LENT 2020: Day 33

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• Lent 2020: Day 33 Friday, April 3, 2020:
  Psalm 31:9-16; Job 13:13-19; Philippians 1:21-30

     Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.

These words immediately take me back to Mercer University, and the year 1999. I can hear the voice of Joseph Millard “Papa Joe” Hendricks, his South Georgia drawl booming, as he quotes the King James Version. And I can feel the weight of his strong farmer’s hand slap down on my back, taking the breath from me.

     Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.

Papa Joe was an icon — is an icon — as well as an outlaw. His role in the desegregation of Mercer and the broader civil rights movement is documented by another Baptist outlaw, Will Campbell, in The Stem of Jesse and Forty Acres and a Goat.

     Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.

Papa Joe would bellow these words often — they were central to his theology, which can be summed up by the time he took a stick of chalk and wrote, “God is God is God is God is…,” all the way around the classroom. And if that didn’t hammer home the point, he went out into the hallway and continued writing on the wall between the two doors.

     Look, he slays me, I have no hope.

This is Robert Alter’s translation of Job. I trust Alter more than the King James translators, but I don’t think he would disagree with Papa Joe’s understanding, for he emphasizes the Book of Job’s “radical rejection of the anthropocentric conception of creation.”

     Look, he slays me, I have no hope.
          Yet my ways I’ll dispute to his face.

God is God, but Job is Job. And that means human agency to protest, to call God to account. Note, too, that Job brings his dispute to God, rather than turn away.

May we do likewise — or, as Papa Joe would say, “Carry On!”