What We Can Learn From Job Part I

Rabbi Harold Kushner once sought to answer the question, Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? Properly this is called the problem of Theodicy: if God is good why is there evil and suffering? To become a Christian through the rite of Holy Baptism, we are called to “renounce the evil powers in this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” In particular, both the Church and the nation have been recently and increasingly focused on the problems of sexual violence against women and children. All attempts to sweep such concerns under the rug have been proven futile. The curtain has been pulled back. Corrupting and destructive evil is real.

And if there was any thought that once our current political dilemma is “resolved” this might all go away, the one and only Nobel Prize that is conferred by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, The Peace Prize, was awarded to two individuals who have devoted their lives “for being symbols in the fight to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.” The Committee goes on to say, “that while wartime sexual assault and the #MeToo movement in general are significantly different, their goals share key elements: They both aim to acknowledge the abuses of women, eliminate the victim shaming and support women who speak out about their sexual assaults.”

The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Dr. Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, who has treated victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for most of his adult life, founding the Panzi Hospital, which supports survivors of sexual assault. Sharing the Prize is Nadia Murad, a Yazidi survivor of rape and captivity by ISIS. She is a member of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq and was taken captive by ISIS members who had launched an attack on her small village. She was held as a sex slave for three months before escaping from her captors. In 2016, she was named the U.N.'s first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. It is believed that some 3,000 Yazidi women and girls remain enslaved. As long as they are enslaved, ISIS has not been defeated. Corrupting and destructive evil remains real.

One might say that God is trying to keep our attention on the problems of sexual violence against women and children. Against this backdrop, we begin a cycle of readings from the Book of Job: “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” Job is offered to us, like Dr. Mukwege and Ms. Murad, as one who has “renounced the evil powers in this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.”

In this nearly 3,000 year old fable, Job’s faith in God is challenged by Satan  - a Hebrew word meaning “adversary,” or “accuser,” not the Devil of the New Testament. Job has a flourishing family, much cattle, bountiful crops and life is good. Job thanks God for all good gifts that surround him. Satan suggests that if Job is to lose everything his faith and love of God will vanish and he will curse God. Suggesting that Job serves God because it is profitable.

God, it turns out, has faith in Job and says, “Very well, he is in your power, but spare his life.” Satan strips Job of everything he has, and goes so far as to cover his body with sores. Then his wife says to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.” But he says to her, “…Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” In all this, we are told,  Job did not curse God.

What follows are something like 40 chapters of theological attempts to explain or answer the problem of suffering and evil in the world. Much of it features three friends of Job and a fourth, Elihu, who offer all the usual bromides: You must have done something wrong. You brought this on yourself somehow. God doesn’t give you more than you can handle. Job swings between faith and despair, cursing the day he was born, and finally ends with a flourish demanding that God declare why this has happened to him. Job has no patience. There is no such thing as “the patience of Job.” Job demands that God stand trial.

The three friends give up, Elihu summarizes their efforts, stating that Job has risen for the defense of self, not God. And then it happens. The Lord answers Job out of the whirlwind.  “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins for I will question you, and you shall declare to me!” Then comes what William Safire once described as, “the longest and most beautifully poetic speech attributed directly to God in scripture.” The foundation of God’s defense is, “Where were you when I was creating this universe in the first place? If you have so many good ideas you should have been there to help out!”  The idea being that God, suggests Safire, is busy bringing light to darkness, imposing physical order on chaos, and leaves his human creations free to work out moral justice on their own. In fact, in Genesis God pretty much leaves the stewardship of creation entirely up to us. [New York Times, January 10, 2005]

Job is humbled. “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” Yet, in telling his story, in testifying to friends, in demanding an explanation from God, and through sheer resilience, Job realizes that he has been graced by the living presence of God. His tirade has caused God to appear, demonstrating, much as Jesus does on the cross, that those who suffer are never alone. Job is satisfied, not so much by the content of God’s answer as by contact with God himself. Emmanuel. God with us. Us. All of us.

That is, the answer to the problem of evil is not to be found in the arguments of Job’s friends, or even God’s defense. The answer, if you will, is a response. Rabbi Kushner suggests, “A religious response to tragedy need not be solely about God.  It can be about how the sufferer responds, whether with acceptance, with rage, or with a new understanding of how life works.  It can be about how others respond to his or her pain, with pious explanations or with hugs and shared tears.” Like Job, we can repudiate past accusations, doubts, and even anger and know that we are not alone, living this life in communion with a God who is with us in our sufferings. And listening to and honoring other’s stories of suffering and survival is what heals. All of us.

Wesley Morriston in his essaay, God’s Answer To Job, reminds us of a story that The Hasidic teacher, Rabbi Bunam, tells: ‘A man should carry two stones in his pocket. On one should be inscribed, "I am but dust and ashes." On the other, "For my sake was the world created. "And he should use each stone as he needs it. The experience of the Whirlwind has taught Job to use the first stone. But what we need, and what the book of Job tries, with only partial success, to teach us, is how to use them both together.’ [Religious Studies 32, Oxford Univeriy Press: 1996]

Knowledge is to know the difference and when to use them. As we listen to others, or tell our own stories, we need to learn the difference. Job held to his faith in God. God had faith in Job. God has faith in us. God is with us in the suffering. To be continued.