IN THE THEOLOGY course on suffering that I teach at Lewis University, the Book of Job is required reading. Its plot can be hard to stomach: Satan believes that Job only loves God because the faithful servant has a blessed life. Looking to prove Job’s unconditional loyalty, God gives the accuser permission to take everything from Job except his life. The wager causes Job great suffering. When God finally arrives on the scene (Earth), we get some beautiful, albeit troubling, poetry. God says that God’s ways are beyond human understanding and especially human questioning. As one of my students put it last year, “God is kind of a jerk.”
Season 2 of Good Omens, streaming on Prime, leans into that confusing characterization of God. The fantasy comedy follows the unlikely friendship of Aziraphale (an angel) and Crowley (a demon). After thousands of years together on Earth, they find themselves more at home with humans than with angels or demons.
Episode 2 focuses on the story of Job. It opens with Aziraphale attempting to stop Crowley from destroying Job’s livestock. Aziraphale protests that Job is a “poppit” and the best person on Earth. He is shocked that God has made a bet with Satan — this doesn’t seem representative of the God that Aziraphale believes he serves. Crowley sends fireballs to consume the goats anyway.
Later, we discover that Crowley is a demon who only “goes along with hell as far as he can”; he is fine with making mischief to please his demonic superiors but hasn’t really signed up to be evil. When crows gathered in Job’s courtyard bleat at one another, we learn that Crowley has merely transformed Job’s “blameless goats” for safekeeping. He performs a similar trick to spare Job’s children. When Job inevitably proves his loyalty, his children (and goats) are restored to him in an angelic sleight of hand, defying God’s mandate that new children would make things right.
Good Omens is not devout, but it does take Job seriously. It makes the text come alive by challenging it, poking fun at it, and inserting characters within the story that make us see the moral issues inherent in the text. This is how the Bible ought to be read: with wonder, play, and challenge.
Aziraphale and Crowley are willing to skirt the rules of the divine plan to preserve life. In Job, we see little of the same concern from God. The angel and demon prioritize the spirit of love that is at the center of God’s work above the literal instructions immediately before them. This is a model for how to read scripture and live life, with an eye toward maximizing the good.
Michael Woolf is the senior minister of Lake Street Church of Evanston in Illinois and the author of Sanctuary and Subjectivity: Thinking Theologically About Whiteness and Sanctuary Movements. He is the co-founder of Challenging Islmophobia Together Chicagoland with his spouse, Rev. Anna Piela.
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