Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation
7 June 2020
Carved wooden figure of Job.
Probably from Germany, 1750–1850 CE.
The Wellcome Collection, London
Job 1.1-22
The question of why terrible things happen to innocent
people
is one of
the biggest challenges to faith.
Why would God allow George Floyd to be killed?
Why would
God allow a pandemic to sweep the globe.
What about
hurricanes, earthquakes, and criminals?
But it’s actually more problematic than this,
because the
innocent to whom terrible things happen
are rarely the
random victims of chance.
They are usually those who are already disproportionately
disadvantaged,
and often
Black and Minority Ethnic, or women, or in poverty,
or
disabled, or of a minority sexuality or gender,
or
suffering from poor mental health,
or some
combination of these characteristics.
Susceptibility to victimisation
correlates
to vulnerability and marginalisation.
And so, with a man killed for his colour in 21st
century America,
with
protests and riots sparking violence on streets around the world,
and with
news that the worst effects of Coronavirus
disproportionately
affect people of colour,
we come to
the book of Job.
This week is the first of a five week series,
in which we
will seek wisdom from this extended meditation
from the
Hebrew Bible on the nature of suffering before God.
The opening chapter starts with what modern theologians
call the question
of theodicy,
which is
the problem of why a good God permits evil in the world,
and it’s something people have struggled with
since the
dawn of religion.
It may even be the
question
which drove
the evolution of religion in the first place,
as people
sought answers to their experience of capricious suffering.
The Hebrew Bible offers a range of perspectives on this,
but the
dominant one is found
in what is
known as the Deuteronomic history,
this is the version of the Jewish story
articulated
in the book of Deuteronomy and those that follow it,
namely
Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings.
These books were probably first written in the 7th
century BCE,
shortly
before the time of the Babylonian exile,
and reached
their final form during the exile.
And they tell the story of Israel based on a premise, which
is this:
God has
chosen Israel to be his people,
and
has given them the law,
which they are
to keep as their response
to
God’s choosing of them.
If they obey the law God blesses them,
and if they
disobey the law disaster comes upon them.
This means that if things are going badly,
it is an
indication that they have in some way departed from God’s law.
So, for example, the invasion of the Assyrians,
the
destruction of the Temple at the hands of the Babylonians,
and
the exile that follows,
are the
result of Israel’s faithlessness.
In the Deuteronomic texts,
this
mechanism of cause-and-effect around suffering
is
understood primarily at a communal level,
with
faithfulness or faithlessness
seen
in the actions of the leaders of Israel,
and divine punishment
experienced
in
terms of war or disaster;
and we’ll come back to this issue
of national
or structural culpability later.
But when people considered the problem of personal
suffering,
it was
harder to always see
how
individual calamity
correlated
to personal faithlessness.
We find this tension reflected in the story of Jesus and the
man born blind,
when the
Pharisees asked Jesus whose sin had led to his disability
-
his own or his parents (John 9.1-3),
and the
answer Jesus gave was to reject the premise entirely,
and
to shift the focus away from the cause of the disability,
towards
the action of God in what comes next:
‘Jesus
answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned;
he was born
blind so that God's works might be revealed in him.”’
And so we come to the book of Job,
which
offers a different perspective on personal suffering,
introducing another strand of theology
to set
alongside that articulated by the Deuteronomic texts.
Job is an innocent and righteous man
who suffers
unbearably through no cause of his own.
And the book that tells his story
echoes the
approach of Jesus to the Pharisees,
by devoting relatively little space
to the
question of ‘why’ these things happen to Job,
and most of the text to the question of how Job responds
before God
to his experience
of unjust suffering.
But we will come to that part of the story over the coming
weeks.
Today, we are in the first chapter,
and today
we have before us the ‘why’ question.
And the answer, to be honest, is less than satisfactory.
But let’s
take a look anyway.
Maybe the reason Job suffers is that it’s all Satan’s fault?
Certainly, I’ve met many Christians over the years
who have
been very quick to blame Satan for all of their life’s woes.
But the problem here is that Satan in Job
isn’t the
Satan we know and love to hate
from later
Christian mythology.
I preached a whole sermon on Satan at Bloomsbury back in
2014,
so I won’t
repeat that here,
but I’ll make sure the link is in the blog
if you want
to follow that up a bit more.[1]
But let me just refresh your memories a little if you’ve
forgotten…
Satan is the Hebrew word for ‘adversary’;
and the Old
Testament only has three places
where it
depicts a personified adversary, or satan.
