Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections

by Richard Rohr

We can’t observe the question of suffering from a distance. Unless we’ve felt it, unless we’ve been up against the wall, at a place where, frankly, God doesn’t make sense anymore, the Book of Job is probably going to be only an academic study.

A big obstacle to authentic Christianity is that so much of it has been only secondhand knowledge.

Hand-me-down Christianity can be interesting. It may allow us to answer the questions of suffering friends a little faster, but the answers will be glib, tripping off our tongue. “We

People “on the top” are slow learners, which is one of the reasons any “established” church is hard to preach to. People “on the bottom” have a symbolic head start toward truth.

If we wish to enter more deeply into this mystery of redemptive suffering, which also means somehow entering more deeply into the heart of God, we have to ask the Lord to allow us to feel, not just to know. To feel what it means to be empty, abandoned, uncared for. Not only for five minutes and not only about trivia like missing the bus, but rather, an entire life’s stance, a standing-under, so that we can “understand.” This change of position is what we mean by “conversion.” Metanoia means turning around. It’s quite different from mere education.

Many people are no longer on a journey. They have easy Christian answers before they have struggled with the question.

Faith is a unique creation of both grace and freedom. It’s a choice we become capable of by God’s love. “A mysterious meeting of two freedoms,” Gutiérrez calls it. A freedom that God is and a freedom that we must become.

Scriptural authority rests in pointing beyond itself to history, to what-is, to God. When we make an idol of the book, when we make an end of the words themselves, we get into trouble,

The point of scripture is to do the very thing that the writers of scripture did, that Moses and Abraham did: go out on the journey and there meet the Lord. And then continually come back to the word of God for confirmation and hopefully consolation.

The perennial temptation is to scapegoat rather than to carry the dark side of things. Demonizing the other makes us feel superior and “saved.”

Scapegoat

It is much easier to belong to a group than to belong to God. To belong to a group one usually has to be convinced the group is “right”; to belong to God, one always knows one is as wrong as everybody else. They are two very different journeys.

Group

An awful lot of religion is an excuse for not facing our fears and doubts. True religion is not denial but transformation.

Religion

God walks with us into our fears, to feel them, to own them, to let them teach us.

Faith

Faith cannot rest. Faith definitions grow old as we move through our lives. Periodically we have to say, “Lord, what does faith mean now?”

Faith

Although the common phrase has been “the patience of Job,” we will see in this story that Job is actually very impatient and it is, in fact, a story of God’s patience and love for Job.

Patience

We won’t move, ordinarily, until the old answers don’t work any more. Pain is an activator that forces us to choose between what is important and what is not.

Pain Change

If, at forty-two, you’re still using your fourteen-year-old answers, my reaction is that you’re not growing. And I’m afraid that’s a lot of the Christianity we have in the West. Childish more than childlike.

Spiritual formation

The enfleshment and suffering of Jesus is saying that God is not apart from the trials of humanity. God is not aloof. God is not a mere spectator. God is participating with us. God is not merely tolerating human suffering. Or healing suffering. God is participating with us in it.

With us

We look for something certain, strong, undying, infinite. Religion tells us that something is God. Great, we say, we’ll attach ourselves to this strong God. Then this God comes along and says, “Even I suffer. Even I participate in the finiteness of this world.”

With us

Jesus is. He basically turned theology upside down. He said, in effect: Who you think God is, God isn’t. You can’t know this merely by study or theology or religion, but only through painful encounters with the living God where you feel your flesh being torn off and yet you do not die. Then you experience another kind of life, another kind of freedom.

Jesus

Jeremiah 20:7 is probably the most quoted of the confessions. “You have seduced me, Yahweh, and I have let myself be seduced.” Jeremiah is upset. “You have overpowered me,” one translation goes on. Literally it is, “You have raped me.” What an image — raped by God. Jeremiah pictures himself as a helpless woman in relation to God:

When people are named from within “by God,” and the outer circumstances don’t make a great deal of difference, then grace has triumphed within them. How am I defined? Are we defined by people’s response to us each moment? If we are, we’ve built on a very subjective and sandy foundation.

If how we feel each morning depends on whether people are nice to us, if we can’t be happy without outside approval, we’re not really happy or fundamentally free. Happiness is finally an inside job.

Without ontological grounding we can only react from womb to tomb. Life becomes an eternal hall of mirrors. We can never be stable in a life of reaction, because our significance is dependent on others or on our own cleverness and self-talk.

The Book of Job proclaims from the beginning that there is no correlation between sin and suffering, between virtue and reward. That logic is hard for us to break. This book tries to break it, so that a new logos, called grace, can happen.

