PENnED

Job 31:13-15 NIV, ©2011

 ¹³ “If I have denied justice to any of my servants,
whether male or female,
when they had a grievance against me,
¹⁴ what will I do when God confronts me?
What will I answer when called to account?
¹⁵ Did not he who made me in the womb make them?
Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?

I don’t normally use a “motherly” theme for Mother’s Day. But for a change, I thought I would use one.

The texts that speak about mothers are rare. I ran a search and found this passage in Job. Instinctively, like a hopeful mother looking at an adorable baby, I was drawn to it.

However, finding what appears to be a good Scripture text for the occasion is one thing. Writing a reflection that is faithful to both the text and the occasion is quite another. It’s like wanting to get pregnant and give birth to a baby. Trouble is, you’re a guy!

I remember Thomas Beatie, the man who became pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl in 2008.

Mr. Beatie was born female and named Tracy Lagondino. He had a “gender reassignment” and became legally male. But because he kept his female organs, he was able to get pregnant.

In other words, it’s not that simple to create a message for Mother’s Day from a text that was written for an entirely different occasion.

But having said that, let’s see what idea can be conceived.

Naturally, it is the last verse that immediately draws my attention:

          Did not he who made me in the womb make them? 
          Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?

But these parallel lines that essentially ask the same rhetorical question can only make sense if taken within their context.

Job, the main character of the book named after him, was “blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil” (1:1). He had seven sons and three daughters, thousands of animals and a “large number of servants” (1:2).

So by the standard of his time, Job was a wealthy man. Job was the combination of a holy man and a billionaire. The coolest combination, we might say.

But immediately after we are told of Job’s great spiritual and social stature, the real drama unfolds.

Job lost his children, his animals, and his servants to evil men. And as if that wasn’t enough, Job was afflicted “with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head” (2:7).

I’m not sure if it made him feel better or worse, but he “took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes.”

As some have suggested, the sores might not only be painful but also itchy. So Job scraped himself with a piece of pottery. That may have relieved the itch, but I’m sure that it was then replaced with great pain.

Why did this evil happen to Job?

The standard theology of the day was to say pain and suffering was a punishment for sin. And that’s exactly how Job’s friends, who were supposed to bring comfort, understood what had happened to him. So instead of giving him comfort, their judgment of him added to his misery.

But Job was blameless. And he knew it. And he tried to defend his innocence. This passage is among his attempts to show that he was not guilty as charged.

The first verses are a set of rhetorical questions the answers to which obviously go in his favor:

 ¹³ “If I have denied justice to any of my servants, 
   whether male or female, 
   when they had a grievance against me, 
¹⁴ what will I do when God confronts me? 
   What will I answer when called to account? 

Had he denied justice to any of his servants? The obvious answer is no! He would not do such a thing. He feared God.

There appears nothing special about Job’s way of thinking until we learn that in Job’s day slaves were not regarded as fully human. But unlike many slave owners in that period, Job had not treated his slaves like they were subhumans.

So Job was radical in his thinking as a believer in Yahweh. And what was the basis for his theology?

¹⁵ Did not he who made me in the womb make them? 
   Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?

Job treated his slaves as fellow human beings because the God that made him in his mother’s womb is the same God that “formed us both” (him and his servants) “within our mothers.”

Job may had a different intention for saying what he said, but the same principle—that we are all created by God equally human—still apply.

On this day, Mother’s Day, it is good to revisit this fundamental truth.

It is one thing to give assent to the biblical principle that all human beings are created equal, but it’s quite another thing to put this principle into practice.

When we find ourselves in a position that give us power over others, the temptation to see others as less human becomes greater.

I’m sure that we all have encountered some homeless people somewhere. Some of these people are in the worst of situations—they look ugly, they stink, and their bodies might be so soiled that you can almost plant a vegetable garden on them.

Now when you come across a bum that looks like the ones I’ve just described, how do you see him?

I doubt very much if you would see in this lost soul the image of man, much less the image of God. Our usual response to people who smell and look like this bum is to get away from them. And quickly!

Now that example might be extreme, but bad physical appearance is not the only cause for looking down on others.

My family and I were enjoying our hamburgers when two men that didn’t look like bums approached us. One of them asked me for money. But I had no money. Really, I had a credit card, but I had no cash.

So I said, “Sorry.”

And as soon as he heard my sorry, he looked down on me like I was worth nothing. Apparently thinking I was Japanese, he barked, “Go back to Hiroshima!”

Just think of it, he obviously thought that he and his kind alone deserved to be in this country. But it was him that was begging!

Hitler regarded Jews with great prejudice that he tried to annihilate them. But to some extent you and I also suffer from such malady.  When we have power and authority, we utilize those we deem inferior for our benefit. And I think one of the saddest is the case of many mothers.

Some people know that when they were kids, and couldn’t do anything on their own, relied on their mothers. When they are old and independent, they still want their mother to do things for them.

The problem is, mother is no longer mother but yaya or nanny! And if mother is dependent on them for things, some treat her even worse.

A Filipina friend of ours got a phone call from his son-in-law asking her to live with them. That made her happy because, instead of renting a room, she now could live with her daughter and her grandkids. And she’d be able to help them with the mortgage as well. (Her son-in-law had intimated that they could not afford it.) So she moved in with them.

But now she regrets that she did—she’s being treated not like a mom but a renter. No, worse than that!

For some reason she doesn’t know, her daughter ignores her and doesn’t treat her like a mother. So she feels that she was asked to live with them because of her financial contribution, and perhaps also to employ her services for doing household chores–gratis!

It’s a sad thing that some people treat others—even their own mother—unfairly. What’s the cure for this unfair treatment of others or tendency to look down on others?

Job’s regard for everyone, including his slaves, as equally human can definitely help us see others as fellow human beings.  Looking down on others and treating them unfairly can be avoided if we do not think of ourselves more highly than we should.

As the Apostle Paul admonished, “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment….” (Romans 12: 13, NIV).