1 + 1 + 1 =2? Squaring a loving God with the reality of injustice

As many of you know, my "day job" is with a health regulatory body, and it was there some years ago that a contract employee amusingly told our department director, "Listen, I can get it done fast, cheap or well. You can have two out of those three, but you can’t have all three."

After doing some figuring in my head, I realized she was likely correct. If you want the job done fast and well, it won’t come cheap. If you want it done cheap and fast, it won’t be her best work. And so on. It’s pretty impossible to make all three of those things square.

The Book of Job, excerpts of which we have been reading in our lessons over the course of October, similarly wrestles with three statements that cannot be fully reconciled.

Job is a good.

God is good.

God is all powerful.

Each statement on its own has the ring of truth to it. But they don’t add up, and the fact that they don’t add up - in this story as in so many others, real or imagined - has been the cause of anguished questioning for millennia. If God is all powerful, and Job is a good man, can a God who empowers Satan to unleash all these afflictions on Job really be considered good? Or perhaps God is all powerful, and also good, which perhaps means Job somehow invited all this wrath upon him by his conduct. Or both God and Job are good, and God isn’t, in fact, as powerful as we like to think.

This foundational conundrum was the focus of the 1981 bestseller, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. It was written by Rabbi Harold Kushner, who as a teenager had learned of the horrors of the Holocaust and become gripped by trying to square this rampant, unchecked evil with the notion of a loving Creator. He finally felt ready to write the book after he suffered his own personal tragedy, the loss of his son at age 14 to a rare disease.

Rabbi Kushner returned to the study of theodicy, or why a loving God permits evil in the world, in a later work called The Book of Job: When Bad Things Happened to a Good Person, and it is one of the books I have turned to these past few weeks.

Rabbi Kushner, along with other scholars, explains that the biblical Book of Job is actually two stories sandwiched together. There is what he calls the Fable of Job, a very old tale that is not specifically Hebrew in origin, but that circulated in various forms in ancient cultures. The Fable of Job is told in the first and second chapter of the biblical book, and then jumps to the latter part of the 42nd chapter, most of which we heard this morning. In the fable, God permits Satan to test Job’s faith through various trials — the loss of Job’s health, children, cattle and fortune — but Job refuses to turn away from God and as a reward God replenishes his bounty and then some.

But someone along the line looked at the fable and said, nope, that doesn’t fit with the life I know. This unknown author or authors wrote the Poem of Job, which we now find sandwiched into the Fable of Job, in chapters 3 through the beginning of 42. The language used in the poem is rich and poetic, and some of its words are found nowhere else in the Bible. It faces square on the fact that good people are often given burdens they don’t deserve, and that the seeming injustice of this cannot be explained away.

It faces the notion that none of us can count on our humblest of prayers or most faithful of acts to restore our good fortune.

The poem wrestles with the very human questions and responses we have to unexplainable tragedies. People have often used the expression "the patience of Job" when talking about someone who is particularly unwavering or stoic, but they are thinking about the Job in the Fable. The poem of Job, in contrast, begins with Job roundly cursing the day he was born. His friends, who previously had been respectfully silent in the face of his suffering, now take turns trying to convince him that he must have done something wrong for God to be so afflicting him. They have decided that if God is good, and God is all powerful, then it figures that Job cannot be good. Perhaps we hear echoes of this argument when, sadly, we sometimes hear of Christians telling their suffering friends that if their cancer isn’t cured, or their child is still on drugs, or their promotion hasn’t come through yet, then it must mean they just aren’t praying hard enough.

Job keeps protesting his innocence. If, as his friends suggest, he is guilty of wrongdoing, why is God letting so many other, far more bad, people flourish? "When I think of it, I am dismayed," says Job. "And shuddering seizes my flesh. Why do the wicked live on, reach old age, and grow mighty in power? … Their houses are safe from fear, and no rod of God is upon them." (21: 7, 9)

The arguments continue, Job wants to reason with God, but cannot find God anywhere. "If I go forward, he is not there," Job says, "or backward, I cannot perceive him. On the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him" (23:8-9).

Does that feel familiar? I imagine that most or all of us have walked down a dark road of suffering that is compounded by the sense that God is just nowhere to be found. It is a very hard road to walk. When the sun is shining, we are confident that God will be at our side in the hard times. When those hard times come, we are understandably alarmed if instead all we feel is divine absence.

