A Surprising Family of Faith: Job, the Afflicted

Job 13:1-15
August 4, 2019
Matt Goodale

We enter today’s story at an awkward place. We enter in the middle of a heated argument between Job and his friends. Now I’m sure all of us have had that uncomfortable moment when you walk into the middle of someone else’s conversation and you realize you’ve made a grave mistake; but you’ve already inserted yourself into the conversation, and so to leave would be even more awkward and uncomfortable. Well, that’s the predicament we find ourselves in today. We’ve walked right into the middle of the conversation, and it’s a messy one. We enter in the middle of a monologue by Job, explaining what he intends to do.

Job has a complaint to file with God. Actually, complaint might be an understatement. Job, a man from the land of Uz, had it all. He was blessed with seven sons and three daughters – both numbers of perfection in Jewish thought. He possessed 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 female donkeys and very many servants, so that he was the greatest of all the people in the east. Not only was Job prosperous, but he was upright and blameless, one who feared God and turned away from evil. 

And then one day Job’s perfect life comes to a perfect end: written almost as a tragic comedy, Job is reclining one day when a messenger comes to him with word that a foreign tribe has infiltrated Job’s servant quarters and slaughtered all his servants; while this messenger is yet speaking another messenger comes to tell Job that the fire of God fell from heaven and burned up all his sheep; while that messenger is still speaking another comes and says that another foreign tribe has made a raid on the camels and stolen them, striking down the rest of the servants; finally another messenger arrives while the previous one is still speaking to alert Job that the house his sons and daughters have all been dining together in has been blown over by a great wind, killing all his children. If this wasn’t enough, to add insult to injury, Job is afflicted with sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head; they are so painful and bothersome that he must scrape himself with a piece of broken pottery. All of this in the first 30 verses of the story; the author wastes no time getting down to business.

Then enter Job’s friends, stage right. Job has three friends come to visit him because they’ve heard of his misery: Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar – they sound like good names for a pet goldfish. Job’s friends play the role of good companions as they sit silently with Job in his suffering for a week. And then they have to go and open their big mouths. Job’s friends want to get to the bottom of Job’s suffering; they want to know the root cause, because they all know that God wouldn’t dare afflict someone unless they had done something to deserve it. That is just the way the world works. God blesses those who do good, and God curses those who sin. Plain and simple; everyone knows that. 35 of the 42 chapters in this book are comprised of monologues as Job and his friends argue back and forth about the cause of Job’s suffering.

Eliphaz is the first to break the silence as he slithers up to Job who is sitting in a heap of ashes, covered in sores, head downcast. Eliphaz is described by biblical commentator Thomas Long as “the embodiment of a mushy brand of self-serving piety.” “Job, will it bother you if I speak,” Eliphaz oozes in his first line right before attempting to shame Job for his suffering and questioning of God. “You have been seduced by sin,” Eliphaz croons. “You are lucky God would scold you rather than just smite you.” “If I were you, I would pray and make peace with God. You’ll be sorry if you don’t.” “If you do, everything you do will succeed; your life will be all light and butterflies.” 

Eliphaz is not able to take Job’s suffering seriously. Job’s suffering is not an opportunity for empathy, but an opportunity to spout his own religious slogans and platitudes to stroke his own ego and reassure his own view of a God who must’ve had good reason to punish Job. Eliphaz does not have faith; he has a religious machine; prayer is a bargaining chip, a means to gain success and avoid suffering. Eliphaz is unable to take Job’s suffering seriously.

Job’s other companions, Bildad and Zophar, are described by Thomas Long as religious authoritarians. “They have bumper stickers on their cars that read, ‘God said, I believe it, and that settles it.’” (Long). They can sniff out human sin from a mile away. They are convinced that horrors and tragedies like AIDS and earthquakes are well-deserved punishments for sin. They are glad that God deigns to punish such cesspools of iniquity. Bildad tells Job that his children must have sinned against God, so God punished them rightly. If Job is as good a man as he claims to be – which Bildad surely does not believe he is—then he should repent and pray to God for mercy. Bildad and Zophar are unable to take Job’s suffering seriously. They look past it and try to peer into the soul of the man they are sure has done something to bring this suffering upon himself.

And this is where we have awkwardly entered the conversation. Poor Job sits alone in an ash heap, covered in sores, forced to defend himself against accusations from people who should’ve been his friends, because they are convinced that he has surely done something to deserve such suffering. But his friends are too uncomfortable with Job’s suffering; they need to fix it, make it go away. They need to explain Job’s suffering away so that it fits neatly into their ordered boxes of how the world is supposed to work. They are too troubled by the idea of a God who allows random suffering to fall upon the righteous and the unrighteous; that is too uncomfortable to deal with. So they reason that Job must be the cause of such suffering. He must’ve sinned. They look past Job’s pain, they explain his suffering away, and they do not take his affliction seriously.

