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I speak to you as any foolish woman would speak.
That’s right. I’m standing next to the wife of Job, right at this particular moment. I stand next to her in defiance of her suffering husband’s dismissive remark. He snaps at her, saying, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak,” and I’m on her side. She seems to find the problem of innocent suffering intolerable, and if God doesn’t answer for it, then she is not about to just shrug her shoulders and say, “Thy will be done.”
Girl, same.
It’s all too easy for Christians, it’s easy for all people of all faiths, or no faith, to minimize the problem of suffering. But our tradition offers authentic empathy, too. C.S. Lewis, the Anglican scholar and theologian, reflected memorably on the awful pain of human grief, and how that pain deepens when it appears that God is absent, or uncaring. "Meanwhile, where is God?” Lewis wonders. “...Go to [God] when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.”
That’s rough. But it feels real. It’s an authentic human experience. It’s the cry of Jesus on the cross: “Why have you forsaken me?” We may cry out, too, as we grapple with the injustice and suffering that seems to cover the face of the earth, in Gaza and Lebanon and the West Bank, in Israel and Iran and Egypt, in Ukraine and Russia, in our routine school-shooting tragedies, in the storm-ravaged towns of western North Carolina, at every hospital bedside, along every dangerous highway, in the private agony of an addict, in our endless partisan Gotcha! politics, in states that make health care for women illegal: enough. Where is God?
We need a good answer.
Just yesterday I told one of you that my emotions these days are right below the surface. They feel like they’re up in my neck, awfully close to coming forth from me at any moment. My companion said he understood, and that he thinks it’s because of the state of the world. Many, most, maybe all of us are up to our necks in passionate feelings about all that’s going wrong, about unchecked and unending human suffering. (And not just human: yesterday, in the Blessing of the Animals, we talked about the suffering of millions of animals.)
So I say again: let’s get a good answer, an answer to the question: Why suffering?
That’s the whole book of Job — that question. Why? And Job will haunt us with this question throughout the month of October, four Sundays in a row. This is right and good: Why suffering? may be the human existential question. I will turn to two sources for an answer.
But before I do that, I need to wade into a conversation that seems to be about something entirely different. I ask your patience while I seem to change the subject. I promise: I’ll bring us back. To aid our contemplations on suffering, I invite you to come along with me, and together we will listen in on an encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees. They’re not directly wrestling with the problem of suffering, but the problem of innocent suffering lurks beneath everything Jesus says and does. And so, yes, it can be found in this encounter.
The Pharisees — good, upstanding religious leaders — are testing Jesus. They want to trap him by asking a question about divorce. If he takes a hard line on the topic, he could end up like John the Baptist, who was beheaded after criticizing Herod for marrying his brother’s divorced wife. Like their question to Jesus about taxes, the Pharisees try provoking him about divorce, to put him in danger with the Roman authorities.
Jesus avoids political controversy, at least for now. (Lethal political controversy is in his near future, in Jerusalem. But for now he’s safe.) Nevertheless, like John the Baptist, Jesus does take a sharp and radical position on the topic of divorce. He seems to be saying that divorce is never acceptable, ever. I say that he only “seems” to be saying this even though the text appears to be firm on this point, because it’s all too easy to misunderstand the text as rigid religious dogma. And that’s not what this is.
Unfortunately, that’s how it has been read, down the ages. Church leaders have misinterpreted this text to be a firm rejection of divorce, for any reason. They are ignoring what’s going on in the world behind the text, the world of Jesus and his followers, the world of the Pharisees, the world of the ancient Roman Empire. It’s always hard, even impossible, to understand a distant time and place, but let’s do our best. Jesus is taking a strong position on divorce because in his day, divorce usually harmed or even killed the woman in the couple. (It would gravely harm the couple’s children, too, and in this encounter Jesus quickly moves on to affirm the dignity and value of children.)
In short, Jesus strongly condemned divorce because divorce in his culture caused unjust human suffering. See? I told you: the problem of innocent suffering lurks beneath everything Jesus says and does.
But unjust divorce can cause damage beyond the couple and their children. If a man is divorcing his wife in a strongly patriarchal culture, he can damage his entire community, a close social network of kinship and cooperation. Remember that the Gospels are written by and for whole communities. Jesus, in his words about divorce, is teaching a communal ethic. If a personal choice would be unjustly harmful to our whole group, then we should pay attention to that, too, and not just the impact on one household. We should take our decisions quite seriously. Jesus is stern, then, about divorce: he’s not at all casual on this issue, or any issue that could harm someone. But he’s not saying that divorce is wrong in all times and all circumstances. That would be an ahistorical and simplistic interpretation. I encourage you to let it go.
