Let's meet Job's friends. 

In Job 2:11 we read “When Job’s three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite, heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathise with him and comfort him.” These friends come from different places- places known for their wisdom (see for example Jeremiah 49:7)- so we might say that they bring with them the wisdom of the world.

And as the friends catch their first glimpse of Job they are appalled. Job 2:12 tells us “When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognise him”. Now the word "hardly" isn’t actually in the text- the verse literally says “they did not recognise him”. This may be because he is so disfigured and afflicted that they cannot recognise him. But it could also be that they refuse to acknowledge him- that they make the decision that Job is a man utterly abandoned by God and without hope. And so instead of acknowledging Job- recognising him- we read that “they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No-one said a word to him…”

Now it is usual to say at this point that by sitting with Job in silence, that was the best thing the friends could have done. And it is true that once they begin to speak in the following chapter after chapter, we see how little good their speaking does. But I’m not so sure that their silence should be seen as a positive in this case. What we see the friends do here- weeping aloud, tearing their clothes, sprinkling dust on their heads- is exactly what you did in their culture when mourning a corpse. This is- for example- exactly what Joseph did in Genesis 50 when his father Jacob died.

So it may well be that their silence is not so much a silence of sympathy, but what we might call a silence of bankruptcy. They are silent because they really have nothing to say and they really think Job is beyond help anyway- he’s as good as dead. They have called for the hearse and they have Job in a coffin already. Can you imagine the effect of this on Job? Already crushed and broken, now his friends treat him as if he were already dead, a person without a future, without hope, without anything to look forward to. No wonder Job will call them "miserable comforters" (Job 16:2)!

And this is why the opening verse of Job 3 is so important: "After this, Job opened his mouth..." The Jerusalem Bible captures the idea very effectively by translating the phrase "Eventually it was Job who broke the silence". And as we saw in Sunday's message, Job begins his wrestle with God: 

"Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden,
whom God has hedged in?” Job 3:23