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A year and two months ago a strong tornado struck the small town of Stoughton, Wisc. A neighborhood of fine, big new homes was leveled in a few moments. After a while, debris started to drift down into our yard in the town of Ottawa, 50 miles away: bits of the local newspaper paper featuring school sports, torn photographs of families as though ripped right off someone's bedroom wall, splintered pieces of furniture. Those pieces of scattered debris coming down in our yard were a startling reminder that we are all connected, and we are all vulnerable. Life is uncertain, and we belong to one another.
The book of Job could have as a subtitle, "When bad things happen to good people."
Job didn't just appear to be a good man. He was truly a good man: honest, industrious, successful, faithful, a family man. Then, in the blink of an eye, gone; all gone. In about a week this man went from top of the world to bottom of the barrel. Not because of anything he had done. But just because, stuff happens. Marauding armies, storms, disease took away everything he held dear: livestock, possessions, workforce, children, and his own health. The scripture by the end of Chapter 2 offers a pathetic picture of a hollow shell of a man, covered with running sores, scraping himself with cracked pottery, sitting on a pile of ashes. It's a stunning and swift plunge from the heights of human existence.
One of the questions the book wrestles with is: how will he handle this? Is Job's love for God dependent on good times? What if all the outward blessings were taken away? Then what? The stories pictures God saying to Satan, "Well, okay—give it a try. See what happens."
But there's another issue: Job's friends struggled with the question of why. Why was this happening to him? There must be a reason. What did he do to deserve this? They clung to the notion that it must be something he did, because good and evil are doled out according to what we have or haven't done—aren't they? Our condition is always the moral outcome of our behavior: that was the time-worn adage. Platitudes followed—lots and lots of easy answers. The friends wanted desperately to believe that the good and the bad always get what they deserve. Sometimes in the book it seems they're trying to convince themselves as much as they are Job. If calamity hits, hits even a person of exceptional virtue, it must be payback for some hidden fault.
Job wasn't buying it. I'm not perfect, he said, but nothing I might have done deserves such ferocious suffering. Sometimes, stuff just happens. Reality has a way of encroaching on our theories. In the real world, suffering strikes randomly—a lightning bolt here, a piece of flying shrapnel there, a wandering microbe here, a tsunami there; rhyme or reason—not required. A lot of other tragedies do occur because of human sin—crime, war, bad habits, a killing spree—but often enough those who suffer are not the perpetrators, they're the innocent victims. Where is this perfect moral balance sheet that Job's friends defend so forcefully? It doesn't add up.
This book came to play a role in the New Testament understanding of Jesus Christ. Job is a foreshadowing of the suffering servant—the righteous one who came to be with us and to suffer for us. Jesus, the truly good man, left the power and splendor of heaven to take on our burden, our condition—and somehow his suffering redeems, somehow his suffering means something of eternal significance for us. Like Job, Jesus was stripped of his high standing, and in the end, had nothing at all. "My God, my God: WHY?"
In his ministry it is said of Jesus that he went about doing good. Sometimes he got asked the why question—why is this one suffering, Lord. Or, How did this man sin that he should deserve this? Christ's impulse was not to philosophize about suffering, still less to assign blame, but if at all possible to relieve it, and in so doing, glorify God. And, to stand by people in their pain. What a paradigm shift that is: in Christ we know God not as the one who inflicts suffering for reasons unknown but as the one stands with us in it and who works to overcome it.
This biblical book has had enduring fascination for people through the years, because it is forever relevant. There are at this very moment large stretches of earth, and vast numbers of people, living under the conditions of Job. This week Anderson Cooper has been reporting for CNN from the Congo—scene of a civil war that has claimed 4 million lives so far, the vast majority innocent civilians. Words, even pictures, do not suffice, he said, to convey the depth of human suffering. Like all nations of sub-Saharan Africa, Congo is also in the grip of AIDS, with 650,000 AIDS orphans, of a world-wide total of 15 million. This is humanity reduced to the ash heap, scraping itself with broken shards. We know the litany of other dark places on the earth—Darfur, North Korea, Iraq, with whose destiny our own is increasingly linked, for the conflict there is costing, in addition to the lives of soldiers, $2 billion a week for the foreseeable future. How many schools built, teachers trained, is that? How many hospitals? How many roads repaired? How many diseases conquered? How many renewable fuels and new technologies invented—every week? Job is very much with us today. From the halls—and computers—of congress, to troubled congregations, to corporate board rooms, to the lush Pennsylvania fields of Amish country, the anguish of Job is never far away. Indeed, it's as close as our neighbor, a near relative, perhaps even our own heart and spirit.
There's a fascinating verse in the book of Hebrews that speaks to us of the Lordship of Jesus, and of the challenge of faith until that Lordship is fully visible. Its essence is this: "God is in control. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him." It's a remarkable statement of the Biblical paradox. We have arrived, but we're not there yet. God has completed all things in Jesus, but there is much left to do. Love is victorious in Christ—it's just that there are days when it's awfully hard to tell.
So the fulfillment of Job is to be found in the person of Jesus Christ. He turns conditions of despair into places of hope. Where others give up, and dare not even go, Christ boldly enters in. That's our vocation too, as people of faith. Job's friends deserve a little credit. Before they gave all that bad advice, they did something right. They sat with him. The Bible tells us they didn't say anything. For the first seven days, words failed them—his plight was so shocking. But, they stayed with him. When everyone else—even Job's wife—gave up on him, they stood by him. We don't always need answers, or even words. Our presence can make the difference. Henri Nouwen wrote: "Still, when we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a silent and tender hand." They sat with him; they got alongside him in his misery.
There are folks who, rather than giving up, are trying to respond. One of the darkest corners of the earth is Darfur, a province of Sudan under genocidal onslaught by the Sudanese government itself. I thought, who in their right mind would go into such a dangerous place? Then I saw a short video from Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in Tipp City, Ohio. Mike Slaughter, the pastor, is shown right there in the middle of Darfur, touring the agricultural projects that the people of the church made possible by their gifts, which totaled several hundred thousand dollars. It was a Christmas offering—and he had challenged the congregation to give an equal amount to the Darfur project as they were giving to their families for Christmas. He said, we get gifts on our own birthday—why should we get gifts on Jesus' birthday? Give Jesus the gifts on his birthday—and he asks for gifts to the neediest of earth.
Too early to be thinking about Christmas? Maybe not. But Mike Slaughter said people asked him how he could go into such a dangerous place. Wasn't he afraid of getting killed? He told them, "Oh, I'm going to die anyway. So I just try to do what the Lord wants me to." And there are people, famous and not so famous, who are refusing to desert the people of Africa, the hungry, the AIDS sufferers, the orphans. And the shocking attack on the Amish school—unspeakably bad—but what a witness to that faith: The Associated Press reported that an Amish neighbor comforted the shooter's wife and three children just hours after the incident and extended forgiveness to them. It takes the breath away to encounter that kind of response in the face of such a trauma. Can we, in our normally less dramatic lives, seek to demonstrate hope and forgiveness to those around us who are going through the trials of Job?
God has subjected all things, though we do not yet see it, says the scripture. The most important part is next: BUT WE DO SEE JESUS. When things are falling apart, when no outward comfort remains: we see Jesus. He's the center. He's our hope. He has promised, Lo, I am with you always. When we can't see any way forward, or any way out, we can see Jesus. Hold onto that. You might not think you need it right now. But you will, someday. That's certain. Cling to that verse as to life itself, so you'll have it when the time comes. "Just now, we don't see everything subject to him. But we do see Jesus." |
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