The difference between Job and his advisers is that they want and demand clarity and order from the universe. They want to foresee what God will do. Job wants to see God. They want to preserve a world of correct and coherent ideas. Job wants to preserve his relationship with God, even if it means his “littlement.”

Job is the suffering-man-who-should-not-be-suffering and prefigures Jesus the dying-man-who-should-not-be-dying.

most human beings carry around inside, namely, that everything has to balance out. Because we keep score, we assume God is Scorekeeper writ large.

Untested faith tends to produce a very mechanistic and impersonal spirituality. Mature faith, however, almost always has a quality of paradox and mystery about it — as if to leave room for the freedom of God.

Satan deserves special mention. The word “Satan” is used only four times in the whole Old Testament. It’s a Hebrew word which literally means “the accuser” or “the adversary.”

Clement of Rome in the second century after Christ, who says, “God has a right hand and a left hand and both of them bring about his will.” In other words, one brings good and the other evil. Modern theologians, as we know, have trouble with talk like that.

The point of all this is that the Bible is much more right-brain literature than left-brain. The Hebrew people were not subject to the sophisticated civilization we have been subject to. They had no problem with paradox, with both-and. That’s why they can bring Satan up into heaven and make him God’s counselor. His advice wasn’t very good, but he did advise. The name wasn’t yet capitalized, it just meant “adversary.”

Evil is always dualistic, always separates: body from soul, heart from head, human from divine, masculine from feminine. Whenever we separate, evil comes into the world.

Symbolism, however, always reconnects what has been thrown apart. This probably explains why healthy religion (“re-ligio”=bind back together), throughout history, gives us symbols, images of reconciliation, that heal, that put together what has been taken apart.

I personally took great comfort from being a bridge-builder, connecting people who don’t usually connect. I hoped new life would come out of that. But I learned after a while that you pay a price for being a bridge — people walk on you from both sides.

The world is afraid of reconciliation. We prefer to live in a world of black and white where we create and maintain enemies, because that keeps our own group together.***

God can set us right only by breaking us down. As long as we remain in a self-assured, righteous, left-brain position, there is no way we can be bridge-builders or reconcilers.

The story of Job also makes us aware that we have paid a heavy price for our process of individuation. The private self, cut off from sacred union, is very vulnerable, insecure, and prone to either immense guilt and shame or dangerous inflation and illusion. Job is in many ways the beginning of the modern sense of self. He lives the struggle and pays the price in both guilt and defiance. Who of us cannot identify with him? And his loneliness?

When you have real authority, you do not have to prove it. When you are truly in charge, you don’t have to go throwing your weight around.

Yahweh remains quietly on the edge, observing and trusting. When you know you’re in charge, you can wait, because you know you have the power to bring things together. It is a lesson not only in ultimate authority but also in the patience and even the humility of God.

Sometimes people who don’t know God well presume that God would use power the way they would use power: as a dominative force. They want a deus ex machina, a magician God who appears out of the wings to solve the problem. The paradox of the Book of Job is that Yahweh remains totally present in power, yet to all appearances does nothing.

Yahweh says you cannot solve the problem; you can only live the mystery. The only response to God’s faithfulness is to be faithful ourselves.

It’s disappointing that we Christians have emphasized theology so much more than spirituality. We have emphasized catechism and religious education much more than prayer.

There has been a great temptation in many modern religious movements — like some in the charismatic movement or the “gospel of success” — to have the resurrection without the cross, to enjoy part of the mystery and to avoid the pain that necessarily goes with it.

On the other side, many moralistic, stoic, or Jansenistic types suffer their crosses diligently but refuse to recognize or enjoy Christ already risen in all things.

True joy is not authentic unless achieved through pain — not under it, not to the right or left or over, but through it. That’s the only authentic Christian joy.

There is much denial in religion. The old ostrich maneuver — pretend it’s not happening. That’s not what the Lord is calling us to; it’s not the whole paschal mystery. It’s not the mystery to which Job is submitting here. “If we take happiness from God’s hand, must we not take sorrow, too? And in all his misfortune, Job uttered no sinful word” (2:10).

There’s a part of each of us that feels and speaks that sadness. Not every day, thank goodness. If we’re willing to feel and participate in the pain of the world, part of us will suffer that kind of despair. If we want to walk with Job and in solidarity with much of the world, we must allow grace to lead us there as the events of life show themselves.

Emotions ought to be allowed to run their course. Emotions are not right or wrong; they have no moral meaning.

Job draws his satisfaction from truth and justice, not from hope of future reward or fear of future punishment.