The Poem of Job does not give us answers; its message is that we are not to expect them. God’s role in human suffering is not within our power to fully understand.

What is in our power is to decide how we will respond to injustice, suffering, evil and what may sometimes feel like God’s indifference to it all. The response we choose creates our reality. It determines how we walk in this world, what we hope for in the world beyond it, and where we decide to look for meaning, courage and comfort.

Some people choose to keep God at the centre of their life, even if it means wrestling with hard questions like if God made the world, and God loves the world, why indeed is evil allowed to flourish?

Other people feel that God has broken their heart just too many times. They step away from belief in a loving deity, because the suffering they have experienced or witnessed, small-scale or large, seems entirely incompatible with a just, merciful God, and to try to reconcile the two creates an unbearable cognitive dissonance. I think of the soldiers coming back from World War One, so many of whom had their faith crushed by the horrors of those four years.

For myself, I imagine that taking God out of the equation might make some of the math simpler, but I suspect it would make my life feel flat and fragile, somewhat two-dimensional in both good times and bad.

Like most of you, I suspect, when bad things happen in my own life or the life of others, I don’t tend to rail at God, but turn to God. And, yes: God often remains silent. But let’s read about those friends in the Fable of Job, in the second chapter of the book of Job:

Now when Job’s three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home. They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.

This, to me, is a far truer version of friendship than the one we see in the Poem of Job, when the friends wax forth with their theories and reasons about the cause of Job’s trials. When we are in the midst of pain, do we really want theories, or rationales or reasons? In truth, when people offer them, we sometimes feel like bopping them on the nose. Yes, we may cry out to God for answers, but we might want to bop even God on the nose if God materialized in front of us with answers we aren’t ready to hear. So the next time we perceive God as absent during a tough time, perhaps instead we can think of God as those friends, sitting for seven days and seven nights in steadfast, sorrowful, silence.

The word "passion" comes from the Latin word "patior," meaning to suffer; hence, we talk  about the crucifixion as the passion of Christ. The word com-passion literally means to be with someone who is suffering. A compassionate God does not promise to remove suffering, or to make sense of suffering, but to suffer alongside us.

As followers of Christ - as Christianoi, or "little Christs," - we are called to be a compassionate people. We are not called to explain why evil or injustice may flourish, but to stop it where we can and to stand with its victims when we can’t. It not a small thing to help someone carry their grief. We all know how hard it can be to sit, bereft of words, feeling helpless when when we can’t fix someone’s problem or heal someone’s heart. But in those first terrible days, what Job needed most from his friends was simply their quiet presence.

I notice, too, that Job’s friends gave way to their own grief,  weeping and tearing their robes, when they were still at a distance from Job, not when they came through his front door. They didn’t want their own distress to be at the forefront of their meeting with him; that would just give Job another burden to carry. Keeping ourselves and our feelings out of the very centre of things when a friend is grieving or struggling can also be a skill that takes some learning.

At the end of the Fable of Job, when Job’s fortunes began to be restored, everyone who knew him came to express their sympathy for what he had gone through. Each of them brought the gift of money and a gold ring. In this story God uses people to participate in the restoration of Job’s fortunes, just as God called on the community to help restore the life of Lazarus by unwrapping the binding of his grave clothes. At times compassion demands our silence; at times it calls us to action. Sometimes God simply abides with us, sometimes God moves mountains for us. Both are acts of love.

I hope that St. Clement’s is a place where we can become even more practised at living a compassionate life. I know you to be big-hearted people of both prayer and action, both listeners and do-ers. And when you are accustomed to being a big-hearted do-er, it can sometimes be hard to put up your hand when you’re the one who needs help or support at a wearisome time. If that’s you, please consider this your encouragement to learn when it’s time to take care of yourself, and to invite compassionate prayers and acts from others.

Children’s television entertainer Mr. Rogers famously said: When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”  It is in those helpers that we see the active presence of God amidst grief and injustice. We don’t know why bad things happen to good people; we just know that that they do. So may we all seek to be a blessing wherever one is needed, and may we all know ourselves held in God’s unrelenting love whenever we need it most. Amen.

Image from the painting "Job," artist Leon Bonnat 1880