that he is incapacitated and about to die. I grant that the book of Job raises the question of why the just suffer, and I value interpretations of the book of Job that focus on this question.¹⁰ But I consider that the book of Job’s central concern has to do with mortal suffering and God’s love. Specifically, if God is a loving creator, then Job’s impending annihilation is unjust and unbearable.¹¹

As we will see, Job repeatedly returns to the question of whether God intends to annihilate him. Indeed, the perseverance of Job in pressing this challenge to God, and in this sense the “endurance of Job” (James 5:11), can stand as a parallel to Jacob’s stubborn wrestling with the mysterious stranger as Jacob prepares to enter the promised land. Jacob refuses to let the mysterious stranger go until he blesses Jacob, and from this stranger—whom Jacob deems to be God—Jacob receives the gift of his new name, Israel: “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed” (Gen. 32:28). Likewise, Job wrestles with God until God makes clear that God can be trusted not to abandon Job everlastingly.

Job’s challenge to God over what happens to us when we die accords with Job’s status as a non-Israelite from “the land of Uz” (Job 1:1), since, as Levenson shows, the question of or yearning for a personal afterlife simply does not arise in the Torah. At the same time, however, Job is a representative of Israel at its best, since Satan’s prediction that Job will curse God when Job’s temporal goods are gone (see 1:9–11; 2:10) turns out to be completely erroneous. Like the people of Israel at their best, what Job truly wants is not temporal goods but rather the everlasting good of communion with God in love, and Job cannot put a brave face upon his mortal suffering without assuring himself of this love. At the end of the story, God concludes that Job has “spoken of me what is right” (42:7). Job is right that if God only loved his human lovers for a short time and then obliterated them, then God’s goodness and real love for us would be radically thrown into question, and the basis of our love for God would be undermined. In the book of Job, then, we find the deepest problem that confronts dying persons: in the midst of the terror and darkness of mortal suffering, can and should we love our Creator God?¹²

God speaks at the end of the book of Job to make clear that God is the wise and generous Giver of life, possessed of the power to restore Job’s standing. In response, Job confesses, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me”; and Job repents before God “in dust and ashes” (Job 42:3, 6).¹³ Thus, although God permits Job to face with terrifying immediacy his vulnerability to annihilation, God makes himself experientially present as the supremely powerful Giver of life in the midst of Job’s mortality.¹⁴ Pope Benedict XVI observes in his encyclical Spe Salvi that “the human being needs unconditional love.”¹⁵ In the book of Job, the conditions of divine and human love are tested, and we discover love’s power even in the darkness of dying.

God and Job’s Suffering

The Book of Job as a Parable

If read as historical reportage, the first two chapters of Job would be misread. The opening phrase, “There was once a man in the land of Uz,” already indicates the parabolic, rather than historical, character of this text.¹⁶ In the second sentence of the book of Job, we learn that Job has “seven sons and three daughters” (1:2), and these symbolic numbers are echoed in the next sentence’s observation that Job also had “seven thousand sheep” and “three thousand camels” (1:3). The parabolic character of the story similarly informs the description of the heavenly court. Job 1:6 states, “One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them.” In God’s dialogue with Satan, God and Satan are like two powerful men arguing about whether a slave can perform with the grace that his master attributes to him.¹⁷ Their dialogue is important for setting the scene for the testing that Job undergoes, but it should not be taken, of course, as a literal description of God’s attitude toward Job. Job is a “blameless and upright” man “who feared God and turned away from evil” (1:1). Since Job also has a large family and significant wealth, the obvious question is whether Job performs pious actions toward God out of love of his own earthly prosperity, rather than out of love for God. Many people have done precisely this, as the storyteller well knows. The dramatic tension of the parable, therefore, is whether when Job loses every earthly thing, he will still love God. Since God’s providential power is unquestioned by the storyteller, Job can lose his earthly goods only if God permits it to happen. In the story, God does not directly cause the evil that befalls Job, but he permits it.

Beginning in Job 1:13, four disasters are reported to Job in quick succession: the killing of all of Job’s oxen and asses, and some of his servants, by Sabean marauders; the killing of all of Job’s sheep, and some of his servants, by lightning; the killing of all of Job’s camels, and some of his servants, by Chaldean marauders; and the killing of all of Job’s sons and daughters by a great wind that blew down the house in which they were eating. In each of these four devastating events, exactly one servant escapes to tell the tale to Job. The afflictions next shift to Job’s own person. Job comes down with a case of “loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” (2:7) and goes to sit “among the ashes” (2:8). His wife tells him, “Curse God, and die” (2:9), and his three friends simply weep and lament at the sight of him.

Having lost everything, Job, who is “blameless and upright” (1:1), makes clear that he never loved God simply because of the blessings he has enjoyed. In his crucible, he remarks with real love of God, “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” (1:21); and “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (2:10).¹⁸ The narrator approves Job’s righteousness in both instances: “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing” (1:22); and, “In all this Job did not sin with his lips” (2:10).

