Speaking In Suffering
Proper 22 B
As a priest in the upper eastern region of Tennessee, 30 miles from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene, I am in agreement with Job’s wife.
No doubt you have seen the devastation to Asheville, its surrounding region, and Unicoi County in East Tennessee. There is little use for reason and explanation when something like this devastates so many lives, tearing folks from their homes and loved ones, and isolating people from the basic necessities like water and food.
I am fortunate to not have any significant damage to my home or to our parish, and the people in this region are scrambling to make sure the folks in Unicoi and Buncombe Counties have the provisions they need through donations to different shelters and distribution sites. With deeply mixed feelings, I see the ways in which vulnerability as human creatures draws us toward communion with one another in self-abandoning ways. What is the “self,” after all, when every trapping that might obscure our deeper identity is washed away?
In her book, Getting Involved With God, Ellen Davis writes an insightful summary of the book of Job, and I am indebted to her for much of my reflection now. Perhaps most relevant to our current nightmare is her reflection on Job’s own response to suffering. Davis writes,
The book of Job is about human pain; it is also about theology, the work of speaking about God. In the last chapter, God takes the friends to task, saying, “You have not spoken accurately about me, as has my servant Job” (42:7). Here God is pointing obliquely to what is so remarkable about this book. It shows us a person in the sharpest imaginable pain, yet speaking accurately about God. Job gives us immeasurably more than a theology of suffering. It gives us the theology of a sufferer. In it we hear authoritative speech about God that comes from lips taut with anguish. From this book above all others in scripture we learn that the person in pain is a theologian of unique authority. The sufferer who keeps looking for God has, in the end, privileged knowledge. The one who complains to God, pleads with God, rails at God, does not let God off the hook for a minute—she is at last admitted to a mystery. She passes through a door that only pain will open, and is thus qualified to speak of God in a way that others, whom we generally call more fortunate, cannot speak.
When I say I agree with Job’s wife, I say so faced with an unimaginable amount of suffering just up the road from where I live. Job may initially reject his wife’s suggestion, but the prayers that follow this initial scene help us to see this as a more complicated matter. Job is one who is suffering, and, while he doesn’t exactly “curse God and die,” Job is not willing to let God “off the hook,” as Davis says.
We might be familiar with Job’s friends, who after sitting shiva with him, begin to offer lengthy explanations for Job’s circumstance and suffering. They are convinced that he has done something to deserve what he is receiving, and Job’s insistence on his integrity falls on deaf ears. Job’s friends are committed to a mechanical understanding of the world, one that rewards and punishes based on calculable righteousness. “People get what they deserve, and here’s how you measure it,” seems to be the brand of certainty they are peddling. Job will have none of it.
In fact, Job’s response to his wife in our reading begins what might be the turn in his own inner dialogue: “‘Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?’ In all this Job did not sin with his lips.” Davis points out that this is indicative of a shift. She writes that this is, “a cautious statement, considering that earlier we were told he did not sin at all (1:22). The ancient rabbis inferred that with this, Job’s first question, he had already begun to sin in his heart. Now for the first time, Job has named God as the Source of evil.” Job identifies God as the source of evil, here, which suggests that he is gearing up to go on the defensive, but we are also told that this is first an inner dialogue, followed by substantial silence.
Job’s response out of the silence begins his own accusation of God, which is an interesting parallel to “The Satan,” who is also like an accuser, or adversary. Job’s grief does not lead to blind acceptance of an almighty puppeteer. Rather, Job’s complaint and lamentation against God is born of his faith. Perhaps he doesn’t realize this consciously, but Job becomes our theological instructor as we learn from the sufferer what it means to insist on the covenantal relationship with God, rejecting a simple sovereign/subject relationship.
God’s affirmation of Job at the end of the book, saying that Job has spoken rightly of God, gives us divine permission and a theological language with which we might direct the experience of our suffering toward God. That is to say, Job gives us permission to speak to God, even cast blame on God, for the irrationality of suffering. Whatever God’s response to Job in the end of the book might entail, God’s affirmation of Job’s speeches to God as right speech gives us a clearer picture of what prayer can, and perhaps should, look like in the midst of grief, suffering, uncertainty, and tragedy.
The book opens with a kind of divine wager, and perhaps it sets us up to be on Job’s side in this saga. The foil from the beginning is that we are poised to begin thinking about God’s relationship with the world as transactional, while God’s concern is with love free from coercion. So, God’s revelation to Job at the end brings us to the question Davis poses, and it is one that I think is at the heart of this book: “Can you love what you cannot control?”
The call to us is to begin with our love of God and God’s love for us. From there, we can trust in the covenantal bond of that love to express every kind of grief that comes from the immense suffering we experience. Let God have it, as it were. Recently, my prayers have been in this register more often than I would like, but it is sometimes the only way to honestly express my anger, confusion, doubt, sorrow, grief, and expectation that the world should be different. And I expect the One who Created it to do something about it. So I let God have it.
I cannot control what is going on, and I cannot control how and why these things happen. I can love Creation for what it is, out of control as it may be. I can admire its immensity and respect its risks. I can love my neighbor, who I cannot control. I can identify the ways that we have failed to honor Creation’s beauty, immensity, and danger, and I can rail at God for those things I know to be unjust, tragic, devastating, and terrible. Job reminds us that all of these things can be done with confidence that God will not reject our cries, that God hears the reality of our pain, and that nothing we might throw at God can ultimately separate us from the love of God. God even affirms this expression of vulnerable trust in God’s commitment to us. Maybe, in the end, our brutal, raw honesty with God is part of what it means to love God.