Cries of Anguish

Long ago, before tattoos were so popular, a college friend of mind got a small tattoo on her shoulder. The tattoo was a question mark. I never asked her what existential question was on her mind, but I loved that tattoo because I believe all of us are born with burning questions about our lives. We especially want to know why. Why are we here? Why is the world the way it is? Most of us know little kids who get stuck on asking why over and over-or maybe we were those little kids.

But the deepest and most difficult why has to do with the mystery of suffering. Why do innocent people suffer? Why do bad things happen to good people?

The book of Job poses this question in all its starkness. In the opening scenes of the book, Job is stripped of almost everything that is important to him-his wealth and possessions, the lives of his sons and daughters, and finally, his health. All he has left is his faith, which he clings to, even when his wife tells him he should just curse God and die.

Job somehow holds onto his faith in the midst of his darkness. But he does curse the day he was born. In the words of a modern paraphrase of the Bible by Eugene Peterson called The Message:

"Obliterate the day I was born

Blank out the night I was conceived

Let it be a black hole in space.

May God above forget it ever happened.

Erase it from the books." **

And Job cries out to God in anguish,

"You made me like a handcrafted piece of pottery-

And now are you going to smash me to pieces?

. . . My belly is full of bitterness.

I'm up to my ears in a swamp of affliction.

I try to make the best of it, try to brave it out,

But you're too much for me,

Relentless, like a lion on the prowl." ***

Job is bewildered by his suffering-and outraged. He has done everything right-how could God let this happen? He wants God to come and answer the question that all of us ask when we suffer undeservedly: why me?

Today's reading from Job is the climax of the book-when God finally shows up and gives his answer. But before we get to that, it is worth pausing to comment on Job's friends. Several of them show up to comfort him when he has lost everything and is sitting in the dust, with sores from head to toe. They are so appalled at his suffering that for seven days, they say nothing. They just sit there with him in silence.

So far, so good. When we suffer, we want someone to bear witness to our suffering. We want to feel that we are not entirely alone because suffering makes you feel utterly alone. But after a while, his friends start offering well-intentioned but unhelpful counsel to the effect that Job must have done something wrong or God would not have afflicted him. Job's friends want the world to make sense-they want to be able to identify cause and effect. They are terrified by the thought of senseless suffering over which we have no control.

Even though the friends set out to comfort him, they end up by making him feel worse. It is not uncommon for people to be so uncomfortable around suffering that they rush to try to "fix" it, or make sense of it somehow-even if they end up blaming the sufferer. If you would only pray more, or get help, you would feel better. If you had only taken better care of yourself, you wouldn't be sick. You should be over that by now. We've all experienced that kind of well-intentioned effort at comfort that ends up making us feel worse.

Job will have none of it. This is not my fault, he says. This is God's fault, and I want God to show up and explain himself to me. Finally, after many long chapters of Job expressing his grief, despair, bewilderment and outrage, God does show up and speaks to Job out of the whirlwind: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?"

Evidently God has been paying close attention to every complaint and lament from Job, because he comes prepared with his own long list of unanswerable questions. What do you know about the origin and design of the universe? Or the mystery and beauty of life?

After God speaks at length about the mysteries of creation, Job is a changed man. But it is not the content of God's speech that heals him. It is true that God is God and we are merely finite creatures, but that is not really a satisfactory answer to the mystery of suffering. No, Job is consoled by the fact that God has come to him personally. He is finally face to face with God, and God's presence means everything to him even though his questions remain unanswered. Eugene Peterson writes in the introduction to the book of Job: "Perhaps the greatest mystery in suffering is how it can bring a person into the presence of God in a state of worship, full of wonder, love and praise." He adds that suffering does not inevitably bring us into God's presence, but it does far more often than we would expect. ****

Is this word of hope enough for those who suffer? That no matter where the path leads us, in the end it is God's presence that heals our grief? Probably not, because it is only hearsay until we experience it for ourselves. But I believe that if we cling to our faith as Job did, and speak honestly to God about all that we experience, our suffering, our anger and our despair, that we will finally find ourselves in God's presence. Just as all paths in a labyrinth finally lead to the center, so all our paths finally lead to God. And that meeting with God means everything.

** The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, by Eugene H. Peterson (Navpress, Colorado Springs, CO. 2002), p. 845.

*** Ibid. p. 857.

**** Ibid. p. 840.