The Song of the Emu
by Cavan Brown
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 62
Spring/Summer 1998/1999

Part 2

If Job had been an Australian, the Song of the Ostrich would have been the Song of the Emu and, with some poetic licence, the text might have read:

The wings of the emu are no more.
Who can compare this bird to that of the wedge-tail eagle
whose wings take it to soaring heights.
The emu lays her eggs and then leaves. She does not care
for the well-being of her young. She is not concerned that
her labour in producing the eggs was in vain.
For God did not endow her with wisdom and common sense
given to other birds like the magpie and crow who care so
carefully for their young. Yet when she sees danger watch her run-she laughs at the
dingo and the hunter as she
speeds away.

What happened in the creation program to produce these anomalies? Did God make the order Struthioniformes at the same time as he was suspected of making Australia, "late on the afternoon of the sixth day when he was tired", according to Manning Clark.

The issue in the Song of the Emu from the book of Job is about the human inclination for consistency-the human preference for a neat world in which everything fits quite nicely.
The problem Job had with God was that his own world had been robbed of consistency. While Job was righteous, healthy and wealthy everything looked good-everything appeared to be neat and tidy with his belief in a God-directed world. Now he looks at himself-a righteous man of faith but dead broke, sick with some ugly physical side-effects and feeling as incongruous as a bird that can not fly and a mother without maternal instincts. Where is the consistency of God in his dilemma?

The problem that Job's friends had with Job was that his dilemma was inconsistent with their theology. They looked at Job and saw a righteous man seemingly forsaken by God and that was a serious threat to their understanding of how God works in the world. In their theology, God orders the world so that the righteous man was blessed and the unrighteous punished. In their ordered world, there was no place for a righteous, sick and broke man. Job was either broke or righteous, but not both, and there was no way they were going to change their way of thinking.

The problem that God had with Job's friends was that they read life from their own cramped, myopic laws of consistency, predictability and their own self-satisfaction that the world was neat. There was no place for misfits like a bird with an odd feather that could not fly or mother. Therefore, there was no place in their world for the oddity of a 'dead broke righteous' man

To: Part 3

Cavan Brown Cavan Brown is the minister of Geraldton Baptist Church, WA, and is the author of Pilgrim Through Barren Land, Albatross, 1991, and the forthcoming The Blackfellas' Friend: a life of John Gribble (Access Press, 1999).