Suffering is indiscriminate, but then again, so is joy. (Listen here).
There is a story in the gospel according to John which begins like this: Jesus was walking along when he saw a man who had been blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Teacher, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ These days, we’re not quite so quick to blame people for being differently abled or ill. And yet when my mother, Ruth, had multiple sclerosis, I lost count of the number of people who became frustrated, even angry, with her.
‘But she’s such a good person!’ they said, ‘How can she be so sick?’ ‘Our prayer chain prays for her daily,’ they said. ‘Why isn’t she getting better? Is she even praying?’
As her disease progressed, others came to visit. ‘What an opportunity,’ they said. ‘No doubt God is asking you to transcend your suffering, write a book, and increase our understanding.’
Instead, she became quadriplegic. She couldn’t type or hold a pen. Her damaged nervous system meant it felt to her like her skin was always on fire. She was in extreme pain, she was constantly fatigued, she struggled to concentrate, and then her hearing and eyesight began to fail. Unsurprisingly, she sunk into depression. And as she continued to confound the hopes and prayers of those around her—hopes of recovery, healing, restoration, transcendence—many of her friends gradually drifted away.
She was a lifelong Christian, an ordained Baptist minister, and a pastoral theologian who prayed faithfully to the end. And yet, she never was healed. She never did write that book, or transcend her suffering and pain. Instead, she read and re-read the book of Job, and she walked the long hard lonely road to her death.
Teacher, who sinned, Ruth or her parents, that she suffered in this way?
This is the question at the heart of Job. For Job was a man who knew terrible suffering. First, the loss of his wealth and the murders of his servants. Then the deaths of all his children. Finally, an end to health, and the eruption all over his body of terrible sores. The sorts of losses, in fact, that many people in Palestine are experiencing right now, and which many colonized people experience at some level in ongoing ways.
So his friends come to visit. In wisdom and compassion, for seven days they sit with him silently on the shitheap of his life. Finally, Job speaks. But instead of words of confession or repentance or acceptance, the kind of pious words they expect from Job, he shocks them by cursing his fate. Better that I was stillborn, he says, than to live this terrible life. Better to be dead and buried than to live with such excruciating pain.
His friends are appalled. They cannot accept that suffering is unmerited, nor can they cope with hearing someone rail against God. So their silence is broken as they frantically insist that God is a just God and fair. God doesn’t inflict suffering on people without cause, they say, so confess, turn back to God, and you will be healed. Examine your life, they tell Job, and repent of your sins. It’s all part of God’s plan, they say, so learn what you need from this and grow in faith. In other words, like so many people today, Job’s friends believe that people get what they deserve; that people somehow earn their suffering.
For most of the book, Job, too, shares this worldview. But unlike his friends, he is convinced of his innocence. And if he is indeed innocent and this worldview is true, then it’s not reasonable that he should be suffering, so Job rails against God and demands a fair hearing from the ultimate judge.
It’s not just Job who knows he doesn’t deserve this. At the outset of this story, we are told that Job was ‘blameless and upright, one who held God in awe and turned away from evil’ (1:1); later, if Job is to be believed, we learn he was widely respected not only for his wisdom, but for feeding the poor, caring for the orphan, and championing the cause of the stranger. He was so concerned about righteousness that he prayed not when his children sinned, but in case they even thought about sinning.
Yet in the face of all this piousness, God is silent. ‘If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him,’ cries Job. ‘On the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him … Yet I am not silenced because of the darkness or the night that covers my face.’
Job is relentless as he continues to demand that God show up and explain Godself. By stages furious, suicidal, bewildered, outraged, Job asks over and over again, Why me? But as he rages and argues and weeps, something happens. Job changes. This pious goody-two-shoes who said and did everything right becomes a ravaged, raw and desperate man pouring out all the grief and pain of the world: and it takes him into the whirlwind. And it is there, in the storm, that he encounters God. Not in calm acceptance, but in desperate outrage; not in pious words, but in blasphemy.
*
Job is a poem of great dramatic irony: all along, the reader knows so much more than Job. For we are also told at the beginning that there is a malevolent force stalking the earth, causing pain. It is not God, it is not punishment, indeed if anything Job is targeted precisely because he is pious. Any assumption that people get what they deserve should be shaken to the core, and to be asking God to justify suffering is to be asking the wrong question.
Indeed, when God does finally show up, God provides no answers to Job’s questions, no justification for the disasters of his life. Instead, God grants him a vision of the beauty and terror of the world. It’s a world where the lioness pounces to feed her young and the vulture tears flesh with delight, and predators and victims are locked in a vast and amoral dance. In this world, which is so much greater than the human, suffering is inevitable and has its own strange dignity, and everything is suffused with joy.
