Blogging Towards Sunday

November 11, 2007

Why Doesn’t God Answer Our Questions

About Suffering & Evil?

Heroes of the Faith

JOB

Job 38:1-30; 42:1-6

At our church we're continuing our series on "Heroes of the Faith" in which someone from the church community suggests their favorite Bible Hero or story. Inspired by my mania for the TV Show Heroes, it's our way to reflect on heroes and heroines of the faith and how we're called by their example from story texts to participatory action.

This week it's Job. Not a part-time or full-time gig, but a man who's story is the ultimate story of suffering, and looking for sense in the chaos, crap and challenge of life.

Here's the Monteskewed-notes to bring you up to speed. Job is a good, faithful, God-fearing man. He is pursued and tormented by the devil; losing all that he has - wealthy, power, status, land, family, wife, and health. He refuses to curse and blame God for all the *%$# that has gone down. His three good friends come along and try to convince him that it's his fault: he's been bad, been a sinner so he's gotten what he deserves. In the end Job asks, "Why?" God responds (our reading for Sunday) saying basically, "Who the hell are you to question me? Where were you when the universe was made? Who are you to think yourself that important? Don't you see my love for all things. I make it rain on the good and the evil, on the rain forest and also the desert." Job realizes what God is saying, repents of his arrogance, and is commended by God.

Did it happen. Maybe. Scholars say that it most likely is a long philosophical poem written as a way to question the theological ideas of the day (about 2,300 years ago), which are still the questions we face today:

1. Why do bad things happen to good people?
2. Why do good things happen to bad people?
3. If God is so loving and all-powerful how come the world is so %$&*#$ up?

I first have to say, "Who I am to answer these questions?" I haven't lived a life of tremendous suffering like some friends I know, captivity in the Middle East, homelessness, abandonnement. So I can only answer based on my experience and faith journey and relationships with others.

Classic theology calls this the question of Theodicy. We basically have 3 options (this comes from Kushner's book When bad things happen to good people.)

1. God is all powerful but not all-loving. He can do anything but doesn't love us enough to be kind to us all of the time. So bad things happen because of him.

2. God is not all powerful but all-loving. She loves us so much, wanting to do anything for us, but she can't. So bad things happen despite her.

3. God is all powerful and all-loving. God loves us so much, wants to do anything for us, and does but somehow bad things happen. Evil is. God could overcome it completely in a petrelli-power-move of omnipotence but doesn't. It's a mystery that we have to accept.

If you choose 1, then God is a jerk.
If you choose 2, then God is a joke.
If you choose 3, then God is an unknowable mystery that chooses to make himself known.

I choose 3. But that doesn't make it any easier.

I think we get screwed up as followers of Jesus because we expect God to answer our questions on our terms and in our contexts. "Why do you let my ennemy win?" "Why do you let evil continue in Darfur?" "Why didn't you help the Raiders to win?"

Yet what I fathom in the testimonies of the Bible and glimpse in my own life experience is that God speaks another language. God doesn't exist or relate to us in order to answer our questions like ask.com or google. Jesus never really answers the questions that he's asked with a straight-forward multiple-choice kind of answer. Instead he says, "Come and see." "Follow me." "Get up and walk." He always turns it around, not to make fun of the question or to be elusive, but rather to invite the question-asker to action, participation and movement. It's not a static tit-for-tat question-answer session. It's something else. A mystery, sure. And also more intimate than a mystery. As Job learns and confirms, there is no answer there's only what the Bible calls obedience, Paul Ricoeur calls moving from text to action, and what I'd call following in faith.

One thing that comes to mind is a quote that I often see on the internet these days and another from George Eliot:

"PEACE: It does not mean to be in a place where there is no

noise, trouble or hard work.

It means to be in the midst of those things

and still be calm in your heart. "

"Deep unspeakable suffering
may well be called a baptism,
a regeneration, the initiation into a new state."

I think that's partly what the author of Job is trying to tell us and invite us to discover for ourselves