by CCW | 23 October 2011 14:53
The patience of Job is one of those familiar proverbs or sayings that remain with us even in a less than biblically literate age. Some have pointed out though that Job is anything but patient. He seems remarkably impatient. Yet patience here is not about the quality of our waiting so much as it is about suffering. To be patient is to be acted upon.
The patience of Job is actually a way of talking about the sufferings of Job. And, Job has more than his share of suffering.
The whole book is a kind of drama, a moral drama about suffering and grace. The Book of Job interrogates certain ancient and modern assumptions about suffering. The passage this morning[1] is from the first speech of the three comforters of Job. The phrase ‘Job’s Comforters’ is another one of those once familiar phrases. The phrase is ironic, referring to the patter of pious platitudes which are more annoying than comforting and fundamentally wrong in the way in which suffering is viewed.
This morning’s second lesson[2] suggests a certain way of looking at the human experience of suffering. It opens us out to the idea of redemptive suffering. “After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, establish and strengthen you.” Comfort, it should be noted really means strengthen. The so-called “comfortable words” in the Communion Service are strengthening words, we might say.
But are the words of St. Peter in his first Epistle merely pious platitudes too, simply sentences of empty sentiment? Suffering for a little while and then all will be well? Is that always or even often the case? One thing, perhaps, redeems Peter’s comment from being just another pious opinion. Somehow our suffering is connected to our being called to “eternal glory in Christ.” The idea of being “in Christ” perhaps redeems this passage from being simple wishful thinking. Somehow “in Christ” we really see and learn about suffering and glory.
What then are we to make of the speech of Eliphaz the Temanite? Is it simply nonsense? No. There is some truth in what he says, particularly about the human condition in general. “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward” is true in the sense that suffering is part and parcel of the human experience. We all suffer, to be sure, but not all in the same way and to the same extent and not always for the same reasons.
Eliphaz the Temanite is supposedly a friend of Job. What is his “comforting” advice? Simply this. ‘You are suffering, so you must have sinned’. It is the most basic theme of all Job’s comforters; the very viewpoint that The Book of Job most wants to counter and correct. It belongs to a viewpoint which thinks to subject God to a finite and human understanding. ‘If you are suffering, you must have sinned’ has as its corollary the idea that ‘if you are doing well you must be right with God’. It is a form of harmful pride.
There is more to human experience and, in fact, this simplistic viewpoint makes a mockery of the realities of the human experience. The forms of suffering or success cannot simply be reduced to acts of sin or virtue.
We can, I hope, see the problem in this simplistic equation. It overlooks the realities of doing the right thing and still suffering, the significance of motive over mere consequence. The saying, “no good deed goes unpunished,” exists for a reason! There is the endless complaint, too, about those who seem to get away with “blue murder,” to use another phrase, albeit a non-biblical one. More importantly, there is the whole business of suffering wrongfully or suffering because of someone else’s folly or wickedness. It is just too simple and easy to equate suffering with specific acts of sin.
Yet the insight that suffering is our human lot to one extent or another is important. It goes to a deeper view of sin than what Job’s Comforters could possibly envision. It goes to the greater reality of original sin. Simply put, things are not as right with us and with our world as we think they should be. We are “bent out of shape,” to use another metaphor. The phrase, “yet man is born unto trouble” is a way of stating the obvious. It is as obvious “as the sparks that fly upwards”. No one is exempt from suffering or from death.
So then what? How do we face suffering and death? That is the real question and one which the Comforters have really very little to say beyond trotting out a series of tiresome platitudes that don’t really explain anything. They are dead to the larger and more redemptive view of suffering, the very thing which we are given to see in Christ crucified.
In the Christian understanding of things, Christ’s suffering and death changes the very meaning of suffering and death. In a way, the argument of The Book of Job prepares us wonderfully for the story of Jesus. Why? Because it opens us out to the grace of God which is greater than the Law and greater than the whole messy and complicated package of human sin. Because the glory is not just later on but here and now in and through the suffering.
We suffer for our sins, to be sure, at least in one way or another. Sometimes there are explicit consequences, visible and painful; sometimes there are those struggles of the conscience, the inward conviction of our own sinfulness; and sometimes, just sometimes, there is a kind of suffering for others. Such is the nature of our co-inherence with one another in Christ.
All this is allowed to be positive and good through the grace of Christ at work in our souls. Job seeks to know the cause of his suffering; his insight is that in principle if it is on account of sin, it has to be made known. No confession, no forgiveness; no redemption, you might say. Suffering cannot simply equal sin. Sin has to be named and confessed; only then can it be purged and done away. So Job wrestles with God until God answers him, an answer which humbles Job because it reminds him of the grace of God in creation and in the Law but without taking God captive to the world and to the Law.
It is not about the irrationality of God as if God can simply do anything he wants. Whatever God does and what we have been given to see about God’s doing is something good and good for us. He seeks our perfection and uses even the means of our suffering as part of the lesson. Job is able to learn this. Are we?
There is a kind of breakthrough of the understanding for Job when God speaks to him out of the whirlwind and calls him to account in terms of his creatureliness. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” The point is straightforward. We cannot make God answerable to us. We have to be answerable to God. The struggle is to see what his lessons for us are even in the times of hardship and suffering.
“All God’s children got troubles,” the old spiritual puts it. But how we think about those troubles is the critical question. It is not the Comforters but Job himself who best helps us here by virtue of his willingness to struggle to understand. He is answered by being recalled to the majesty and the truth of the transcendent God. In the motions of God’s love we find the redemption of our wounded and broken humanity. In Christ Jesus and in his sufferings we glimpse the glory of our redemption, however great our troubles may seem to be.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVIII, 2011
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