Fault-Finding
By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
October 14, 2012
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
Job 23: 1-9, 16-17
In our Old Testament scripture for today, Job longs to find a place where he can present his case for a fair hearing before God.
If only I knew where to find him; if only I could go to his dwelling! I would state my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. I would find out what he would answer me, and consider what he would say. Would he oppose me with great power? No, he would not press charges against me. There an upright man could present his case before him, and I would be delivered forever from my judge.
As Gerald Janzen points out, this is a “utopian” vision, for Job’s point is that such a place is “utopia”—a word that means “nowhere.” There’s no place where he could get that fair hearing where God would see the error of His godly ways in causing Job to suffer so, and would amend them. You see, here in essence is Job’s complaint: It’s not fair. The universe is not fair. The good people often suffer and the bad people often prosper. Suffering seems to happen without any direct connection to whether somebody deserves it. His complaint is that he thought that we live in a moral universe, and it turns out apparently we don’t.
His friends, his so-called comforters—Eliphaz, Elihu, and Bildad—take the traditional line, the same line we hear a lot today. This is a moral universe. People suffer because of their sin. Suffering is a kind of punishment. That’s the kind of thinking we heard from Pat Robertson when he said that Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans because of gays or, on the other hand, the idea promoted by the Prosperity Gospel that the more faithful a Christian you are, the richer you’ll become financially. It’s the idea that the universe—and specifically the God of the universe—operates by a divinely ordained system of weights and balances and that ultimately we all get what we deserve in the balancing act of life.
Eliphaz, Elihu, and Bildad all firmly believe this to be true. Bildad and Elihu try to prove to Job conclusively that he must have sinned to deserve so great a punishment. Job has no patience with those arguments. For one thing, ultimately they make God look monstrous. For instance, if Job is being punished for his personal sins, then why did his children have to die? And as to his children, basically good kids, what kind of sin could they have committed that was so terrible that it warranted their deaths?
Often we come up with so-called “explanations” for suffering and evil that make God look cruel. An African-American pastor friend of mine, James, tells this story: the eldest matriarch of a family died and the church staged a huge outdoor funeral and wake. James says that the tradition is that anyone can get up and give a eulogy, and as he puts it, “It can go on for hours and there’s bad theology flying left and right and up and down.” A couple of dear old church ladies got up and extolled their old friend, and then said, “God took her because He needed her in heaven.” Then some folks thought it’d be cute if her three-year old grandson got to the mike to say a few words. They asked him if he loved Jesus and to their horror he said, “No. ‘Cause Jesus took grandma and I still needed her here!”
We say things like “God took her because he needed her in heaven,” or “don’t grieve because they’re in a better place,” or “God needed another angel in heaven”—or just the general observation, when disaster happens, that “There’s a reason for everything. It’s God’s will”—these kinds of statements are meant to explain away what’s difficult and dark in life, and to “justify the ways of God to man,” but actually they only make God look arbitrary and cruel.
Not only that, they are actually meant to shut people up. They’re meant to make people stop asking hard questions. It’s a way of saying, “God knows what God is doing. If you complain or grieve or ask questions, it shows you lack faith.”
All of these positions presuppose that somehow, in the great scheme of things, that God has some great moral purpose to suffering. The universe is ordered by a cosmic standard of “right and wrong.” Think of it as the universe owes us a debt. There’s a cosmic balance sheet, and things are supposed to even out. Job’s friends believe it, and Job believes the same thing, that suffering has a moral purpose in the cosmic balance sheet of life—or at least he believed it until he himself was hit with what seemed like a completely disproportionate amount of suffering. And now he’s wondering the opposite—maybe God is unjust, or uncaring, or uninformed.
Maybe God is wrong.
But The Book of Job actually raises an alternative explanation for the way the universe works. Maybe the universe doesn’t operate like a cosmic balance sheet. Maybe neither God nor life owes us anything. Maybe the universe is neither just nor unjust, neither right nor wrong. Maybe it just is. Maybe the universe is a morally neutral thing.
When God challenges Job later in the book, God compares the universe to a building he constructed, or to great mythical animals that people in those days believed roamed the lands and filled the seas. Animals and buildings can be wonderful or they can be terrible, but they aren’t moral. They just are. Maybe the universe is the same way. We make the mistake of thinking the universe, the cosmos, karma, the way that things operate, is the same as God, but it isn’t. God is loving and kind, but that doesn’t mean the universe has to be.
That’s not a satisfactory answer for the problem of suffering, I know. But the problem is that NO ANSWER IS SATISFACTORY. Nothing is going to please us. Even if we knew exactly why suffering exists, it wouldn’t give us any comfort. The Book of Job has a very different lesson for us than the one we think.
