The following are true stories.

 

An elderly woman lives out her last days in a nursing home, struggling against a body which is slowly shutting down.  And her daughter turns to me and says, “I don’t understand why God is putting my mother through this.”

 

A young woman, having already suffered a miscarriage, carries a baby to full term, only to have her beautiful daughter die within an hour of being born.  And the mother cries to me, “I DO NOT understand why this had to be.”

 

A teenager writes, wondering why our “loving God” isn’t around when marriages break up, or a friend considers suicide, or when children must live – and die – in poverty.

 

Because of true stories like these, Job is our contemporary in a way few other biblical characters can be.  He is one of the most compelling figures in the Old Testament, and it is his unexplainable, unjustified, innocent suffering that does it. 

 

This morning’s lesson tells us that Job “was blameless and upright, and he feared God and turned away from evil.”  He was a good and faithful man with a loving wife, ten children, and much property.  But then, Job’s world collapses.

 

It happens because one day, God and Satan start chatting about Job.  Now this Satan isn’t the devil as we usually think of.  The idea of an evil devil that operates as a separate and opposing force to God didn’t develop until hundreds of years after the Book of Job was written.  In Job’s time, Satan served as a respected member of God’s “council,” a heavenly being who served as a kind of divine prosecutor.  His name is translated as “The Accuser” or “The Adversary,” and he had no power to do anything except the power God gave him.  His job was to bring people to trial when God said so – and only if God said so.

 

So one day, up in heaven, God says to Satan, “Where have you been lately?”  And The Accuser tells God that he’s been walking down on the earth.  God asks, “Have you seen Job?  There’s no one like him; he’s faultless and honest; he fears God and he turns away from evil.”  We can imagine the Accuser putting his arm around God’s shoulder, shaking his head, and saying, “Yes, but look at all that you’ve blessed him with – family, health, wealth, land.  No wonder Job worships you!  Take it all away from him, and he’ll curse you to your face!”

 

And wanting to get to the real motivation behind Job’s piety, God says, "Very well, then, he is in your hands; but on the man himself, do not lay a finger."  And God permits the Accuser to begin testing Job.

 

In a matter of just a few verses, Job’s idyllic life falls apart.  First, God allows Satan to take Job’s property and family.  All of Job’s servants are slaughtered by enemies; all his camels are stolen, and lightning kills his sheep.  Then, a desert wind lifts up the roof of the house and the house falls down, killing all his children as they eat dinner together around the table.  Yet, even with all of these devastating calamities, Job falls upon the ground and worships God, crying, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.” 

 

But in this morning’s Scripture lesson, Satan the Accuser is not impressed by Job’s continued devotion, and he tells God, “Job is still faithful because you didn’t lay a hand on him.  Hurt him physically, and he will curse you to your face.”  And God responds, “Very well then, he is in your hands, but you must spare his life.”  So, God again having given him permission, Satan makes itching sores erupt all over Job’s body, from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.  And finally, left to scratching his sores with broken pieces of pottery, Job erupts, saying “God curse the day that I was born!  Why didn’t I die at birth!  Why am I suffering?  I am innocent!!”  

 

Job lives in a rather narrow world where the good get rewarded and the bad get punished. He’s been a good person.  He’s done nothing wrong.  He’s been faithful.  And yet, God is punishing him.  “It’s not fair!” he cries, and with his words, Job raises perhaps the biggest, deepest questions any of us ask.  If God is good, and loving and all-powerful, why is there suffering?  Why do bad things happen to good people?

 

Job asks these questions, and so do we.  When things go well with us and in the world around us, it is not hard to believe in a loving, just and powerful God.  But when we experience tragic suffering in our own lives and see it in the world, we begin to have doubts and question our beliefs.  We want a world that is orderly and balanced and fair, a world that has a kind of moral arithmetic in which the guilty are punished and the good are spared.  But life doesn’t work that way.  And when, like Job, the bottom falls out of our world – torn apart by pain or illness or death, we – like Job – cry out to God, “Why?” 