Job’s Insistence upon His Innocence

In chapter 3, however, Job—whose physical decline is so grave that his friends at first “did not recognize him” and could only sit with him in stunned silence for seven days (2:12–13)—suddenly pours forth an impassioned curse against the day of his birth. His friend Eliphaz the Temanite reprimands him for not seeing the earthly goodness of divine providence: “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same. By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of his anger they are consumed” (4:7–9). Eliphaz goes on to point out that Job, in his claim that he is righteous before God, is being sinfully presumptuous. Eliphaz claims to have heard a voice in a dream that said: “Can mortal man be righteous before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker?” (4:17). The point is that Job is being reproved and chastened by God for his sins. Eliphaz urges Job to respond sensibly: “Behold, happy is the man whom God reproves; therefore despise not the chastening of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he binds up; he smites, but his hands heal” (5:17–18). If Job repents, Eliphaz says, Job will have many descendants and a long life.

Job refuses to listen to Eliphaz’s rebuke, again claiming his own righteousness before God.¹⁹ Bildad the Shuhite therefore takes his turn at reasoning with Job. He points out to Job that if, indeed, “you are pure and upright, surely then he [God] will rouse himself for you and restore to you your rightful place” (8:6). The key point is that God does not “pervert justice” (8:3). Bildad then argues that if Job is charging God with iniquity in bringing Job low, Job is in the wrong, since “the hope of the godless shall perish” (8:13), and “God will not reject a blameless person, nor take the hand of evildoers” (8:20). If Job is indeed innocent, Job has nothing to fear, and certainly nothing to slanderously blame God about; God “will yet fill your mouth with laughter, and your lips with shouts of joy” (8:21).

Zophar the Naamathite next takes a turn at answering Job. Zophar accuses Job of babbling proud nonsense and of mocking God. It is not surprising, Zophar says, that Job claims to be “clean in God’s sight” (11:4), since the wicked often persuade themselves that they are pure. Zophar concludes that since God sees far more deeply than Job can see, Job can be sure that “God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves” (11:6). Zophar urges Job to repent immediately: “If you direct your heart rightly, you will stretch out your hands toward him. If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away, and do not let wickedness reside in your tents. Surely then you will lift up your face without blemish; you will be secure, and will not fear” (11:13–15). Job responds forcefully against Zophar, accusing him and the other two friends of being “worthless physicians” who “whitewash with lies” (13:4).

Eliphaz, however, does not allow things to stop there. He condemns Job in stark terms. He tells Job that “you are doing away with the fear of God, and hindering meditation before God” (15:4). He warns that Job has forgotten that all humans are sinners. Job’s presumptuous insistence upon his own innocence in the face of the calamities that have befallen him shows, Eliphaz says, that Job’s mouth has been carried away by “iniquity” and that Job’s spirit has turned “against God” (15:5, 13). When Job responds once more, this time in a more despairing vein (although without giving in to his friends), Bildad chimes in against Job by insisting that calamities come justly to the wicked. Again Job bemoans his fate, only to have Zophar repeat and amplify Bildad’s description of the calamities that befall the wicked, and that have now befallen Job. Job replies with exasperation. After noting that the wicked often enjoy long and prosperous lives, he asks his three friends: “How then will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood” (21:34).

Eliphaz now turns upon Job with strong condemnations suited to the sorry state in which Job finds himself: “Is not your wickedness great? There is no end to your iniquities” (22:5). Eliphaz lists a large number of extremely grave sins that he attributes to Job, and then at the end of his discourse he once again urges Job to repent: “Agree with God, and be at peace; in this way good will come to you. . . . For God abases the proud, but he saves the lowly” (22:21, 29). But Job merely repeats his innocence and accuses the all-powerful God of not caring about the just while sustaining the life and prosperity of the wicked. When Bildad again urges Job to recall that all humans are sinners before God, Job responds by repeating his lamentations at even greater length: “[God] has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes” (30:19). The section concludes, “So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes” (32:1).

At this stage, Elihu the Buzite, a man younger than both Job and Job’s three friends, intervenes. Elihu “was angry at Job because he justified himself rather than God” (32:2). Disgusted with the inability of Job’s friends to persuade Job, Elihu asks why Job complains that God will not hear him. God speaks in various ways, says Elihu. One way that God works to “keep [people] from pride” (33:17) is to allow disease to afflict us; but the person who prays to God, and who finds an angel or mediator to intercede for him or her, can recover from a mortal disease. Elihu deems that when Job complains that God does not hear him, it is because Job has not cried out in repentance to God but instead has continued to rely upon his own righteousness and has not adequately reckoned with the fact that “God is great, and we do not know him” (36:2...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Love: Job’s Challenge to His Creator
• 2. Hope: Meditatio Mortis
• 3. Faith: Jesus and What Dying Persons Want
• 4. Penitence: The Stoning of Stephen
• 5. Gratitude: The Dying of Macrina
• 6. Solidarity: Divine Mercy and Redemptive Suffering
• 7. Humility: Jesus’s Dying and Ours
• 8. Surrender: Anointing the Sick
• 9. Courage: Goodbye to This World
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture References