October 6, 2012
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Difficult Lessons
The book of Job is challenging to most people and even moreso to those who take the Bible literally. The concept of God playing a game with Satin and people are the gamepieces doesn’t work well with my understanding of God, or with the image of Godpresented by Jesus. It would be easy tosimply dismiss the book but I prefer to open myself up to hear the story withnew ears. The story of Job is a majorshift in how people understood God and their relationship with God. The sacred texts prior to Job speak of God asjudgmental. God intervened in the livesof people by rewarding those who were obedient and visiting calamity upon thosewho were disobedient. The primary roleof the holy men and women was to interpret for the people what pleased God andwhat made God angry. Clearly, this gavethese holy persons a great deal of power.
In the story of Job, God reveals that not everything thathappens to us is either a reward or a punishment. In a world where there are violent storms andupheavals of the earth, people are going to get hurt. In a world where imperfect persons controlthe wealth and means of production, people are going to go without and beexploited. In a world where there areviruses and bacteria, people are going to get sick. In a world with nations and rulers, there aregoing to be wars. This is not God’s planfor us, it is just the way the world is because we are imperfect people. Very often when I spend time with people whohave experienced a tragedy, there comes a point when they ask, “Why did thishappen to me?” The question serves twopurposes. It explains what we did so wecan change our behavior so it never happens again and we want to know there wasa purpose to what happened so as to make the unpleasantness worthwhile. It has also been my experience this questionis not raised as often when something good has happened in one’s life. This is the foundation of Job’s retort to hiswife.
My sense of what we are to learn from Job is that whathappens to us is not dependent upon the level of favor we have found withGod. Being healthy and wealthy does notequate with being a righteous person in God’s eyes. Being poor and ill does not mean one hasangered God. Does this mean there isnothing to be learned from the difficult times of our life? No, there is much to be learned from thedifficult times in our lives, but what we can learn is more about us than it isabout God. God has created us with freewill, with wisdom, and with compassion and put us in dominion over God’screation. When we experience sufferingin our own life or in the lives of others, God expects us to respond with ourwisdom and with our compassion. We arecharged by God to work in ways to reduce the suffering caused by poverty and byillness. My experience has been thosewho have not suffered are the least prepared to respond in compassionate waysto the suffering of others. We don’thave to be poor or ill to be compassionate but knowing the weight of sufferingprovides us with the empathy to respond to others who struggle under itsweight. One of the most effective waysto move someone from feeling overwhelmed by their circumstances to feelinghopeful they can manage is to remind them of other times when they have feltoverwhelmed and have come through.
I do not believe God sends us difficulties as punishment butI do believe God uses our struggles to demonstrate the depth of our faith andthe strength we find when we trust that faith. I so often hear people saying things like God won’t send you more thanyou can handle or God brought you to it and God will bring you through it. As well-meaning as these expressions may be,they do not acknowledge the truth that sometimes we are given more than we canhandle and sometimes we arrive at places God didn’t bring us to. What I believe to be true is God will neverabandon us, God is with us even when life is more than we can manage, and Godis with us when we find us in a place where we are not equipped to gothrough. Our faith is not that life willnot be too hard or our path too difficult. Our faith is that in those times we can trust that God is with us,guiding us, holding us, and loving us even when we find it difficult to loveourselves.
Life is full of lessons, some of them more difficult thanothers. The best we can do with thoselessons is to seek to learn how to be more loving, more healing, and to be morewise in the ways we live and the way we treat others. In other words to be more Christ like. Amen.
