Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections

by Richard Rohr

Eventually we called faith, hope, and charity the “theological virtues” because they were a participation in the very life of God (who God is) as compared to other virtues which were practiced, imitated, and developed qualities. Hope here is “uncreated” because it’s a communion with the one who is hope instead of the human creation of hopeful circumstances. These are two different realities, as every believer eventually discovers.

It would be much truer to say we are brought to God by our weakness and brokenness — exactly the opposite of what most people think. It takes most of our lifetimes, even with grace, to accept such a paradox. Grace seems to create the very emptiness that grace alone can fill. “For it is in weakness that power reaches perfection . . . it is when I am weak that I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9–10).

To this day, many people equate “religious answers” with “faith.” But faith does not mean having answers; it means being willing to live without answers. Cultural faith and civil religion tend to define faith poorly and narrowly as having certitudes and being able to hold religious formulas. Such common religion is often an excuse for not having faith. Strange, isn’t it? Faith is having the security to be insecure, the security to live in another identity than our own and to find our value and significance in that larger union.

Every movement toward union will be experienced as a loss of self-importance and a loss of control. No wonder that faith is so rare and we substitute it with nice religion.

Job is saying he doesn’t think morality matters because God isn’t moral either. Whether you’re good or bad, there is no equation. That’s a point many people get to. Maybe they won’t say it up in their heads, but they feel it down in the gut. And, of course, they are right. Life is not just. We’re really not doing our young a favor if we paint for them a world in which fairness can be demanded or even expected. The poor and the outcasts seem to know this much earlier. That’s their head start on the Gospel: Life itself has given them an understanding and acceptance of the essentially tragic nature of human life. Most of us have to learn it the hard way.

There’s no real equality despite the promises of the French and American revolutions. It seems the real revolution, which we still have trouble accepting, is the Gospel, which tells us to work for justice for others but not to demand, expect, or even need it for ourselves. That is extraordinary freedom.

When you preach the Gospel to sated and satisfied people, they don’t understand it. They distort and misuse it for their own ego-centered purposes, their own control purposes, their own religious purposes, whatever their intent may be. They have not yet been initiated into giving up control, which we now find is at the heart of all traditional initiation rites. The Gospel, in short, has to be preached to people like Job. They are the only ones who can hear it and not rearrange it for their own purposes. The Jobs of history have been initiated into the essential human paradox: We learn by letting go; we grow by giving up.

Many who go diligently to church, who read the Bible, sing hymns, are still terribly lost in hatreds and fears. They have answers but they have not struggled with the questions. And what is the question? Or questions? Job’s questions might well be our own: Is God for us or against us? Is God loving? Is it an indifferent universe? A benevolent universe? Or a toxic and dangerous one? When we struggle with these questions, we share Job’s struggle — and perhaps the inner struggle of everyman and everywoman. The one answer that seems to be clear in this book is that our distance from God is somehow also the distance we keep from our pain.

The more deeply we enter into the mystery of Christ, the thinner becomes the line between joy and suffering, according to people who have gone down that road.

Even today, it is hard to find the Christ who stands apart from culture and easy to find the Christ who identifies with what everybody else is into: law and order and scapegoating of the problem people. We use the image of Jesus to hold together a disintegrating culture instead of following Jesus to build a new one based on justice and truth.

If we are truly champions of the cross, we probably live a very simple and poor life. Yet, how many Christians signed with the cross are living such simple lives? How many churchgoers are materialists and militarists without even blushing? This is where the difference between the name and the reality leaps out at us. “It is not those who say, ‘Lord, Lord’ . . . but those who do the will of God” (Matt. 7:21).

The Bible has become another of those symbols people hide behind when looking for moral superiority or personal control. “Do you believe in the Bible?” the slogan is shouted in our faces. The Bible has become one of the primary indices by which people check out our orthodoxy, in the same way Catholics used to do in regard to the pope or Mary or the Eucharist. These become symbols, flags that we wave, and people check to see if we have the right flag. Flags and rituals get in the way sometimes. The important thing, however, is the reality the symbol is supposed to represent.

Many good people are taught that to trust and believe in God means to trust and believe in things extrinsic to oneself. Fortunately, when we do find healthy inner authority it is also in religious people who are calmly but utterly grounded in God.

Both church and Bible are fonts of truth and ought to be profoundly respected, but they are one step removed from the inner testimony of the Spirit. We can’t avoid that responsibility.

