Wednesday 9th September 2026
Reading Job 3:1-10
After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. Job said:
‘Let the day perish on which I was born, and the night that said,
“A man-child is conceived.”
Let that day be darkness!
May God above not seek it, or light shine on it.
Let gloom and deep darkness claim it.
Let clouds settle upon it;
let the blackness of the day terrify it.
That night—let thick darkness seize it!
let it not rejoice among the days of the year;
let it not come into the number of the months.
Yes, let that night be barren;
let no joyful cry be heard in it.
Let those curse it who curse the Sea,
those who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan.
Let the stars of its dawn be dark;
let it hope for light, but have none;
may it not see the eyelids of the morning—
because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb,
and hide trouble from my eyes.
Reflection
As we move from the prologue to Job 3, there is a marked change. The style changes. The narrative is abandoned and suddenly Job’s voice is the only one we hear. He opens his mouth and out comes all the pain and grief and anger that has been bottled up inside him.
Job does not address his lament to anyone here. He is not speaking to his friends or to his wife. He is not even addressing God at this point. He just needs to express his pain and make known what he is going through.
Trauma is isolating. The world has been ruptured, and nothing is the same – one scholar calls this “passing through the ‘trauma membrane’”. Other people who have not shared the experience remain on the other side of the membrane; they are part of ‘the world before’ and cannot truly understand ‘the world after’. Often there are no words to describe what happened, because it is beyond everyday experience, and so explaining what happened and how it feels can seem impossible.
The act of crying out in lament can be one way in which individuals make their pain known to others. It is visceral and does not involve explanations or answers. In crying out, though, an individual is able to take the first step and say: ‘this happened, and it shouldn’t have done.’
The Bible is full of laments, and some people find that biblical laments resonate with their own suffering. The biblical scholar Gerald West writes about a Contextual Bible Study that took place in South Africa, where a group of individuals who had HIV sat and read Job 3 together. He recounts how the participants identified with Job’s honesty and emotion, and in particular with the way in which he imagines death. For the participants, seeing things that they themselves had experienced in the pages of Scripture validated how they were feeling and gave them the sense that they were not alone. At a time when they could not find the language to express how they were feeling, Scripture acted as a key by which they were able to identify and articulate their feelings.
Prayer
We cry out to you, Lord, even when there are no words
and trust that you will hear.
Sit with us as we curse and cry,
hear our screams, our sobs, our questioning.
Witness our pain and notice our suffering.
Remind us that we are not alone, even when we feel completely lost. Amen.