 

Later on in the book, three friends try to comfort Job, but they cannot accept that Job’s suffering can coexist with Job’s innocence and God’s justice.  And so they defend God, arguing that Job must have done something to deserve his suffering.  After 35 chapters of uncomforting words that only add to his pain, Job finally tells his friends to be quiet.  The only one he wants to hear from is God; he wants an explanation for his suffering straight from the Source.  And at last God speaks.

 

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”  God asks Job.  “Have you commanded the morning since your days began?  Do you give the horse its might?  Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars?”  God goes on for four chapters, God’s voice rising like a magnificent symphony of questions.  But God’s response doesn’t answer Job’s questions, nor ours. 

 

Why do some people suffer more than others?  Why do some have more tragedy in their lives than anyone should have to bear?  Why the debilitating disease, the tragic accident, the death of a young person whose life is just beginning?  Why is there suffering?  Why you, your child, your spouse?  Why mine?  The questions are endless.

 

And the answer?  I could stand here and talk about the frailty of our mortal lives, or the fragility of the order of creation, or the consequences of human irresponsibility – and perhaps we would be able to come up with some partial explanations.  But in the final analysis, the answer is: we just do not know.

 

I think, in the end, if there is any response to the problem of unjustified suffering, then it is this:  for most of us, the worst thing that can happen is not to suffer without reason, but to suffer without God, to suffer without the hope or consolation or promise of new life that God offers.  I believe this from the bottom of my heart, because I have lived it.

 

Many years ago, I watched my young husband suffer for 21 months with terminal cancer.  Darcy and I had been married only eight months when he was diagnosed and given less than two years to live.  That diagnosis dashed the hopes and dreams we had of a lifetime together, of children, of a future bright with promise.  I confess that there were times I asked why God had doomed Darcy to an early death, why God would allow Darcy to suffer so, and why God would leave me a widow at age 27.  At times I wondered if God had not just let Darcy suffer and die, but indeed had inflicted a horrible death on him.  I questioned God’s goodness, God’s justice, God’s very existence.  And I closed my heart to God’s healing love and presence.  I had nothing left – no hope, no future, no strength or desire to go on. 

 

But even though I had turned my back on God, God had not abandoned me.  Even in my loneliness and isolation, God was there at my side.

In his Sermon on the Mount, in the poetic verses called the Beatitudes, Jesus says, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted" [Matthew 5:4].  The literal meaning of the word translated into English as “comforted” [parakalao] is “to be called to the side of.”  When we are in mourning and in pain, we are called to the side of God.  It is not just in our times of unwavering faith or spiritual devotion, but perhaps even more in our times of doubt and questioning, our times of confusion and suffering, that God is at our side.  Blessed are those who mourn, for in our sorrow, sadness, and grief, God is right there next to us.

And God was indeed with me.  In what proved to be a life transforming experience, God gave me the courage and strength to move on and create a new life for myself.  God abundantly graced my life in the ensuing years, bringing restoration, renewal, and rebirth in ways I could never have imagined.  Six years after Darcy’s death, I married again, and John and I were blessed with two beautiful children, and when John died suddenly just eight months after Ian was born, this time my heart was open to God’s healing love and presence.  God uplifted me in my sorrow and sustained me, healing my heart yet again, healed it so that I was able to love again fully and deeply, bringing Peter and me together, and giving my children and me another new start.

 

In Job’s story, after hearing God’s poetic response to his cries and questions, Job’s vision is transformed.  He begins to see the universe not through human eyes, but through God’s eyes.  And through God’s eyes, Job sees a mixture of birth and death, of creation and destruction, of suffering and joy.  Job begins to comprehend God’s divine magnificence, and his own earthly insignificance, and he says, “I have heard of you with my ears, but now my eyes have seen you.” 

 

What Job wants us to know – and what I believe with every fiber of my being – is that God does not abandon us.  Even though we may want answers to our questions, what we really need is God.  And God will respond.  When we have nothing left but a piece of broken pottery with which to scratch our sores, we still have the God of all creation, the God who laid the foundation of the earth, who commands the morning, who gives might to the horse and flight to the hawk and has made everything that breathes.  That God will never abandon us, for God will always be where God has always been – loving, sustaining, and caring for God’s own. 

 

Thanks be to God!  Amen.