I’ve been known to host a few guest speakers during my day and some of them are stunt preachers who need props to emphasize a point. So like a good little host, I’d pick up six coffees per Sunday (and take a few “bad ones” back), make hotel and airport runs, care for nannies and children, dash from green rooms to front rows, and of course, stop by Walgreens for hairspray.
Because the verse “Life is but a vapor - POOF” is much better with a spritz of aerosol hairspray wafting across the stage at a women’s conference. But, to be fair, points were made.
Life is so short. Life is so hard.
We’re headed to a funeral this weekend for an unimaginable loss and I’m not sure any of us know how to process it. Death of any kind is disappointing and painful but this one feels just feels unfair. Morally wrong. It should never, ever happen.
We studied Job two weeks ago in my cohort and I am telling you, to read the Bible in its full context has brought me so much freedom. The questions I’ve been kicked out of meetings for raising were correct interpretations all along and I’m thankful to not be one to need a positive spin on the painful realities of life. Christians like to package hardship in an-event-we-survive to an-event-we-overcome box with a bow on it.
What is faith if it is neat and tidy?
At some point that faulty belief system falls apart. The formula stops working. The mantras don’t hold up in suffering. The pretending and performing only goes so far.
Our framework for death and suffering is insufficient; it needs a better foundation. Thankfully, the suffering of Job does not resolve in scripture. The epilogue (which scholars believe is written by a different author than the rest of the book) shares the restoration of family and wealth. But it does not explain why God told Satan, in essence, “Do your worst. But don’t take his life.” The good book does not explain the death of his children, loss of his land, the ravishing of his health and physical appearance, the friends who cannot arrive for Job in his misery. None of this makes any logical sense and that tracks with the human experience.
Early on in my Christian faith, I determined to make meaning out of everything that happened to me (and, therefore, to others). As I have aged, particularly in midlife, I am content to understand that not everything has meaning. Perhaps it is the wisdom that comes from watching people we pray to heal die, or journeying with friends who long to find a partner, or witnessing loved ones in recovery relapse again and again, no matter how much they love Jesus. I cannot make sense of the suffering in this life. I cannot make sense of a God who allows it – even sanctions it – generation after generation. I cannot make sense of a cosmic war above us in the heavens while we live in a kind of unadulterated hell on Earth.
Terrence Tilley wrote a refreshing argument in his paper titled, God and the Silencing of Job1. He calls it both “a masterpiece of Wisdom literature and the most problem-plagued text in the Bible.” (Tilley, 1989, 257) Tilley lays out the parts of Job for us to consider, the differences in translations (particularly on the famous "though he slay me yet will I trust him” verse), and how the text was formed from “markedly different materials” and stitched together by one or more writers.
Personally, I found the narrative I was handed about Job in churches quite unbearable. The idea that we must submit to suffering, thank God for it, trust him when he slays us, and then call him good though he hands us over to the devil, Satan is quite strange, no? Reading the text in my younger years, I’d breathe a sigh of relief reading Job’s wife say, “Curse God and die!” (Job 2:9) She seemed to be the only honest one in the book, and I fear we would turn out to be more like her than like Job if our children were murdered and everything we owned was destroyed.
We tend to favor and center ourselves as heroic main characters forgetting how quickly we fold when faced with real hardship.
No with many years of distance from the churches that taught me this narrative, I see now that this narrative of Job was a mechanism for control. In a sense, the leaders were acting like God as he is portrayed in Job, causing significant and unnecessary suffering in congregants to either prove a point, feed their agenda, and (or) enlarge their pocketbooks.
Suffering for Jesus kept us suffering in their churches under bad leadership and toxic theology. We were supposed to grin and bear it, listen to bad counsel, work toward restoration, live in poverty, and if lucky enough, stand up to tell the story of redemption without lamenting the losses or remembering the pain. The victory was celebrated, the pain hidden. Perhaps this is why Tilley’s critique of other scholars of Job is resonant. He said that their ultimate goal is “...to silence the lament of the innocent.” (265)
I am thankful to be resolved enough in my faith and trust in God that I do not need to make sense of the Book of Job. It exists, and I appreciate Job’s unabashed belief in God and his personal choice not to demand God perform for him because of his suffering. I am also resolved to not make sense of suffering. Earth is a mixed bag of brutal and beautiful.
Which is why I believe we have a responsibility to joy.
I don’t know why the Psalmist wrote, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12) But I imagine a circumstance so formative it created a song about the time we have left.
I’ve faced my own mortality more than once in the last four years and I am determined — no matter what — to enjoy my life, my children, my husband, my family and friends, my work, and my passions. I want us to laugh hard, nurture our neighborhood, and give ourselves over to love. Because none of us know the time we have left. Weeks like this are a painful and somehow, beautiful, reminder.
In the end, I hope you and I are remembered for our love and not our dogma, for our compassion and not our judgment, for our connections and not our control.
If you’re grieving, may you feel the assurance that you are never alone. If you’re suffering, may you feel free from making meaning as you endure. If you’re facing your own mortality, may your heart grow with wisdom. And may we all live knowing that joy is our resistance.
In solidarity,
Ashley
Terrence W. Tilley, “God and the Silencing of Job,” Modern Theology 5:3 (1989)