Who Knows?
Psalm 30, 32 • Psalm 42, 43
Job 22:1-4, Job 22:21—23:7 • Acts 13:26-43 • John 10:1-18
Job has to be one of the most studied books of the Bible. Even the columnist William Safire wrote a book on it (The First Dissident) with an eye its insights into contemporary politics. The poetic power of its forty-two chapters help explain the enduring attention, but I suspect the fascination is there mostly because Job addresses a common question every believer confronts: Why does God allow terrible things to happen to good people?
The author cheats a bit by letting us know why, in fact, God is allowing Job’s suffering. It’s what seems to me a pretty sick bet between God and Satan, with the latter wagering that he can break Job’s piety by gradually increasing the misery meter. Still, the essential question remains at the heart of this profound book.
In today’s reading Job’s friends say that, appearances aside, Job must somehow be offending God by departing from His ways. The answer is to repent. “Agree with God…; in this way good will come to you.” Job answers that he is, in fact, faithful, but God must be insufficiently aware of the fact. If only he could meet with God and plead his case, “fill my mouth with arguments,” he would set things straight, get a good answer and “understand what [God] would say to me.”
Fat chance.
Spoiler alert: God rejects not only Job’s arguments but the questions themselves. The approach of both Job and his friends is, to use a common current term, transactional, one of negotiation and tit-for-tat, and transactions assume all sides are on roughly equal footing. In the book’s extraordinary climax, God, as a voice out of a whirlwind, asks Job how he could possibly presume to understand God’s ways. Was he there at creation, when God made the leviathans, etc.?
In our Eucharistic Prayer C we praise the God that commanded the birth of galaxies, suns, and “this fragile earth, our island home.” Expecting to understand such a God is like asking an oyster to understand opera. The answer to that inevitable question (“Why does God allow…?”) seems to me another question: “How would I know?”
Our faith rests on the rock that Jesus came among us with a different assurance. Whatever else is going on in the universe, including the suffering around us, we can know that Jesus came, as the angel told Joseph, as the message from Isaiah, Immanuel, “God with us,” and we know from watching God walking through our world, that God is above all one of compassion and love. In the end, that’s all the answer we’re given. Whether it’s enough is up to us.
Written by Elliott West
Elliott teaches history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for more than twenty-five years.