Job and Friends: Sufferings, questions, answers and mystery

Job and Friends:

Sufferings, Questions, Answers and Mystery

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Someone I was acquainted with through social media was struggling with questions concerning suffering. I imagined I could help with an insight. The one struggling with suffering and questions replied with a less than grateful reply. I remembered reading the Book of Job. I remembered how Job's friends had imagined they would be helpful to their friend in his suffering. They discovered he would not accept their answers as the answers to the questions he was asking.

            Have you ever heard that the Book of Job was a book written to explain suffering? I don’t believe that for a moment. If it was written for that purpose it was the greatest colossal of a failure ever in the category of a book that missed its intended purposes. But I would accept a more existential sounding description of the Book of Job. If you told me the book of Job was a book describing the human struggle with the questions and proposed answers about suffering in a world where there are no adequate explanations of suffering, then I would declare the book a true masterpiece that has survived the ages and is as true in modernity as it was when first published in ancient times long since forgotten.

            After my failed attempt to encourage someone struggling with suffering I realized something I had never so fully grasped before about the Book of Job. It is easy for you and me to think that Job stood on the brink of spiritual disaster as he asked all those questions about his suffering and as he accused God of making him a target – which by the way is something acknowledged in the book as Job’s sufferings all flowed from God’s expression to Satan that there was no one else like Job in all the world, one who was blameless and upright, who feared God and shunned evil. (Job 1:8) Every trial and suffering Job experienced followed that assertion by God. We like to have thoughts about God that do not allow him to be the one who allows suffering in our lives. Yet this is enough of a theme throughout the Scriptures that St. Paul, quoting the Psalms describes believers as being accounted as sheep for the slaughter. (Romans 8:36) St. Paul hasn’t changed subjects from his describing the Christian life as being a life where all things work together for good. But he is describing the whole story which includes that God is working all things together for good even through those seasons when we experience what it means to be sheep appointed for the slaughter.

            It struck me that we fail to appreciate one of the lessons the Book of Job shows us. Yes, Job was in spiritual danger as he sought to question God with questions that chipped away at the boundary between faithful and impious sorts of questioning. We imagine Job to be in spiritual difficulty, but we imagine his friends to be mistaken but in no real spiritual danger. Yet when the book of Job is concluded God appoints Job to be the mediator between God and Job’s friends. He tells them that they will have their sins forgiven if Job prays for them. He will not forgive Job’s friends until God hears Job’s prayers for them.

            That mysterious ending seems to prefigure the mystery of the Gospel in Jesus Christ. For Christ, despite our attempts to downplay it asks the questions that seem to border on heresy. He retires to the Garden of Gethsemane and asks if this path of suffering he is moving towards is really necessary? Is there another way? Whatever one might think of how Anselm of Canterbury treated these questions such questions were poured out in the Garden of Gethsemane. Our Lord wanted to know if there was a way out of the path of suffering for which he had been chosen. On the cross, his questioning became more intense as he prayed what must seem like the most heretical prayer ever prayed – “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” We esteemed him stricken, smitten and afflicted. The multitudes scorned him and wondered about this messiah who now hung helplessly upon a cross. If only he had listened to some of his disciples he wouldn’t be in this mess. If he hung upon a cross facing such agony then surely he must have sinned grievously or he would not be hanging there. Yet he is not in the spiritual danger as we are, who have fortified ourselves with our theological and philosophical explanations that help keep the disturbing realities of evil pushed out of our minds and kept at a safe distance from us.

            Perhaps it is not someone who asks questions about suffering, that we should imagine is in danger on their spiritual journeys. Perhaps it is the one who has so compartmentalized suffering into a restricted zone that he has an answer for its appearance. That answer allows the reality of suffering to be restricted, isolated, domesticated, and managed from a safe distance. Perhaps true spiritual life does not have safe answers for suffering but only dangerous questions that erupt when we are found struggling with the reality of suffering.

            Perhaps that is why our mediator between us and God must be one who suffered and asked the  inconvenient questions. Perhaps our ability to restrict our thinking about suffering to fit into tidy compartments based on theological and philosophical understandings simply show us having lost our sense of horror regarding suffering. Many of our answers prove not to be answers rooted in wisdom but words which darken counsel, words without knowledge or wisdom. (Job 38:2) We have safe answers for suffering because we have begun to take on a disorder akin to that of a psychopath who has lost feeling and empathy for the suffering of others. Perhaps if God were speaking to us and to Job, he would point out that some of Job's questions were improper. But I imagine he might look at us (the ones with the answers) with disgust and ask, "Have you so figured out suffering that you have no questions?" So God looks upon us and says that he will not hear us unless a mediator prays on our behalf, a mediator who has suffered and has asked the questions and has overcome suffering by passing through its fiery ordeal. That was how God reproved Job's friends and secured their redemption. Job prayed for them. That is how our Lord secures our salvation when we imagined we had all the answers but in reality the only proper answer for us to give regarding suffering is to ask the tortured questions that are the only realistic response to suffering. Once we have been rescued from our having an answer for everything we are left to join the martyrs with one more question to ask God, "How long O' Lord, How long?" Until that day is realized perhaps our lot in life will be well described by the Anglican poet George Herbert (1593-1633) who wrote:

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.