Read: Job 42:1-6
I had heard you with my ears, but now I see you with my eyes. Therefore, I recant and relent, being but dust and ashes (Job 42:5-6, JPS).
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” we hear as ashes are smudged on our forehead on Ash Wednesday.
If that’s not a stark enough reminder of our mortality, let’s move to the cemetery. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” the officiant says, and we toss a symbolic handful of dirt onto our loved one’s coffin.
Most of us don’t like such reminders. In fact, we go out of our way to avoid them. And if you think it’s uncomfortable receiving the ashes on Ash Wednesday, try stepping into the shoes of the one who is imposing them. Imagine reminding your favorite teacher, your child, your grandchild that “they are dust.”
Yet, like it or not, we are dust. Genesis 2 gets it right in depicting humans as humus. There’s a similar word play in the Hebrew. Adam (human) is from the adamah (earth). Ellen Davis points out that in the Bible, the soil is less of a resource than a relative.
All of this is important background for our verse du jour from the book of Job. The trouble is, most translations obscure our ability to get its point.
For instance, the NRSV reads: “…therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” This makes it sound like an expression of self-loathing—or worse—an admission of the “secret sin” that Job’s friends have been making such a fuss about. It is neither of those things, but only a better translation will help us to understand why.
Here’s one from the Jewish Publication Society that I find helpful: “I had heard you with my ears, but now I see you with my eyes. Therefore, I recant and relent, being but dust and ashes.”
Bear in mind that Job has just been on a whirlwind tour of, well, a whirlwind. After demanding an explanation for why bad things happen to good people—namely him—Job braces himself for an explanation from the Almighty. He seems to assume he will understand such an explanation. To God’s credit, God responds, but not with the explanation Job (and we) are hoping for. Instead, God spends chapters 38–41 with a whirlwind of “where were you when” questions designed to put Job’s question into perspective.
If you’ve ever experienced the power of a hurricane or a tornado, you’ll understand why the whirlwind is such an apt metaphor for Job’s reality check. We’re powerless to control it. Completely out of our league. Just so, the God who made the morning stars sing together and leads Leviathan around with a fishhook has a level of wisdom that is exponentially beyond human understanding. In short, God is God and we are not.
It’s in the wake of this reality check that Job “reconsiders.” Sure, he still has questions (don’t we all?), but he now understands the limits of his own wisdom in a way he didn’t before. He understands that he is “dust and ashes”—a phrase that is used to describe the human condition. In Genesis 18:27, for instance, Abraham dares to dicker with the Almighty over the fate of Sodom, but he does so knowing that he’s doing so at his own risk. “Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord,” he says carefully, “I who am but dust and ashes.”
We’re only human. Yet, as Job discovers, there is some real freedom in that. At the end of the day—and a whirlwind of a day it has been—God asks us to live without having all the answers. Job does just that, reinvesting in a new family knowing full well that no amount of “let’s make a deal” obedience can guarantee their safety. Faith is about trust, not calculation.
It’s a lot to ask. But that’s what the life of faith is. And that’s part of what it means to be “dust and ashes.”
Ponder: Being “dust and ashes” doesn’t mean we aren’t worth anything. What does the incarnation tell you about how God values our humanity? The crucifixion? The resurrection?
Pray: Frail children of dust and feeble as frail, in Thee do we trust, nor find Thee to fail. Your mercies how tender, how firm to the end—our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend.*
*From the hymn, “O Worship the King, All Glorious Above!” by Robert Grant.