And, again, we do not live in the time of Jesus of Nazareth. In our own time and place, we know that divorce is sometimes quite just, even essential; and we know that divorce can sometimes be abundantly beneficial to the person in the marriage who has less power and fewer resources. And we live in faith communities that are healthiest when every member of that community can freely make ethical choices that honor the well-being of everyone involved, taking to heart all the nuances, all the complications. Jesus is not about hard, flat rules, then or now. Jesus is about justice and ethics, with the most vulnerable members of our community at the center.
In other words, we should interpret the teaching of Jesus on divorce with our hearts first, and our heads second. Jesus does not establish legalistic, rigid, dogmatic rules. Jesus bonds us to one another in love. Our faith tradition does not ban divorce, but it does wrestle with it, as a discernment of the heart. What solution reduces suffering? What decision protects the vulnerable? We relieve human suffering — particularly innocent human suffering — when we discern all these difficult questions with our hearts.
And this brings me all the way back to poor Job and his exasperated wife. As we’ll see in the coming weeks, Job and his friends try to make sense of innocent suffering by using their heads: they try to reason their way to the answer. Maybe Job isn’t so innocent after all. Maybe his children sinned. Maybe Job should repent of his sinfulness, and all will be well. All of these answers fall flat.
The answer comes from the human heart. The dean of my seminary, Ian Markham, published a little book a few years ago, a book with the title — wait for it — “Why Suffering?” The whole book tackles the question before us today! Here is what Ian Markham says about suffering, a problem that requires an answer from the heart:
“The Christian ‘answer’ to suffering is not [a] head [answer]. …The Christian ‘answer’ [to suffering] is Good Friday. It is an answer that says this: you need to know that the Creator of the universe has been where you are. The Creator knows what it is to suffer. The Creator understands that despair. …We are being invited to trust. We are not granted the gift of seeing exactly why suffering is necessary, but we are invited to see that the Creator God who is responsible for this universe has tasted suffering and is involved in the hurt and pain of this universe.”
Once more: “[W]e are invited to see that the Creator God who is responsible for this universe has tasted suffering and is involved in the hurt and pain of this universe.”
But please take note: this ‘heart’ answer to suffering — the idea that God in Jesus tastes our suffering and is involved with us in the hurt and pain of this universe — this answer does not glorify or justify suffering itself. Jesus becomes human to relieve suffering. Jesus takes on suffering to destroy it. We should avoid two easy but dreadful mistakes: we should never assume Jesus makes hard, flat rules; and we should never conclude that God endorses or recommends suffering. These are heresies.
Jesus is not a grim enforcer of angry rules. Jesus is the dead and risen innocent at the center of our faith. And by teaching us how to form a new kind of community, an ethical, thoughtful, heart-centered community, a community that places its most vulnerable members at the center, Jesus teaches us how to bear suffering together, and relieve suffering together, as loving companions. Innocent human suffering is met by, treated by, and finally healed by human love.
I’ll close with one more take on the wife of Job, who speaks not with foolishness, but with an understandable human desire for relief, for healing, and for an answer or two. Archibald MacLeish wrote a play called “J.B.,” a modern take on the Job story. The character J.B., of course, is Job. In the play, his wife is called Sarah. At the very end, J.B. has survived all of his sufferings and his life is back on an upturn. But he is feeling badly shaken, still plagued with the eternal question, Why suffering? Sarah’s answer is not a ‘head’ answer, not a neat, systematic formula that explains everything. She offers her husband a ‘heart’ answer to this awful, nagging, infuriating question.
“It’s too dark to see,” J.B. tells Sarah, speaking literally and figuratively, both. (They’re in a dark room, but his mind is still darkened by his anxious thoughts about his trauma.) “It’s too dark to see.” The stage directions then say this: “[Sarah] turns, pulls his head down between her hands and kisses him.” And then she says, “Then blow on the coal of the heart, my darling.”
“The coal of the heart…” J.B. repeats back to her, wondering.
“It’s all the light now,” Sarah continues.
“Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in churches are out.
The lights have gone out in the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we’ll see by and by …
“We’ll see where we are.
The wit won’t burn and the wet soul smoulders.
Blow on the coal of the heart and we’ll know …
We’ll know …”
***
Preached on the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Year B), October 6, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Job 1:1; 2:1-10
Psalm 26
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16