Job

“Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?” “Isn’t life difficult?” This is not the kind of message you would normally expect to hear in the Bible. However, it is appropriate for the situation Job finds himself in. Job is a good man. The first sentence of the Book of Job describes him as a man who was blameless and upright, who feared God and turned away from evil. He had done everything right, and he had been rewarded: he had large herds of animals, wealth, a large family, and everything else a first-millennium BC man from Uz could want.

And then, all of that changed. Satan, the adversary who wanders the world seeking the ruin of souls, tells God that Job is only righteous because of what he gets out of it. So God allows Satan to take everything away from Job: bandits kill and steal his herds of animals and the servants watching over them, and his children die when the house where they were partying collapses on them. He even loses his health: he is left covered with painful sores, with only a broken pot to scratch them with. His wife tells him to curse God and die.

This sets up one of the great Wisdom books of the Old Testament. The remainder of the book is a series of speeches raising the problem of suffering. Why do good people like Job suffer? Three friends of Job: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite appear. They each give speeches telling him that God is just, so Job must have done something wrong to deserve this punishment. They argue that all bad things are the results of our actions: we fix our actions, and everything becomes ok. Bad things only happen to you because you are a bad person.

We already know that this is not the case for Job. Job was blameless and upright. He had always feared God and turned away from evil. He defends himself from the accusations made by his friends. Following his first reply to Eliphaz, he laments his fate. This is where the text for today’s first reading comes from. “I have been assigned months of misery, and troubled nights have been allotted to me. … My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle: they come to an end without hope. Remember that my life is like the wind: I shall not see happiness again.” Job is experiencing real suffering: and he does not deserve it.

Later on in the book, Job gets even angrier and more depressed. “Know then that God has put me in the wrong, and closed his net about me. Behold, I cry out, “Violence!” but I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice. He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths…. He has kindled his wrath against me, and counts me as his adversary.” Job nevertheless keeps his faith and his fear of God, his awareness of God. He still refuses to curse God and die. In this same passage, Job says, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold and not another.” There is still some hope left.

At the end of the book, Job does confront God. God’s response is to emphasize His transcendence: He is not a man like Job but with higher power levels. He is entirely different: transcendent. God has created all things, and set them in their place: the stars, the day, the night, deer, lions, goats, Behemoth, Leviathan. God’s power and wisdom go beyond anything Job could understand. God is totally other. In Judaism, like in Islam, you cannot make art depicting God.

Job sees God, recognizes this, and humbles himself. This does not mean that Job’s friends who told him everything had been Job’s fault were right. God tells Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, who had thought they were defending God, that they had spoken wrongly, and must atone by sacrifice and asking Job to pray for them. Job is restored to everything he had and more. He lives to see his great-great-great-grandchildren.

This may not seem wholly satisfying to us. It is not really a response to the core question of why bad things happen to good people. God’s ways are mysterious, and beyond our understanding: we cannot apply human concepts to define God. That is all true, but it doesn’t address the most important question for Job: Why does he suffer?

Through the Incarnation of Christ, which Job points to when he speaks of his living redeemer, a new layer is added to the answer. God is not just wholly other. God himself: God the Son, the Word through whom all things were made, is made flesh and dwells among us. He does not just take on the appearance of man but truly becomes a sharer of our nature. This is why Christianity, unlike Judaism and Islam, does not ban art depicting God: God humbled Himself and made Himself a physical being that can be drawn. The transcendent God lowers Himself to our level. He shares in our sufferings and even suffers one of the cruelest, most painful deaths imaginable: the death on the Cross.

Through His suffering, he brings redemption to the world. Through Christ’s death, we are restored to life in Christ. In Christ, the hard wall between us and God becomes permeable. This is the Gospel that Jesus brings to the towns around the Sea of Galilee. This is the good news that is so important that St. Paul is obliged to preach it and cannot demand compensation. Around the Sea of Galilee, Jesus cures many people who are sick or possessed by demons: he begins the process of restoring life to humanity through his works, of bringing mankind back to the Living God. He preaches the fulfillment of time and calls on the people to repent and believe in the Gospel, to believe the Good News that He Is.

So, why did Job suffer? More importantly to us, why do we suffer? As Job suffers, he looks forward to a living redeemer who will allow him to see God face to face: a redeemer who will stand on Earth to bring Job before God. Through his suffering, he sees hope for Christ’s coming, even if he proclaims himself as without hope. He shares in the sufferings of Christ, because, even though Christ has not yet come, He is revealed to Job. It is only through his suffering, that Job can humble himself before God, and to see God. His suffering even allows him to share that grace with his friends and his family: Job prays for his friends who had misunderstood the meaning of Job’s suffering, and had sought to control God.

It is similar for us, but even stronger. Our Redeemer has come. Jesus Christ willingly takes up our suffering, through miraculous healings and freeing people from demons as is described in today’s Gospel, as well as by accepting the Cross and death for our sins, which is pointed to in everything Jesus did on Earth. Christ did not have to die for us. He chose to suffer for us. He chose to free us from our sins. He chose to redeem suffering, give it meaning, and transform it through the Cross.

With St. Paul, we share in Christ’s Gospel through our suffering. We join in with Christ in our sufferings. Like St. Paul, in Christ, we can become all to all: including weak to the weak, so that we can spread the good news of redemption, a good news that we do not just know, but experience because of our sufferings. Like Job, at the end of our suffering, at the end of our pilgrimage on Earth, if we have humbled ourselves before God and accepted Christ’s grace, our suffering will be fully transformed, and Christ will bring us into union with Him in heaven: all we have lost and more will be restored. We will see God our Living Redeemer as He Is.