Elie Wiesel survived Nazi concentration camps to become a renowned author and playwright. In his stage play of the Holocaust, “The Trial,” a man named Berish is a survivor of a persecution in which most Jews of the village of Shamgorod are taken out and killed by soldiers one day. Afterward, Berish and some surviving Jews put God on trial, with Berish acting as the prosecutor.
He speaks as witness for all the slaughtered: “Let their premature, unjust deaths turn into an outcry so forceful that it will make the universe tremble with fear and remorse!” Berish’s play is interrupted by the news that the soldiers are about to return. A village priest offers to baptize Berish so he can truthfully claim to be Catholic. Berish refuses, saying, “My sons and my fathers perished without betraying their faith; I can do no less.” He insists that this decision does not suggest a reconciliation with God. “I lived as a Jew,” he exclaims, “and it is as a Jew that I shall die – and it is as a Jew that, with my last breath, I shall shout my protest to God! And because the end is near, I shall shout louder! Because the end is near, I’ll tell Him that He’s more guilty than ever!”
There is evil in the world, and pain, and suffering. If God is not responsible, then who is? Is anyone?
The second-longest book in the Bible bears the name of a man named Job. Job was a wealthy and righteous man, said so by God himself in the opening verses. Yet with God’s permission, he was brought to ruin. All his property and his entire family were destroyed by storms and marauders. Then Job was afflicted with terrible diseases that broke his skin out in painful, cankerous sores. At first and for a long time afterward, Job refused to blame God for any of it, even though his wife told him he should "curse God and die." Some friends came and tried to explain his suffering to him. One said he was being punished for his sin, but Job correctly denies that he is sinful. Another says it is not Job's sin that is the cause of the calamity, but that God is trying to teach Job a lesson. But Job rebuts that notion by pointing out that there is no lesson so valuable that he would ever consider it worthwhile to learn at the expense of the deaths of his children and his own, personal suffering. All their attempts to explain Job’s plight have all the theological depth of a bumper sticker. Job doesn’t buy any of it.
Finally, Job cannot cling to his old faith any longer. Sitting in ashes, clothed only in sackcloth, he challenges God to stand trial for mismanaging the world. Piety no longer makes any sense to Job. Chaos such as Job experienced afflicts not only Job, but the world at large, so God seems either inept or monstrous, and therefore should be feared, but not loved or worshiped.
So Job bitterly, defiantly pressed his complaint about God to God: “Let the Almighty answer me; let my accuser put his indictment in writing” (Job 31:35). The task God faces in responding to Job is to make worship and piety sensible again.
God’s reply to Job begins in chapter 38 and continues through the end of chapter 41. Our reading today is just a taste. But is it a taste of a great banquet or of thin gruel? By the time one has read the first 37 chapters one has wallowed in Job’s misery. One has listened to Job’s self-righteous friends, with their turgid, repetitive explanations. Job’s conditions, the problems of human suffering, and the emptiness of easy explanations leave one famished for spiritual food and drink. So Job demands that God defend his governance of the world. Job has shed all his presuppositions about God. Nothing he thought he knew works anymore.
Thomas Long wrote, “Because Job suffers so grievously and so irrationally, he is no longer permitted the luxury of an illusion. Every attempt at make-believe falls before the reality of empty places at his family table and the throbbing pain in his body. The only god Job can manufacture from his misery is a monster, and Job must decide whether to flee from this arbitrary and punitive god or to stand up boldly to see if there just might be another God not of his own making."
1 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: 2 “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? 3 Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. 5 Who determined its measurements – surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? 6 On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone 7 when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
34 “Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? 35 Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are’? 36 Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind? 37 Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens, 38 when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?
39 “Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, 40 when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert? 41 Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?
Job 38:1-7, 34-41
At first reading of God’s reply to Job, it seems God explains nothing, he just swaggers in, thumps the divine chest and throws his weight around, demanding who Job thinks he is.
Back in chapter 9, Job had predicted this would happen. “If it is a matter of strength, he is mighty! . . . Even if I were innocent, my mouth would condemn me ...” (Job 9:19a, 20a). In effect, Job predicted that when God shows up, he will be a humbug, rather like the man behind the curtain whom Toto uncovered to Dorothy’s accusing stare. Taking God’s reply at face value, God says, “You’ve got a lot of gall to question the creator of the world! Be quiet! I’m God and you’re not.”
Unless . . .
Unless we observe two things. First, no one book of the Bible contains all of God’s revelations and thus no one book even asks all the questions, much less gives all the answers. In the rest of Scripture, God has more to say – and more importantly, to do – than he says to Job. Second, God’s reply to job is mostly poetic. It is visionary. God calls us to experience existence itself, not just ponder our misfortunes.