By our twentieth-century Roman Catholic definition of sanctity, of who should get canonized, I can’t think of a single person in this book who would make it through the canonization process. Not even Jesus. The Bible, like life itself, is a “text in travail” —revealing the tension and problem and not simply avoiding it by presenting sanitized models.

There is nothing terrible about making mistakes. The only bad thing is when we don’t grow up because of them. When we’re still making the same mistakes at fifty that we made at twenty — yeah, that’s stupid. We all do it, of course, because we’re all a little stupid. But more than anything else, we do it because of a lack of inner authority, which allows us to observe, name, and own the patterns we see. Mere trust in outer authority almost always creates fear-based and shame-based people, who easily resort to subterfuge or denial.

God is best able to reform religion and society from a place of oppression and persecution, a pattern starting with the Exodus.

Job is contemplating death, lamenting that things are all passing away, and reflecting, “Well, Lord, I know there is a part of you that seems to be angry, and I don’t understand that. But I know there’s another part of you that loves me.” So Job is appealing to that second part. He suggests, as we might with our more evolved lingo, “Can’t you just put me away in Limbo for a while? Put me away until you get back in touch with that better part of yourself and you’re not mad at me anymore.”

When we are feeling overwhelmed by our guilt, on those days we feel inadequate, when our littleness and brokenness seem too much to live with, when we may even get to hating ourselves, that is when we should get in touch with the humble Job within all of us.

When you are feeling abandoned, pick up Job’s book and speak Job’s prayers and know they have been prayed before and that we are part of a great history and we are all in this together. There are no feelings we feel that others have not felt before. At such times, in our prayer, we unite ourselves in solidarity with others who suffer and who have suffered before us. Often, that’s the only way out of self-pity and a preoccupation with our own feelings. We have to choose solidarity and the “communion of the saints.” There, we realize we are carrying the weight of our brothers and sisters, and they are carrying ours.

We are psychologically preoccupied with our own hurts, insecurities, and fears, which is the price we pay for the overindividuated self. The burden of protecting this fragile self now rests totally on us as individuals. Without God-union we have a very insubstantial self that is always needy, and finally untrue.

Until we are grounded in a transcendent reference point, we are almost totally subject to others’ evaluation of us. We cannot live from within by ourselves, at least not for very long.

Only those who are feeling empty are predisposed to understand the Gospel. They have an “epistemological privilege” according to the theology of mission.

The church in the West has looked at the Gospel and history from that superior position for more than sixteen hundred years. We became, not the church of the poor; at our best we were for the poor from our privileged position of the rich. We became a middle-class and even upper middle-class church that largely avoids much that Jesus preached about riches and wealth. The church saw no problem, as most Christians see no problem today, with being fabulously wealthy, amassing huge securities and insurance and properties, and still believing that we trust in God. That would have been inconceivable to early believers. But the early Christian spirit is equally inconceivable to most Catholics in the West today. We have adhered to our present view from above for so long, we don’t even read the Gospels correctly any more. If some passages don’t fit our culture and lifestyle, we dismiss them. Hard sayings of Jesus — for example, the reference to a camel going through the eye of a needle to indicate how hard it is for the rich to enter heaven — are written off as metaphors and literary exaggeration, and ignored.

It’s futile to blame individuals. Rather, the cultural movement of history eased us into today’s predicament. If we are to blame anybody, it should be old Constantine, the “ascending” culture of the West, the dominant philosophy of linear progress, the false promises of both communism and capitalism.

Christianity operates best from a marginal and minority position. Some people pride themselves in being the moral majority, but Jesus was never a part of a moral majority. The Gospel can be preached most truthfully from the minority position. From there, we can’t be bought off. We won’t have to sell out because we have no one to whom we must prove ourselves, no one we must please. Maybe we need to be the “immoral minority”!

For sixteen hundred years we have had the church for the poor. It was always thought grand and glorious that our saints and religious founders would go and help the poor. We thank God for Mother Teresa. But most of the rest of us felt entitled to live undisturbed in our established and wealthy private worlds.

Every real saint eventually left the system of possessions, privilege, and power, so that he or she could hear and speak the truth. In doing so, they were joining Jonah in the whale, Jeremiah in the cistern, Job on the dunghill, and Jesus on the cross. It seems to be the way.

