8 October 2006
Carolyn L Roberts
Job 1.1-5, 2.1-10

            Once upon a time..., in a galaxy long ago and far, far away..., in the conjured land of Uz, lived the Jewish Everyman named Job. Job, a pious and genuinely moral man of complete integrity, whose name is forever associated with suffering. More than a thousand years before  Harold Kushner’s book, Jewish exiles in Babylon  knew: bad things happen to good people.

            Bad things do happen to good people. Just ask Amish parents of the children gunned down in bucolic Lancaster County by that pathetic man, Charles Roberts, whose crazy mind somehow connected the killing of children with an incident, real or imagined, that was reportedly 20 years old.

            Bad things happen to good people. Just ask the parents of high school student Emily Keys, the one student of six who died from gunshot wounds in the achingly beautiful country 40 miles southwest Denver, Colorado.

            Bad things happen to good people. Just ask the survivors of any one of Indonesia’s tsunamis. Or the survivors of any one of our Gulf Coast hurricanes from Florida to Louisiana. Or the millions brutalized and displaced in Congo and Sudan. Bad things happen to good people...as well as to people who do horrible, horrible things. Rain showers on the just and the unjust. For whatever reason, as the result of natural causes or as the result of human behavior, suffering is a part of the human condition.

            It is the reality of suffering–especially suffering that is out of proportion to the character of an individual–that concerns this profound and often puzzling book. A book that finds its location in our Bible right next to the book of Psalms, those hymns of praise and anguish, searching and comfort.

            As the story begins, it is clear that Job is a blessed man. And he is profoundly grateful for his blessings, offering burnt offerings even for the birthday feasts of his sons and daughters. But after introducing Job, the scene turns to a formal assembly in heaven, and God asks a question of the Satan. This is no red devil with horns and tail, but one of the heavenly beings, whose particular function is to be God’s eyes and ears. God asks the Satan for a report: has the Satan has been doing his job? When the Satan responds that he has, God follows with a second question: has Satan paid particular attention to Job, a faithful and blameless man who chooses the path of good and not that of evil?

            This is no innocent question. It plants a seed, and  subtly raises the possibility that Job blesses God because God has blessed Job. By extension, the first question Job addresses is whether we worship God simply because we are blessed. On a far different scale, it is a question that haunts people of talent or wealth or power or position. Are their friends so readily present because they truly care about them as persons? Or are they present because they enjoy the privileges that come by befriending a person in their position?

            Ironically, the question of whether Job blesses God because God has blessed Job is not a question God can answer. Instead, the answer lies with Job–just as it lies with the friends of any person of position. And so in the poetic imagination of the writer, the very basis of Job’s relationship to God is put to the test through the medium of suffering. Will Job continue to praise God if or when all of the blessings Job has enjoyed are stripped away?

            This is no easy question to consider, because it forces us to look squarely at the issue of suffering itself.  Rabbi Harold Kushner struggles with this in his well-known book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. From the random suffering that happens because someone is in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the suffering that happens as a result of natural law...hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, to the suffering that comes because some people intentionally act to harm others, or the suffering we inflict upon ourselves, Kushner addresses the too-easy responses which try to answer the unanswerable question of why.[1]

            But that question–why me? Why her? Why anybody?–is the red herring of this whole issue. Because even if one determines a motive for human-inflicted suffering, the answer is never truly satisfactory. In one way or another, suffering is part of the human condition. What is within our control, what is within the realm of choice for us is our own response to suffering and loss, and it is this that the book of Job helps us to consider. Job’s initial response, of course, is to recognize that the hand that gives can also take away, and despite the loss of servants and cattle and all of his children, he is able to offer God praise.

            Then he is afflicted bodily, and his wife cries out with a different response–a choice that horrifies Job even as it gives voice to an option he had not previously allowed: “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die.” His wife’s words reach to the heart of Job’s soul, and our reading concludes with a level of struggle that was not there before: Job does not sin...with his lips. There is a decision now before Job that was not there in the same way before. Does he deny his integrity and enter into the deterioration of relationship with God and self that must surely follow? Or does he continue with integrity, which takes him to a deeper level than before?  It is the story of the garden of Eden once again.

            These choices are rarely played out so vividly in our midst. But over these last few days, individual members of the Amish community have shown us that relationship between faith and deep, deep integrity as they choose compassion and forgiveness in the face of great  trauma and intense personal suffering. Theirs is a powerful testimony to the strength and support we can draw from personal faith. Theirs is an equally powerful testimony to the strength and support the faith community itself can provide. Theirs is also witness to hope, that in the choices they make within the reality of their suffering, the community itself is marked by grace.

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[1] When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Harold S. Kushner (1981)–notes by Doug Muder (1997), www.gurus.com/dougdeb/Courses/bestsellers/Kushner/BTmain.htm