Both here in Job (chs 1-2) and also in the book of Zechariah
(ch. 3)
we find
visionary descriptions of the heavenly throne room,
which is
pictured in terms similar to the throne room
of
an ancient near eastern ruler
– with God
sat in the place of the king, surrounded by his advisors.
One of these advisors takes the role of ‘the satan’, or ‘the
accuser’,
and seems
to have a function similar to a prosecuting counsel
in
a contemporary courtroom
– his job
is to put the other side,
to
test the integrity and righteousness of the person on trial.
Here, the satan is not a personal name,
but a role
that one of the members of the divine court fulfils.
The third reference to satan in the Old Testament is found
in 1 Chronicles (21.1),
and it
refers to a human being who provokes David
to take a
census of Israel, against the will of God.
None of these are remotely close to the kind of ‘evil
alternative to God’
that many
seem to imagine Satan being.
So, I’m afraid, those looking to blame Satan
for Job’s
misfortune, need to look elsewhere…
But if it’s not Satan’s fault, maybe it is God’s fault after all,
I mean, it
does look a bit like God can’t resist a flutter,
as he takes
the bet that the satan lays before him,
and plays dice with Job’s life.
Virginia Woolf once said,
‘I read the
book of job last night,
I don’t
think God comes out well in it”.
And fair enough, because if our basic premise for reading
this text
is that
this is all about God torturing a man to see if he’ll break,
then this
is not a view of God that I want to subscribe to at all.
Frankly, it’s worse than the Deuteronomic view of God,
and that
was bad enough.
I think the key comes in verses 9-10
Then Satan answered the LORD,
"Does Job fear God for nothing?
Have you not put a fence around
him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work
of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.
The issue that Job is addressing
is not
fundamentally about where suffering comes from,
but whether
faith can survive suffering.
It is a conscious attempt to unpick the Deuteronomic
perspective
of a
cause-and-effect relationship between fate and faith.
What I suspect we have going on here, historically speaking,
is that the
author of the book of Job, whoever they were,
drew on an existing folk-tale
that told
of a character called Job
who was a
righteous man who suffered.
And they took this folk-tale as the starting point
for their
profound meditation on human suffering that follows.
The first chapter is just the setup, it’s not the answer,
and we
shouldn’t expect it to be the answer.
The question of where suffering comes from
is simply not
adequately explained in Job;
but it is surely significant
that the
view that suffering comes as a result of individual sin
is explicitly
rejected.
Which brings me back to the world as we experience it,
in our
time, in 2020.
As I said earlier, the suffering of the innocent
cannot
always be adequately explained by random chance.
And we, like the book of Job, will surely want to reject any
suggestion
that the victimisation
of the blameless is a result of their sin.
That would be to collude in compounding the abuse,
by blaming
the victim for their own suffering;
a tactic
favoured by abusers the world over.
But how are we to respond to the fact
that it is
the most disempowered, the most victimised,
the
most righteous,
who often
seem to suffer the most.
Why do the global poor suffer most from the effects of
climate change,
when they
have made the least contribution to its cause.
Why are those socio-economically disadvantaged as a result
of racism,
who fly and
travel less than those who are white and wealthy,
now finding
themselves at the most risk of COVID?
Why was George Floyd killed by a white policeman?
Well, here I think we can begin to draw, helpfully and
carefully,
on the
insights of the Deuteronomic perspective,
but re-reading them in the light of the book of Job.
Because structural sin is very real:
from
institutional racism, to systemic marginalisation,
to
sanctioned exploitation, to authorised disempowerment;
Like a contemporary pastiche of God in the book of Job,
our global
society instigates and perpetuates systems
where the
most righteous are required to suffer the most.
The world is not just, it is not fair,
but this is
the world that, for better and for worse,
we have
inherited.
The question before us, as before the characters in the book
of Job,
is what are
we going to do about it?
How are we going to respond to a world
where the
innocent suffer, and the righteous are victimised.
Will we shake our heads in sorrow and despair
at the unfairness of it all;
will we be like Job’s comforters,
offering empty words of empathy,
but continuing to collude in the suffering;
or will we learn to listen to Job,
to pay attention to the words of those who suffer and die.
Can we hear George Floyd telling the man on his neck that he
can’t breathe,
calling his
killer ‘sir’ as his life slipped away;
and in that hear the call to a new world,
where Job’s
righteousness is respected,
where Job’s
life is valued,
where Job helps
shape the future to be different to the past.
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