Job doesn’t put up with his friends’ theologizing and accusations. He defends himself against his friends and he lays out his plan to bring his case against God. “Today my complaint is bitter…Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come to God’s seat! I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. He will pay attention to me and I will be acquitted.” Job has his court case in hand, ready to file it with the judge, but there’s only one problem: he can’t find the judge.  God, the judge, is seemingly nowhere to be found. “Behold, I go forward, but God is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him; on the left hand I do not behold him, and on the right hand I do not see him.”

Job cries out in the presence of his so-called friends, partly out of anger and partly out of resignation: “God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me.” God, the judge is nowhere to be found; he seems to have evaporated into mist, disappearing right when the going got tough. And almost worst of all, Job has not only been abandoned by God, but is abandoned by his friends. His friends have sided with God. Job’s friends do not take his suffering seriously. Job doesn’t know what to do with his suffering.

We can practically hear Job’s anguish in our own souls, because his cry of dereliction and feelings of abandonment are not unfamiliar to us. We know what it’s like for our suffering to not be taken seriously. We know what it’s like to suffer not only the seeming abandonment of God, but the abandonment of friends, family and the church when the going gets tough. Our suffering makes others uncomfortable. They don’t know what to do with it. They want to fix it. They want to make it go away. And so, much like Job’s friends, they start explaining; they start giving advice; they start blaming. “Well if you didn’t complain so much and focused on the bright side, then you wouldn’t be so depressed.” “Oh don’t worry, everything will be fine. God makes all things work together for good.” “Maybe if you prayed more, God would heal you.” “Just read your Bible; you’ll find peace in there.” “If you did a better job raising your son, then he wouldn’t be an alcoholic.” “If you hadn’t left your pool uncovered, then your baby wouldn’t have drowned.” “God must’ve taken your loved one because He needed another angel in heaven.” “It’s alright; it’s all part of God’s plan.”

Hearing these empty platitudes and vain religious explanations in rote succession can make some of them sound utterly ridiculous, but they sting because we’ve all heard them. Perhaps we’ve even said some of them. We don’t know what to do with other people’s suffering; it makes us uncomfortable, so we try to explain it away, we try to fix it, we try to hold it at arm’s length. 

We’re afraid of a world where suffering seems to happen at random; we prefer an ordered universe where meaningless and tragic suffering happens for a reason—that way we can avoid it, we can be assured that it won’t happen to us. We don’t know what to do with suffering, and so we explain it away. What do we do with suffering, our and others, when God is nowhere to be found? What do we do when the world does not seem to operate the way it ought to, when good people suffer and bad people prosper? These are the questions that seemed to be burning in the mind of the author of Job.

The author of Job certainly had questions about suffering, God and humanity on his brain while he wrote this epic story. This story stands as a counter-narrative to any theology that would try to explain away a person’s suffering; it’s a counter-narrative to any religion that will not take suffering seriously; it’s a narrative to show what a faithful response to suffering is. The author of Job does not tell us what to do with suffering; the author shows us what to do with suffering.

The character of Job becomes the archetype of what a faithful response to suffering is: when faced with terrible and tragic suffering, Job laments. Job builds a case against God and protests the suffering he must endure. Job does not remain silent, but weeps, screams, cries out to God. Job will not let his friends explain his suffering away, but he desires to bring his suffering to God. He will not let God off the hook. He compiles his case and would bring it to God. We hear Job’s cries: “God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me; yet I am not silenced because of the darkness.” Job will not allow his friends to silence him. He carries on with God. He chooses to engage God in his suffering, he desires to bring his suffering into contact with God, because he knows no other way.

Job participates in a biblical tradition of lament. Biblical lament is prayer. Biblical lament is to mourn the suffering that exists, to look it in the eye and really weep because of it—because we know this is not the way things were meant to be; but biblical lament is also to protest—it is to protest the existence of such suffering; it’s to bring a case to God and sometimes against God. You see, lament is also a faithful act of trust—trust in a God who hears our cries and our protests and will not leave them unanswered forever. 

Job engages God in an act of protest, an act of trust. Job does not walk away from God with his middle finger in the air. Instead, Job engages God face to face, with his middle finger right there, held up for God and the whole world to see. Job engages God in lament, bringing all of his suffering, protest and mourning to God in an act of trust that God still hears. Biblical lament takes suffering seriously.