In the spiritual realm there is no such thing as triumph by force, even if the force is elegantly disguised by means of shame, social pressure, Vatican mandate, or political intrigue. Domination is domination and not growth, grace, or integration.

This is still consistent with our belief today: the Lord as the only fitting avenger of the people. At least in our better moments, we leave vengeance and justice in God’s hands. All through this book Job has been seeking someone to defend him, to plead his case. Just a few verses back, he dared to think of God as his enemy. Now, he breaks through in this magnificent leap of faith and says, in effect, “Still I believe. I call upon God against himself. Even though God is my enemy, I also believe God will be my redeemer.” He finds truth in both sides of God and does not experience any contradiction. He bases his faith and trust on that redeemer God who will take his side, who will stand close to him, whom his eyes will look upon. For Christians it is easy to see how Jesus filled this role. Some have suggested that these verses were the original conclusion of the book. We do not know how further material was added to these manuscripts over the ages. The later chapters are very muddled, and scholars don’t know for sure how to put the scribbled manuscripts together. The book was probably written in many stages, successive authors adding their contributions.

Many good Christians, alas, are still there, living by the merit/demerit system of high school days. We apply our human systems to the magnificent work of God. Most people still work out of the rational model that we get what we deserve. It makes sense. But it leaves no room for mercy, does not reckon with the real meaning of God’s love, which is not a merit and demerit system.

Many of us spend our lives as workaholics for God, hoping it will save our souls and make us worthy of God’s kingdom, while God keeps breaking in to tell us worthiness is not the issue, but only relationship. The underlying problem is that, under such circumstances, we’re never going to love God. We can’t love God because we won’t like such a God. We’re not disposed to like anybody who holds us to a merit/demerit system. As long as our parents held us at that level, we did not love them. We put up with them, had some filial affection for them, but real love cannot emerge until we move beyond merit and demerit. Why would you love God with your whole heart and soul and strength, which is the first and essential commandment (Mark 12:28–34), unless and until you know that God has first loved you in just that way?

As long as we deal with effects or symptoms, as long as we apply Band-Aids, people regard us as religious. If we feed the hungry, that’s a religious thing to do. If we give the poor money, if we heal people, if we offer them consolation, people are happy to regard us as pious and Christian and charitable. But once we start dealing with causes, people call us political.

It’s a common ploy even to this day. You’re two sentences into a conversation and they pull out a scripture quote, “God said. . . .” What they’re saying is, your version of truth doesn’t mean anything to us because we have this big trump card called God. The assumption is that they possess God, have God in their pocket, and thus their interpretation of this text or that truth is absolutely correct and there’s no point in continuing. This is a common occurrence. People who do it are saying they don’t need you, they don’t care about you, they’ve got their answers already, they’ve got their salvation without you. Because they’ve got God.

What we desire enough, we are likely to get. The all-important thing is to desire, and to desire deeply. What we desire is what we will become. What we have already desired is who we are right now. We must ask God to fill us with right desire. It’s our profound and long-lasting desires that will finally explain our lives, and will soon explain Job’s.

Poor persons may themselves be to blame for their poverty to some degree, but one problem of our sophisticated age is the need to ask that question at all — who is at fault? That should not be the primary question. As Dorothy Day once wisely said, “What the Gospel forever takes away from Christians is the right to judge between the worthy and the unworthy poor.” When we sit in judgment like that, we stand aloof and apart. That’s precisely the position the Gospel does not allow a Christian — as if we could critique who is worthy and who is unworthy. Our criteria will always be cultural and too often self-interested. A person might be at fault to some degree, but poverty is primarily a psychological state to which one surrenders after repeatedly being put down. It’s a state of oppression. After continually being assaulted by negative voices from within or without, finally we surrender to them. We can’t stand against them. Soon we are so disadvantaged that we can’t even recognize, much less take advantage of, the opportunities offered to us. The negative voices of cultural shame soon become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Victim behavior is predictable. It is deadly. And it characterizes much, if not most, of the human race in one form or another. We may all be thinking of some group other than ourselves, but every group finds itself in that state of oppression in relation to some other group.

I don’t know if there is an answer on this earth, a secret to overcome this state of universal seeking of power. The closest approach to an answer is the Gospel: a worldview based on simplicity, nonviolence, and nonidolatry of all things except God. That puts us outside every system of control and power. It seems that cultural structures are naturally skewed in favor of power, prestige, and possessions. That seems to be human culture at its worst, but also human culture in its universal state. Without grace, culture (“the world”) seems inevitably to follow the other universal law — gravity.

