Suffering: Answers

“Job's Tormentors” by William Blake c1785-90 found in the British Museum London

The temptation is hard to resist.  Sometimes we just can’t help ourselves.  We feel compelled for whatever reason to offer a neat and tidy explanation for why there’s suffering in the world.  We recoil from living in a world of randomness.  We want answers; we crave predictability; we insist life makes sense.

We want God to make sense, too.  He has to follow the rules, whatever those rules happen to be.  We prefer to know and follow a domesticated God.

The book of Job takes this issue on.  Is it possible to understand the reason behind all human suffering?  Are there rational answers?

The story begins on earth.  The narrator describes Job’s prosperity and virtue. He is rich and successful, presides as a benevolent patriarch over a large and happy family, and serves the common good of his community.  He is kind, upright, honest, and humble.  Job is the ideal man.

The story shifts scenes from earth to the court of heaven.  God points to Job and says there’s no one quite like him.  But a member of the heavenly court, Satan, challenges God, arguing that Job is a good and godly man because God has made life easy for him. If God were to withhold his blessing, God would see another side of Job.

So Satan proposes a contest to see if Job will remain a righteous man in the face of random suffering.  God accepts the challenge and gives Satan permission to make life hard for Job.  Satan strips Job of his wealth and arranges the tragic death of his children and servants.  But Job remains true to God.

Satan approaches God a second time, arguing that, like any man, Job could handle almost anything as long as it doesn’t ruin his personal health.  God grants permission to Satan to put Job to the test yet again, this time inflicting him with bodily sickness and pain.  Job suffers so much that he withdraws from society and makes his way to an ash heap.  There he scratches his sores and laments his fate.

Job is not privy, of course, to the contest in heaven between God and Satan; he doesn’t know that his misery is a test.  All he knows is his suffering.

Three friends visit Job to comfort him. For seven days they sit with him in silence, so horrified by his appearance and affliction that they cannot speak. Finally, they venture to explain why Job has suffered.

They argue that people suffer because they deserve it.  Though Job appears to be a good man, he must have done something wrong.  Otherwise, he would not have had to face the calamity and misery that has overtaken him.

Job cries out in despair and agony, complains to God, curses the day he was born, and wishes he were dead.  But he does not condemn God, nor does he accept the explanation of his three friends. He is no worse than other men, he says.   In fact, he may even be better.  Why, then, is he suffering so much more than everyone else?  He can make no sense of it.

Eventually Job turns against God.  He prays a strange kind of prayer, more an accusatory prayer than anything else.  In the court of heaven God put Job to the test.  But on earth Job does the same to God.  He charges God with randomness and unfairness.  Job is not the problem; God is.  Job has not failed; God has.

All this time a younger man, Elihu, has been listening in silence.   He finally steps forward and speaks.  He raises questions about each of their perspectives and then offers another.  He affirms that God is both transcendent and immanent.  God speaks, too, though often in a mysterious way.

Suddenly everyone and everything recedes into the background.  There is no court of heaven, no argument between Job and his three accusers.  There is just Job, alone in his suffering.

Then God appears to Job in a whirlwind and asks him a series of questions that reveal God as powerful and wise.  In that moment Job encounters the living God, Lord of creation and history, who becomes overwhelmingly real to him.  This is not a God of some distant and heavenly court, nor a God of abstract answers.  It is a God of holy presence.

Job is stunned into silence and admits that he is finite and ignorant.

The story is hard to accept.  Job seems a pawn, his life subject to forces beyond his knowledge and control, and God seems a bully who allows Satan to inflict suffering on the innocent.

But the story makes the opposite point.  God does not put Job to the test.  We know this because Satan does not reappear at the end of the story to claim victory or to admit defeat.  He becomes irrelevant to the story.  Nor do Job’s three friends prove that Job deserved his suffering.  We know this because God implores Job to pray for them because they were wrong.

Suffering is not always a test.  Suffering is not always deserved.

Why then do we suffer?

The story doesn’t answer the question because any answer, however persuasive, would have no power to mitigate or eliminate suffering.

The fact is, suffering just is.

But God is, too.  God steps into the story.  He reveals his unfathomable wildness and greatness.  God is good, to be sure; but not tame.  At least not in this story.

Job admits his fault.  He has spoken about God; then he comes to know God. On meeting the real God, he simply has no more questions to ask. He discovers that God is the answer to all his questions.  Just God.

In the end God restores Job’s prosperous life, which of course does not erase the losses that have already occurred.  Restoration of prosperity, however, misses the larger point, which is restoration of relationship.  Knowing God, not as an abstraction but in a real relationship, is the point.

And the need.  As the Psalmist writes:

Whom have I in heaven but you?
    And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
    but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.