Meanwhile, Job’s friends continue to explain his suffering away, too uncomfortable to offer any real empathy. They judge Job for his lament, for his protest of God. “That’s no way to speak to the God of the universe.” “Take back what you said before God smites you in your place.” Job’s friends throw his suffering back in his face, too religious to do anything but defend God. But in the closing chapters of this story, God appears in a whirlwind to Job and his friends. And Job is vindicated. God condemns Job’s friends. Out of the whirlwind, God speaks to Eliphaz: “My anger burns against you and your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” And in an ironic twist of fate, God tells Job that he must intervene in prayer for his friends to save them from God’s recompense.

We learn that Job’s friends are way off base; the real reason why Job is afflicted and loses everything has nothing to do with his sin or God’s sense of justice. The author tells us what really happened. The real reason Job suffers so is because God made a deal with the devil. Hmm, really? Yep, according to the author the devil saw Job’s prosperity and thought that the only reason Job worshiped God and lived righteously is because he was blessed. God wanted to prove the devil wrong, so God allowed the devil to afflict Job in any way he pleased to prove that Job would still worship God…Really? God made a deal with the devil? Now, if you thought Job’s friends’ response to his suffering was way out of touch with reality, then you might think our author had a few too many margaritas before writing this story. 

Now, before we start drawing too many conclusions and begin creating a theology around this author’s bizarre claim, we need to remember the genre of this story. It’s part epic poem; part tragic comedy; part drama. Job from Uz, a land that doesn’t actually exist, has a life that is too perfect, and is destroyed too perfectly, too hyperbolically to be taken as a completely serious description of what is possible in human life (Long).

The author it seems is not interested in giving us a serious explanation of where suffering comes from or why it exists. Instead, the point of this story seems to be to show us how ridiculous all of our explanations to suffering are. It’s anti-theodicy. This story wasn’t written to give a legitimate answer to human suffering, but to show us how to bring human suffering into contact with God. It’s a story that shows us how to be truly human in the midst of such tragic and meaningless suffering. 

To be human in the midst of suffering is not to try to explain it away; to be human in the midst of suffering is to take it seriously, to look it in the eye. To be human in the midst of suffering is to lament. It is to mourn, to protest; to allow ourselves to be affected by the suffering of others and to bring it into contact with God.

Job’s friends seek to end the conversation with their explanations and religious rationale; they are too uncomfortable with suffering to keep talking about it—they want to end the conversation. Job wants to take the conversation to God. Job’s friends want to silence Job, but Job will not remain silent. 

Once, when I was a chaplain at the psych hospital, I had a young 20-year old patient on my unit approach me with tears in his eyes. He suffered frequent schizophrenic hallucinations and delusions. He hobbled over to me—he had a limp in his step from a previous suicide attempt. Tears streaming down his face, I asked him what was wrong. He told me he was torn up inside and distraught because he could no longer talk to the birds and the squirrels. Ever since becoming medicated he had lost his supernatural ability to talk to the animals outside. He was destroyed inside because he could no longer communicate with his animal friends. 

Now, my gut reaction was to explain his suffering away; I could’ve told him that he never really could talk to the birds and the squirrels in the first place, but that he had just been delusional. I could’ve encouraged him that his current lack of supernatural abilities was a good thing because it meant his anti-psychotic meds were reorienting his brain to reality! But instead of trying to explain his suffering away, instead of viewing his experience with mental illness as a problem to be fixed, I just cried with him. I decided to take his suffering seriously and to hold his experience as sacred and precious. I shed tears with him and I told him how sorry I was that he could no longer communicate with his animal friends. I was heartbroken because he was heartbroken. I lamented with him, crying out to God for help; and secretly in my own mind, I protested his suffering, bringing a case against God for the affliction this young man had to endure. I joined him in his lament and together we asked God “why?”. They question of “why?”, while unanswerable, can unite us as we cry out to God together.

Biblical lament occupies an honored place in our sacred Scriptures; 1/3 of our psalms are laments. The act of speech, the act of giving voice to our lament is an act of hope, because it trusts we have a God who listens. We do not worship a God who silences us, but who encourages us to give voice to our suffering, to lament and in doing so God invites us to take the suffering of our world more seriously. God invites us into a holy calling to faithfully lament the suffering in our world and in our own lives. 

In our act of lament, we find true communion with God, who also prayed a prayer of lament in his dying breaths on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” More powerful words have never been spoken. God, in Jesus, adopted lament as His own response to the tragedy and horror of human suffering. We cry out to a God who knows what it is like to cry out. And so we will not be silent. Let us pray for heaven to meet earth; and let us be ready to lament that heaven is not earth. This is the holy calling we have all been given. Amen.