In the face of this great and terrible vision, Job surrenders. ‘I have spoken of the unspeakable and tried to grasp the infinite,’ says Job. ‘…but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.’
I think now of my mother, who was granted a vision of Jesus the night before she died. He came to her in a dream and told her she no longer needed to struggle. When she woke, she felt comforted by her mortality and refused any further medical intervention. Ruth died the next night in what I can only describe as a blazing presence which filled the room, a presence beyond death, beyond suffering.
*
The story of Job tells us that suffering is indiscriminate. It happened to Job, a man singled out by God as uniquely honest and pious; it happened to my mother, Ruth, who was hardly a saint and yet about as earnestly faithful as they come; and it happened to Jesus, God’s son and the one we describe as the perfect human.
For Jesus indeed suffered and was rejected by almost everyone. Echoing the author of Job, he taught that ‘God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and unjust.’ But when they heard his teachings, many of his early followers said, ‘This is too hard!’ and walked away. When Jesus preached in the synagogue that God’s grace was showered on their enemies, the townsfolk were enraged and tried to drive him off a cliff. Even his family thought he was crazy. They came to where he was teaching, wanting to seize him and lock him away.
Later, he was sentenced to death by religious leaders, scapegoated by the mob, and condemned to an excruciatingly slow, humiliating and very public execution by the military. He knew loneliness, he knew terrible physical pain, and he knew what it is to feel abandoned by God. In agony and terror he cried out from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Like Job, like Ruth at times, and like so many of us, Jesus well knew the abyss of God’s absence.
To those of us who are suffering now, this could be good news. Because it means that the God revealed in Jesus Christ has already travelled the road of suffering. He knows it well, and he has promised to travel it with us again and again even into the paradox of God’s absence on the cross, even into death.
And death is not the end of our story. As followers of Jesus, we trust that as we walk with him, we are walking to the cross and beyond; we are walking through pain and death into the mystery of resurrection life. We don’t know what that life is. Perhaps it is the vastness of the beyond-human world glimpsed in Job, a world of infinite depths and singing stars and wild, shimmering joy. Perhaps it is the vastness of time beyond time, where our reality is as transient as the surface of a bubble and everything else is radiant. It doesn’t matter. Either way, we are not alone in suffering; it is not judgement; and it is not the end of the story. Jesus is with us, and goes before us, and is waiting for us on the other side.
We also trust that Jesus’ Spirit is among us, here and now. This Spirit is poured into his followers and is present every time two or three gather in his name. And this points to something else: that, as people filled with his Spirit, then, like him, we are called to journey with those who suffer.
We are not to wonder what they might have done to deserve it, or wonder how they might have avoided it, or blame them if they are not healed. We are not to shun them, whether out of judgement or fear; we are not to place heavy expectations on them.
Instead, like Jesus, we are called to bless. More precisely, we are called to bless the hungry, the prisoner, the grieving. We are called to touch those whom others are too scared to touch, to minister to the sick, to give rest to the weary, and to carry one another’s burdens. We are called to walk with those who suffer, loving them every step of the way, just as Jesus walks with and blesses us. And, I suggest, we are called to read Job from time to time to give voice to the suffering, to demand an accounting, to permit an unravelling, to move beyond piousness, and to glimpse the shimmering joy of the beyond-human world.
‘Teacher, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ My friends, this is and always has been and always will be the wrong question. As Jesus said, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.’ And God’s works will be revealed in us when we move beyond piety and dare to enter the whirlwind ourselves. And they will also be revealed when we stick by those who suffer and listen to their terrible cries, and tend their gaping wounds, and embrace them with a vast and beyond-human love: which we can do through the power of God’s Holy Spirit. So let us faithfully love, serve and suffer with God, even in the face of God’s absence. Amen. Ω
Reflect: Have you ever met God in the whirlwind? How have you known God’s presence? When have you known God’s absence? How do you practice your faith in the midst of foresakenness and pain?
A reflection on Job 23:1-9, 16-17 given to Coburg Uniting on 13 October 2024 (Year B Proper 23) © Alison Sampson 2024. Photo by Hans Moerman on Unsplash. To be clear: Not everyone in a wheelchair suffers. The picture was chosen because it illustrates both my mother’s particular condition and the ocean and sky mentioned in Job. This reflection was prepared on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation in Poorneet Tadpole Season. This week, dragonflies continue to dance over every pond and waterway.
Alison and the whale 