. . . God is
capable of self-irony. I have noted the hints and signs of YHWH’s self-irony in
his words and actions: the choice of Leviathan as a metaphor for himself; the
form of revelation that mimics the experience of suffering and the unanswered question
about justice; the verdict that affirms the rightness of Job’s protest and the
restoration that acknowledges the wrongness of his experience; the legendary
character of the epilogue and the ambiguity in Job’s confession. All these conspire
to suggest that the bright notes are not enough to eradicate the dark notes,
and that tension and ambiguity still remain. The combination of these
contrasting and conflicting notes reveals a God who is ironizing against
himself as much as he is ironizing against other characters within and beyond the
story. (Scott Xu, Irony in
the Divine Response to Job [Hebrew Bible Monographs 114; Sheffield:
Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2025], 198-99)
In the literary world of Job, God’s self-irony is particularly a
reflection of and arguably the only proper divine response to this paradoxical
reality. We humans can trust that God’s ultimate plan is good. We can also say,
mysteries beyond human comprehension notwithstanding, that the outcome of this
plan will include vindication and elevation of Job (or people like Job) as God’s
servant and a sharer of God’s glory, the defeat of the Satan, the glorification
of God, the proof of disinterested piety and so forth. However, and this is the
unpalatable reality for believers, God is also responsible for the process of
getting there, for a world where the doctrine of retribution cannot be disposed
of but is clearly inadequate, for the situations and experiences that can be
legitimately called ‘evil’. No matter how great and noble God’s ultimate
purpose is, how certainly his tested servant will come through, there is no
getting away from the ‘evilness’ of this world, even though it is only
classified as such from the human perspective, which is limited both spatially
and temporally. Hence, the revelation of God’s self-irony means, on the one
hand, that God is willing to sympathize with the human perspective, but, on the
other hand, God’s self-irony is a lot like the irony that can simultaneously ‘judge
the tyranny and moralism of a certain context and display its own complicity in
that tyranny’. Therefore, a paradoxical self-irony is the only possible divine
response to this paradoxical reality, and the fact that God has responded this
way is also an aspect of his goodness and part of the reason why he is still
worthy of human love and devotion even when complicit in that ‘tyranny’. (Ibid.,
202)