The Book of Job is challenging us not to judge. Not to judge either others or the universe by our sense of right and wrong.
Think about it. Everybody in Job is trying to figure out who is right and who is wrong. Job’s friends believe God is right and Job is wrong. Job believes he is right and suspects that God is wrong. This is the game we humans play every day—The Blame Game.
According to Genesis, the Blame Game is the very root of the human problem. Remember the name of the tree that Adam and Eve ate from? “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” We came away from that moment with the idea that we could figure out right from wrong, that we could recognize right and wrong when we saw it. It was this belief that we could discern right and wrong that alienated Human beings from one another, from nature, and from God.
Remember how, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve played “The Blame Game”? God says to them, “Did you eat of the tree that I told you not to eat of?” And Adam says, “Lord, the woman you gave me, she gave me the fruit.” See, that was a good one—he was able to blame Eve for giving him the fruit and blame God for creating her all in one swipe!
And then Eve says, “Lord, the snake told me to eat it!” And the snake looked left and right, and couldn’t find anybody to blame. But of course he’d started the whole thing by blaming it all on God, saying God was unfair for putting such a wonderful tree with such wonderful fruit in the garden in the first place. This is the Blame Game, and we play it all the time. When it comes to questions about suffering and evil, we just start playing the Blame Game at a Cosmic Scale.
The Biblical answer, especially for us Christians, is different. We are taught not to judge. This isn’t about not judging God. God doesn’t get mad at us for getting mad at Him, for demanding answers in our times of trouble and loss. As we’ll see, God respects Job for asking such questions. God isn’t threatened by our questions. In fact, a case can be made that asking such questions is how justice and fairness happen on earth. We feel something is wrong or evil or unfair, and we seek to correct it. That’s one of the ways God intends for us to respond to the unfairness of life.
But there are some things in life that just don’t resolve that way. They are unfair, and that’s that. Sometimes people are cruel. Sometimes the universe seems unjust and out to get us. After a certain point, demanding that we be treated fairly doesn’t get us anywhere. In fact, it’s alienating. The more we feel like other people, or the universe, have done us wrong, and that there’s no resolution to it, the more we become insular and self-involved. Ultimately our tendency to judge others hurts them, but it hurts us the most, because, like Job, we’ll never find, at least in this life, that cosmic court where all the people who’ve wronged us, and the universe itself, will hear our case and say, “OMG, you are so right. We have wronged you. We are sooo sorry. The restitution check is in the mail.”
That is why we are taught to forgive. People who wrong us may not apologize. We have to forgive them. The universe itself may seem cruel and unfair. We have to forgive the universe. That’s why the Lord’s Prayer teaches us to say, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Jesus taught us that because He knew that we naturally tend to imagine that life is about debts owed and debts paid, and that we imagine our sins are debts we need to pay back to the universe, and others’ sins against us are debts for which they owe us recompense. Neither is true, and to keep operating that way makes us makes us mean-spirited people who keep endless lists of the ways we’ve been wrong; and it makes God a cosmic debt collector. What we’re taught to do, instead, is what God does: forgive. Forgive the debts the universe owes us, and trust God to forgive the debts we owe the universe.
We even have to forgive God. Yes, forgive God. Am I saying God’s done something wrong? Of course not. But often we hold grudges against people for things they did that objectively weren’t wrong, and may not have been meant to hurt us, but they seemed wrong to us. And it’s the same with God. Yes, sometimes life is unfair and we get the short end of the stick. Sometimes we or people we love suffer terribly and it seems to us that God is unfair or unloving either to allow it or not to do something about it. It’s not unusual to feel that way. That kind of dissatisfaction with the status quo can be a good thing, an impetus for making positive change in the world, like the lady whose son was killed in a drunken driving accident and as a result she founded MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. That dissatisfaction with the unfairness of life can provide positive energy for positive change.
But to continue to hold a grudge against the universe, against God, is ultimately simply to deny reality. It is, ironically, a denial of life. This is the world in which we live. It has its terrors and its joys and its incredible possibilities. It is what it is. We aren’t going to find a satisfactory answer to the problem of suffering. So we forgive life the wrongs it does us—we forgive God the wrongs we believe God has done to us—because holding a grudge against cosmic reality doesn’t make the world a better place, or us better people, and it can blind us to the wonders of the world around us and the blessings God bestows on us.
If that was all that Job could teach us, it’d be a good biblical book about French Existentialism. “We are because we exist, and suffering is, because it exists.” Not a bad lesson, but hardly a gospel lesson. But there’s a gospel lesson in the book of Job, too, and next week, that’s what we’ll look at: The Gospel According to Job.