Finding God in Suffering:. Bruce G Epperly
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and ambiguous lives. For Job, theology and spirituality are intimately related. As Episcopalian spiritual guide Alan Jones once asserted, spirituality deals with the unfixable aspects of life – or what I would describe as life’s inevitabilities. Sooner or later even the most fortunate of us must make theological and personal sense of what is beyond our control, while taking responsibility for what we can change.
Once upon a time, a seeker from another religion, the Indian Prince Gautama was faced with the problem of evil. He had been sheltered from suffering until young adulthood until, over the course of three days, he observed three realities that had been hidden by the protective walls of his father’s palace: an elderly person, a sick person, and a corpse. He realized that our attitude toward life is the source of suffering, and that only a life committed to spiritual practice can liberate us from the pain and suffering brought on by the interplay of desire, change, and mortality. From his reflections, one of the world’s great wisdom traditions, Buddhism, was born.
Whether we look at the world from the vantage point of Buddha or Job, or from East or West, theological reflection invites us to ask questions about what is most important to us in life and how we can experience joy and equanimity in the midst of what Judith Viorst described as life’s necessary losses. Theological reflection reminds us that what we believe about God and ourselves is important. Our beliefs can cure or kill. They can provide comfort or traumatize. The book of Job also cautions us that theological counsel, especially by ministers and religious leaders, should fall under the guidance of the Hippocratic Oath, “first do no harm.”
Just think of the thoughtless theological speculation publically voiced by popular religious leaders, who have asserted that:
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 resulted from God’s withdrawing divine protection on the United States as a result of its immorality.
The devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans was divine punishment for the city’s tolerance of homosexuality.
The Haiti earthquake was the result of a pact with the devil to gain freedom from European rule in the 19th century.
AIDS was God’s punishment of the United States for its turning away from traditional Christian values.
While these statements claim to reflect orthodox biblical perspectives, can you imagine how these statements would be heard by the child of one of the victims of 9/11, a family who lost its home and livelihood from Katrina, or the parent of a child, dying of AIDS due to a blood transfusion? If theology begins where the pain is, then we have to ask, “How is our theology experienced by those whose lives have been devastated for no apparent reason and without warning? How would these proclamations respond to the pain of a family whose four year old has been kidnapped or diagnosed with cancer? How would a child receiving chemotherapy understand the God who has supposedly punished him with cancer?” Some people excuse or praise behaviors by God that would lead to incarceration if performed by humans!
A few weeks ago, as I switched from channel to channel looking for a bit of diversion amid the rigors of pastoral ministry during Holy Week, I came upon a proponent of the contemporary prosperity gospel, who challenged his television audience to “just plant a seed of faith and prepare for your great harvest.” Viewers were given the opportunity to plant spiritual seeds with Master Card or Visa! I couldn’t help but pause to reflect on how many seeds wither and how many assurances of prosperity and success fail to come true, despite the televangelist’s promises. In what ways do these promises end up spiritually harming vulnerable and economically insecure people? While I believe that our faith activates and opens us to new possibilities, our faith does not guarantee a particular outcome or happy ending to every story.
In light of easy and glib responses to the problem of suffering, the book of Job is a type of theological Lysol, eliminating the spiritual sepsis of certain theological explanations and pastoral responses to suffering and pain. Job challenges us, first of all, to be pastoral in responding to the needs of others and, then, to articulate explanations of suffering, worthy of the God we worship. While Job might not fully agree with Albert Einstein’s musings on the reality of chaos and suffering, he would have recognized wisdom in the questions Einstein raises:
Does God play dice?
Is the universe friendly?
The Book of Job doesn’t give us a solution to life’s sufferings, but he poses the right questions to guide us in our quest to experience God in the midst of suffering.
Reading Job
Reading Job takes you into the world of Shakespeare’s plays and Plato’s dialogues or a postmodern novel or film. The book of Job presents a variety of voices, raises numerous questions, and provides no clear resolutions to life’s problems. It’s as if they remind us that the problem of suffering can only be solved, and always tentatively, by walking through our own pain and the pain of others with an open mind and a compassionate heart.
The author of Job is a wisdom teacher, who searches for God in the joys and sorrows of daily life. There is no easily understandable divine plan, nor can we fully discern God’s purposes from our finite perspective. Job’s author is unconcerned with God’s deliverance of the Israelites from captivity or God’s continuing activity in Israel’s history. This high mark of wisdom literature is no “purpose driven” spiritual guidebook to solving the problem of evil but an “adventure of ideas,” in which no voices are excluded and no possibilities eliminated. Everything we thought was stable and all the creeds we lived by are on the table, including our beliefs about God. The author of Job recognizes that fidelity to God is not found in the recitation of instant answers but in wrestling with God, like Jacob at the stream of Jabbok in search of a blessing. Chapters three to thirty seven of the book of Job read like a theological tennis match, gaining in intensity with each volley and occasionally collapsing into chaos as if all the contestants are shouting at once.
Reading Job may not give us the “right” answers, but it steers us away from theological and spiritual platitudes that ultimately do more harm than good to those who suffer. Amid the many voices of Job, there is an underlying call to listen to the voices of suffering, our own and others, with our whole hearts. As we will see, when we silence the voices of pain or provide easy explanations, we end up minimizing peoples’ pain and blaming them for their condition. In contrast to theologies than deny or minimize the pain of others, we must, in the spirit of the healer Jesus, respond to peoples’ pain with words and acts of healing regardless of who is at fault.
Talking About God
Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim once noted that the most important theological question is not “Do you believe in God?” but “What kind of God do you believe in?” The author of Job would concur with Fretheim’s vision. Job is a God-filled book, reflecting the deep piety of its author and his main character. Like the Psalms, Job describes a faith for every season of life and shows that piety can be revealed as much in our questions as in our affirmations.
The author of Job and his protagonist are serious men. Job, the author and character, takes seriously the consequences of sin and the wondrous insecurity of life. There are few “praise the Lords” in Job, but a deep faith tempered by the realities of suffering and silence. Job never gives up on God, despite God’s apparent absence. The intensity of Job’s protest gives witness to the importance of his quest to find a vision of God worth believing. Job’s previous understandings of God have proven inadequate in light of Job’s suffering. Yesterday’s easily-recited orthodoxies no longer fit Job’s lived experience. He needs to discover a vision of God expansive enough to embrace what the philosopher Whitehead describes as the tragic beauty of life.
Over two thousand years later, German-American theologian Paul Tillich spoke of faith as involving our “ultimate concern,” what is most important to us, and asserted that the experience of doubt is essential to deep faith. Tillich believed that we can claim certainty about our experience of the Holy and its impact on our lives, while struggling with doubts about the nature and character of what is most important to us. Job would agree. He believes in God, but is in search of a God whom he can trust when life collapses around him. The orthodox God, who rewards