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” God demands. “Counsel” means the “planning of God in relation to his creation and includes what we understand by providence” (Gerhard von Rad). Job’s former world of familiar order and routine has disappeared. God knows that Job has accused him of creating a world lacking moral order, a world governed by darkened counsel.
Job has considered only two possibilities: either God is just in ways that we like and understand, or creation is basically chaotic and not even God is what he should be.
So God defends his design of the world. A rapid series of divine questions reveals to Job that he does not know the ways of God. There is a purpose in creation that God knows but Job does not. Job is right is rejecting his sinfulness as the cause of his suffering. He is right to reject his friends’ suggestions that he somehow deserves his suffering, but still, Job assumes too much. The whole of reality is far greater than Job can comprehend. Human understanding can never be more than very partial. In the midst of the realms of nature, there is order and wisdom – not a fixed order, nor even an obvious order, but a flexible order that demands patience and wonder. God’s questions humble Job because he cannot answer them, and they affirm the counsel of God. But one would have to be God to answer God’s questions, so what is being proved? That Job is not God? Job already knows that.
Yet by the end of God’s speech in chapter 41, we see that Job’s understanding is incomplete. Everything – even evil and suffering – are brought finally under God’s dominion.
Then Job answered the LORD: "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. . . . therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes." Job acknowledges that God’s power and dominion over creation are not fully comprehensible by him or any other human being. He has presumed too much.
There is another side to suffering and another side to presuming too much. The Gospel of Mark records that James and John went to Jesus one day and said, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you."
Jesus replied, "What is it you want me to do for you?"
And they said to him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory."
Talk about presumption! James and John decided to get a jump on the competition and jockeyed for favor early. Jesus was obviously a man who was going places, kingship, no less, so they wanted to be his prime minister and secretary of state.
Like Job, these disciples adopted a bargaining relationship with God. We’ll serve you, they basically said, but on the condition that your governance suits us.
But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking." And he explained that to follow him means to endure what he would endure: you "must be able to drink the cup that I drink," he explained. If you wish to be great, you must be a servant and if you wish to be first you must be a slave to all. "For," Jesus explained, I came "not to be served but to serve," and "to give my life a ransom for many." So suffering and death are part of the cup of discipleship.
The suffering and death of Christ were obstacles to evangelizing the ancient world. How preposterous can it be to worship a God who died a political execution? What sort of God would or could let that happen? If the sufferings of Job call into question God’s governance of the world, how much more the sufferings of Jesus make us wonder whether God is really in control. If Job is able reasonably to imagine that God might be monstrous, what are we to think about a God who would permit his own Son to endure what Jesus did? If God really is in control, what kind of God is he?
This question - not whether there is a god but what kind of God there is - is the central question of religious faith. It is also perhaps the most deeply personal question we can face because within it lie all our hopes and all our fears, all our doubts and all our longings, all our love and all our loneliness.
Intellectual and moral integrity require us to acknowledge the justice of Job’s complaint against God. Far from avoiding the issue by rote repetition of empty religious slogans, Job had the courage to take God seriously, as God, whose majesty and sovereignty over creation were real. The issue for Job was not whether God exists, but whether God is a cosmic bully at worst or incompetent at best.
In the face of the plight of job and the history of our own world, what evidence is there that can persuade us not simply to fear God but to love and worship God as a saving God of compassion and grace and mercy?
The promises of God are many, wrote Paul. Redemption, reconciliation, recreation, resurrection. If we can imagine a better world than we have – and each of us can imagine one easily – then what is God doing to bring such a world about? What is the evidence that God is keeping his promises? For without such evidence, believing those promises is not a matter of faith, but of wishful thinking at best or blind stupidity at worst.
The answer, you will be unsurprised to hear me say, is Jesus Christ. “For no matter how many promises God has made,” wrote Paul, “they are "Yes" in Christ” (2 Cor 1:20a).
A passage from Hebrews tells us, “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. . . . and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. ...”
There is the assurance we find in the suffering of Christ: God himself stooped to suffer pain and death, just as we all do.
Every complaint Job has is valid, but none of his complaints are the final say. For if Job and we want to doubt God because of the way the world treats us, then God in Christ answers, "It has treated me the same way."
But the cruel and sometimes capricious world does not get the last word, either. "In this world you will have troubles," said Jesus, "but don’t worry: I have overcome the world." God gets the last word. Suffering and death are real but not final. The worst that the world could throw at Christ was defeated by his resurrection.
There is an order to creation that we may not see very well. But there are some things we can see with blinding clarity. So we fix our eyes not merely on the here and now, but also the eternal purposes of God. For this world and all its troubles is temporary, but the purposes of God are eternal. “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith,” says Hebrews, “who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:2).
And so, someday, shall we.