Eventually, oppressed people form a whole subculture. These subcultures take different forms in different ages. They are controlled by predictable factors: fear, anger, guilt, prejudice, superstition, compulsive behavior, inhibitions, fantasies, fatalism, conformity, hopelessness, sexual acting out, passivity, and more.

These are the ways the spirit surrenders. It surrenders in order to survive, to make some sense out of this world when all its power has been taken away. The outsider, who is not oppressed, can’t understand. The oppressed become the screen on which we project our own condition. Every group projects its fear and self-hatred onto another racial or religious or economic group. Whatever we can’t deal with in ourselves, we are sure to find it characteristic of others, and hate it there. The Jewish people had a perfect symbol for it, the scapegoat: “And the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place” (Lev. 16:22).

Until we know ourselves and until we are grounded in true transcendence, we are intrinsically insecure and in search of someone to blame for our own unhappiness. Without God or with false gods, it seems humanity is inherently resentful and violent.

Because we are so afraid of nonsuccess, of being a refugee, not having a home, afraid of the opposite masculine or feminine parts of our own souls, we marginalize whoever represents those parts of our soul that we deny. We hate in them what we are afraid to admit in ourselves. We keep ourselves at a distance from handicapped people because every one of us fears our own handicaps. We separate ourselves from retarded people. They’re a threat to our supposedly rational world. We surround ourselves, unfortunately, with clones of ourselves.

Rather, the primary reason to preach the Gospel to the poor, and why the church has to get back in touch with the little ones and the marginalized, is so that the church itself can be converted; so that the church itself can know again what the questions are; so that the church itself can recover compassion; so that the church itself can discover what God is really like. So that the church can again meet Jesus. God is not asking nor answering the law-and-order questions that culture desires from religion. Jesus never speaks about so-called “family values” or institutional loyalty, which are so often misused by people who want order and control. God is instead asking us to discover our own souls, to save the church and to save the Gospel from any further distortion of the Gospel, to be in solidarity with weakness and truth, to surround ourselves with those sacraments of brokenness so we will have the courage to discover that we also are broken. The broken are no different than we are; they are only more visible sacraments of what we are trying to hide: our own lack of intelligence, our handicaps, our lack of a true home. Those are the deep Gospel truths we are afraid to face.

It seems that God has so designed and ordained his church that each group needs and liberates the others. We must give our lives to liberate the oppressed from injustice. But the oppressed and poor in turn must liberate us from our illusions and our innocence.

The “mystery of faith” we proclaim at the Eucharist is precisely the whole paradoxical process. Resurrection theology without crucifixion theology is heresy, half the truth, half the Gospel. Just as an exaggerated emphasis on the crucifixion is dangerous and destructive without a belief in resurrection: Jesus is risen and suffering now.

I now believe that it is not so much from our “sins” that God has freed us as from that sense of utter abasement and littleness that all human beings seem to feel before God.

This deserves meditation upon. I’ve read it several times over as it seems to capture my imagination to the curiosity of God’s soteriology. Jesus’s own words come to mind, “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” (John 15:15)

The punch line is in the final verse, which strongly asserts praxis over any theory or theology. It seems that immanence and transcendence come together not in the head but in behavior, not in clear principles but in right relationship: “Wisdom? It is fear of the Lord. Understanding? It is avoidance of evil” (verse 28). God, it seems, cannot really be known, but only related to. Or, as the mystics would assert, we know God by loving God, by trusting God, by placing our hope in God. It is a nonpossessive, nonobjectified way of knowing. It is always I-thou and never I-it, to use Martin Buber’s wonderfully insightful phrases. God allows us to know him only by loving him. God, in that sense, cannot be “thought.” Job has become the living icon of such “praxis.” The three advisers have correct theory but no experience, thoughts about God but no love of God. They believe in their theology; Job believes in the God of their theology. It is a big difference.

When people insist on teaching us instead of sharing with us, what they have to say will never sink very deeply. That’s the weakness of my own role as perpetual preacher. The most we teachers can do is arouse people’s curiosity, make them think, blow open their systems and stir up their minds, hearts, and souls. But the people most likely to change our hearts are those who share, the people who walk with us, who love us. Those are the people we might change our lives for.