Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 4, 2009
Job 1:1, 2:1-10
Psalm 26
Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16
Why does a good God allow bad things to happen to good people? It’s a question I have heard often in my life, but especially now that I am a priest of the church. People expect me to have an answer for that question. And all I can say is well, I do, but I don’t. Then there is the comment I also hear from people who are going through a particularly difficult time in their life. “God must be punishing me for….;” you name it.
It’s not easy to respond to people who ask questions or make comments like these. Because they seem to come out of an Old Testament understanding of God. Before Jesus comes along to show us a more accurate or up-to-date picture of God, we are inundated with stories of a God who does bad things to good people, and a God who sets out to punish people who willfully or willingly disobey him. But we forget about the other side of this God in these stories. This same God is a God of mercy and compassion who comforts and redeems his nation and people in distress. In the well-know story of Job which we heard in our Hebrew scripture today, the writer of the Book of Job sets out to explain why God allows bad things to happen to good people. We get some interesting insights about who God is, why bad things happen to this good man we call Job, and what the consequences are for his life. Job’s story is an important one for those who wrestle with this cosmic question. And it’s pretty clear that those of us who continue to ask that question today identify with Job when bad things happen to us. We often hear suffering people refer to the suffering of Job, and they pray they will have the patience of Job to get through it. So the story of Job still has relevance, even if it doesn’t have many helpful answers to our question.
It helps to know that the story of Job is only one of many stories like it which show up in other cultures of the ancient world, only because they all have a similar explanation for why bad things happen to good people like us. First of all, bad things happen TO us. Good people are not the cause of them; they are caused by a god or gods who inflict bad things on us. Or bad things happen to bad people as a punishment for some bad thing we did. So we think of ourselves as deserving the punishment if we know we have been bad, or not deserving of the punishment because we have been good. In any case we have no control and little influence over the power or powers that be to bring our pain and suffering to an end or to keep them from happening.
This is a rather simple, if not simplistic way of trying to understand why bad things happen to good people, or why punishment comes to us because we are bad, but they were the only answers ancient people could come up with to justify pain and suffering, and it didn’t matter if you believed in the capricious gods of pagan religions or the just God of Hebrew scripture. The only difference is that our Hebrew ancestors believed God had a good reason for allowing pain and suffering in their life; the capricious gods of pagans, on the other hand, caused pain and suffering to others out of their self-interest, often for their amusement.
But our theological understanding of God’s role in pain and suffering has evolved since the time of Job. For one thing, Jesus came to earth to reveal God to us in a new way, and that changed everything. To understand this change, we need to recognize where Job’s story is not so helpful to us anymore, even though Jews and Christians continue to identify with Job’s story and cling to its explanations for why God allows bad things to happen to good people, or why God punishes us for the bad things we do.
First of all, the story of Job is a story, and stories have always been a means by which human beings explain things they do not understand. Stories require characters who speak and act. Characters can be real or symbolic, but they represent the real experiences of people. Stories in Hebrew scripture are always told to help us understand who we are and who God is, and the story of Job is an attempt to understand why a good God would allow bad things to happen to good people. But, unlike many stories in Hebrew scripture, God does not CAUSE bad things to happen to Job; he ALLOWS them to happen without trying to stop them or keep them from happening. But given that God will allow things to happen then it is also true that God can keep them from happening, as well. So why doesn’t he? Why? Because in this story God is testing Job’s faithfulness. And so one of the common, but questionable notions we have of God is that when bad things happen to us God is, in some way, testing us.
At the beginning of Job’s story God has called his advisors to a meeting. Satan is one of them, and it is helpful to know that Satan gets his name from the name given to the chief advisor to the king in the Persian court, sa TAHN. Now, the Satahn has the power to challenge the king’s decisions and the authority to carry out the king’s wishes on his own terms. In Job’s story Satan holds the same power in the courts of the Lord, and God gets caught up in a wager with Satan who claims that he has the power to cause even the most faithful of God’s servants to turn against him. “Have you considered my servant, Job?” says God. “There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears me and turns away from evil.” Go after him if you like. See if you can bring him down. I bet he will persist in his integrity. Now, this is an offer Satan can’t refuse. But God makes him promise one thing; he can bring all manner of suffering and pain to Job, but Satan must spare his life.
