I’m about to say something that will make some people angry.
Sometimes cops beat people for bad reasons or no reason. Then they arrest their victim. That’s because a victim convicted of a crime-against-a-peace-officer is unlikely to sue the officer for, say, crushing the victim’s eye socket, or giving the victim blood clots in his legs. The officer will have to lie to get the conviction. It happens.
If this makes some folks angry, fine. Let’s sit down with that anger and peer into it. They're angry for a reason that I think they don’t know. Their anger is like the anger of three men in the book of Job.
1. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.
Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar were good men. They were righteous. They were Job’s three friends in, well, the book of Job.
Job also was a righteous man. But God let Satan kill Job’s children, steal Job’s riches, and ruin Job’s health. Job was left in pain and sorrow. Denuded of wealth, health, and children, Job sat in ashes. He scraped his sores with potsherds.
And that’s where Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar come in. They sit with Job. They sit with him in silence for seven days. It takes a very good friend to sit with someone for seven days. Few of us are lucky enough to have one friend like that; Job had three. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar were standup guys.
But in the book of Job this kind comfort of quiet companionship collapsed like an overloaded pack animal.
The collapse happened after Job defended himself. He told his three friends that he didn’t deserve what happened to him. He told them that his affliction was unjust.
Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar tried to beat down any talk of Job’s righteousness. They took turns defending God. They took turns telling Job that Job must have deserved the demolition of his happy life.
And every time they told him that, Job defended himself. And every time he defended himself, he stirred the fury of his friends. For 28 chapters, Job defends himself, and his friends accuse him; Job accuses God, and his friends defend God.
Bildad forgets to be kind:
How long will you say these things,
And the words of your mouth be a great wind? [Job 8:2 (NRSV).]
Zophar is harsh:
Should your babble put others to silence,
And when you mock, shall no one shame you? [Job 11:3 (NRSV).]
Eliphaz accuses Job of breaking the foundation of religion:
But you are doing away with the fear of God,
and hindering meditation before God. [Job 15:4 (NRSV).]
Bildad is insulted by Job’s wrong-headed arguments:
Why are we counted as cattle?
Why are we stupid in your sight? [Job 18:3 (NRSV).]
Zophar admits that Job agitates him. (Job 20:2.)
Eliphaz even catalogues Job’s specific sins, which he somehow knows about:
Is not your wickedness great?
There is no end to your iniquities.
For you have exacted pledges from you family for no reason,
and stripped the naked of their clothing.
You have given no water for the weary to drink,
and you have withheld bread from the hungry. [Job 22:5-7 (NRSV).]
But Job was righteous. The reader knows, but Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar don’t know, that Job’s righteousness was the reason that Job became the target of a bet between God and Satan. God bet that Job would stay faithful even after bone-crushing calamity; Satan bet that he wouldn’t.
2. The anger of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.
In chapter one, Satan accuses Job. In chapters three through twenty-eight, his three friend speak for Satan. Why?
If you cut the surface of anger, you find fear underneath. When an opposing lawyer yells at me, I often know then that my position is stronger than I knew before.
Job’s three friends are afraid.
They’re afraid because they’re righteous, and they count on their righteousness to protect them. They expect to prosper because they are good, and God rewards the good.
And Job is a threat to their happy hope of blessings that flow from their personal blamelessness. If Job is righteous and God flung him into the fire, then for all they know God could do the same thing to Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. And to Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, that idea is a demon howling in the wind at night.
The book of Job defies the idea that we can always make ourselves safe by doing right. That idea heartens us, and it’s perpetuated in our time by stories like the Three Little Pigs. Even if they didn’t know that story, Job’s friends embraced its theme. Their own goodness, their own personal righteousness, was their own house-built-of-bricks. They thought that, try as he might, the big bad wolf couldn’t huff and puff and blow it down.
But Job and his plight stand for the idea that bricks are weaker than Job’s friends thought, or that the Big Bad Wolf has breath like an angry god. So they stridently try to argue Job into accepting his own fault. But they really are trying to convince themselves.
3. Our own houses made out of bricks.
We moderns are like Job’s friends. We also expect that we can build a house of bricks that nothing can shake.
We think that if we eat right and exercise, we won’t get sick. But sometimes we get sick.
We think that if we work hard, we’ll succeed. But sometimes we work hard and fail.
We think that if we spend time and take trouble with our children, our children will grow up and be, well, righteous like Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. But sometimes they don’t.
4. Beaten.
And we believe that if we don’t do anything wrong, we’ll never have trouble with the police.
But for about two decades, I’ve been a civil-rights lawyer. I’ve seen that that isn’t always so.
And one generation of injured clients after another has learned that blamelessness (or relative blamelessness) isn’t always a barrier against police abuse. Sometimes they are vindicated in court. Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they win money from a jury. Sometimes they don’t.
5. What it takes to win.
One reason that victims don’t always win is that a civil-rights lawyer has to do more than prove his case. He has to persuade jurors to give up a safety-blanket – the belief that they can protect themselves against police abuse by being good.
Before they can return a judgement in favor of a civil-rights plaintiff, jurors have to do what Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar couldn’t do. They have to throw away the comfortable idea that they are safe in their house of bricks with bricks made from their own blamelessness.
The same is true in a criminal trial where a victim is accused of a crime-against-a-peace-officer. It’s not just a matter of showing that the officer is lying. The jurors have to set aside a natural fear. Police officers have vast power; we trust them. It’s scary to think that they might abuse their power and violate that trust.
Every time that a civil-rights jury gives judgment to a plaintiff, every time that a criminal jury frees a victim of police abuse, the jury faces the fact that their blamelessness won’t always protect them. They face the fact that what happened to the victim could happen to them. It’s an unsettling thought.
6. Be Job.
The book of Job is about of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar’s fear. But it’s also about Job’s courage.
Job’s friends came to him when he was weak. Job had been rich, well, and surrounded by his children. Now Job was poor, sick, and lonely. Job easily coul have let his friends overwhelm him. Crushed as he was, he might have gone along with the ideas that his good friends so violently argued.
But he didn’t. That took courage. That took wisdom.
The book of Job was written so that we can have Job’s wisdom and courage without suffering Job’s catastrophes.
7. A plea.
This is my plea: if you sit on a jury, know what Job knew. Know that fault does not always sit on the injured and afflicted. See the evidence with an open mind.
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