We know what happens. Satan covers Job’s body with boils, his children die, and his wealth turns to poverty. His wife finally becomes exasperated with him. God has allowed all this to happen to you and you still remain faithful? You still have your integrity? You fool. Better that you should “curse God and die” than keep suffering these indignities. But Job keeps his integrity. He tells his wife she is the fool. “Shall we receive the good things [from God] and not the bad?” The lesson ends by telling us that despite all this horrendous pain and suffering, Job does not sin. He does not turn his back on God. Job remains in faithful relationship with God, despite his wife’s challenge, despite three friends who try to explain God’s ways to him only to curse both Job and God for their foolishness. In the end, even Job rails against God for the misery he suffers, but the story has a happy ending—Job overcomes his suffering, he gains a new family, his wealth is restored to him—but we are no closer to understanding why bad things happen to good people than we were before. God tells Job that humankind cannot know the answer to their question, “Why?” Such mysteries were established in creation; they came before humankind, and they are beyond human comprehension. End of story. And, yet, we humans still ask “why.”
So what are we to make of our own pain and suffering by reading Job’s story. Well, we can all agree with Job on one thing; we all experience the good and the bad in this life. And Job helps us accept that fact without losing our faith in God. However, we tend to believe if God causes good and bad, or allows it, then we deserve the good things and the bad things that come to us, when in fact, what comes to us in this life is not about whether we deserve them or not. What matters is how faithful we are to the God who is with us in our good times and bad times, and how open we are to his redeeming us in them.
What is not very helpful to us in this story of Job is the way the writer in portrays God as an odds-maker; a God who makes a bet with Satan that regardless of the pain and suffering he brings us we will remain faithful. But this is not the God we know. We are not God’s chess pieces in some cosmic game with Satan. And God is not so arrogant to believe that a faithful follower would never desert him; after all, he gave us the freedom to do so. These are characteristics of capricious pagan gods, not the God of Hebrew and Christian origin, and they do nothing to help us understand why a good God would allow bad things to happen to good people. In fact, we are probably asking the wrong question when we bring God into at all.
Several years ago Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote the book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He wrote it because of the pain he suffered when his young son died prematurely of a genetic disease. He admits that he felt a lot like Job at the time. Until he began to work through his own understanding of the question, “Why would a good God allow bad things to happen to good people?” You don’t even have to read the book, you can read the conclusions in the title of his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. First of all “God” is not in the title. So we can conclude that for Kushner God doesn’t cause or allow bad things to happen to anybody. It is unthinkable that a good God who created humankind for good purpose would want to do bad things to them.
Bad things happen as a result of human sin. They happen because humankind has fallen out of communion with the goodness of God’s creation. And that allows goodness to become distorted downright bad things to creep into our human condition. So sometimes our pain and suffering come from our own sins and sometimes they come from the diseased and damaged condition of the fallen world we live in. But God will never abandon his good people to their poor choices. God gladly redeems us in the bad situations of our life; he is present with us in them, and he will redeem us from them on that day when we make our transition from death to back to life with him. In the meantime God is with us, helping us move through the difficult and painful circumstances of our life until we find redemption in this life and in the world to come.
Another important distinction we can draw from the title of Rabbi Kushner’s book is the use of a different pronoun to replace the question. Kushner does not ask “Why” bad things happen to good people; his title simply states, “When” bad things happen to good people. Because they will. And then what?
I think I know “what, then.” And you do, too. Jesus revealed the answers to us by coming into the world as one of us. And even though Jesus was without sin, he experienced the consequences of sin; he endured its pain and suffering himself. Jesus showed us a lot about who God is and how God chooses to respond to our pain and suffering in this world. God neither caused Jesus’ pain and suffering, nor did he try to intervene in it. All he could do was redeem us in it. Jesus showed us that pain and suffering are not of God; pain and suffering are of this world. It is not God who punishes us for our sins; punishment for our sins comes in this world, but he will be present with us in the ways our world punishes us, and he will be present with us in our guilt and shame, as well, redeeming us in them and through them.
Near the end of Job’s story, when he is feeling abandoned and angry, at the injustice perpetrated upon him, he confronts God only to realize that he has found great meaning and value in his pain and suffering. Job is restored to a new and better life and a new and better relationship with God. And the best thing we learn from Job’s experience is that we become stronger in our broken places, and life becomes more meaningful by our compassion for the pain and suffering of others. And while we might never fully understand God’s role in such cosmic mysteries, we grow in wisdom and strength by the pain we suffer, and we grow to God.