Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
“Good People and Bad Things”
World Communion Sunday
Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Job 1:1; 2:1-10/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Mark 10:13-16/NSRVUE)
Have you ever been mad at God? I know I have.
About this time last year, my sister died. She’d been ill for a long time — her condition caused by a combination of things: making some poor choice years ago, coming up a few numbers short in the genetic lottery, and being on the receiving end of some other lousy luck.
My sister was a good person with a good heart; she had a lot of people in her life about whom she cared and who cared about her. And so while I could rationalize her death in a medical sense, I couldn’t do so in a theological one — if I’m being totally honest with you, I still can’t and probably never will. She didn’t deserve what she got, what happened to her wasn’t fair, and her illness and death at such a young age made me really mad at God. I’m betting that many of you have felt the same way at some point.
So let’s cut to the chase and address the elephant that’s always been in the room, let’s ask the questions that have been on people’s minds for as long as there’s been people: If God is loving and all-powerful, then why is there evil and suffering in the world? Why do bad things happen to good people?
In the religion racket, these questions speak to the problem known as “theodicy,’ a term created in the eighteenth century by the mathematician and philosopher Wilhelm Gottfried Leibnitz as he was arguing with his intellectual adversaries who claimed that the presence of evil and suffering and all of the other bad stuff that happens in the world (at some level they’re all one and the same thing) proves that God doesn’t actually exist. And, to be fair, Leibnitz had his work cut out for him.
You see, the concept of a single infinitely good and powerful God, on the one hand, and our experience of what can often be a really rough world, on the other, combine to create a really big theological problem. If there’s no such God, then there’s no need to explain the relationship between that God and human suffering. And if there are multiple gods (as was the case throughout ancient Near East and in the Roman Empire), then human suffering could be explained as the unfortunate by-product of conflict and competition among those gods.
But our understanding of one omniscient all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving God, and the reality of suffering are incredibly difficult things to reconcile, so humankind has spent an awful lot of time and effort over thousands of years attempting to do just that. These attempts tend to go in one of two directions: one challenges one of more of the assumptions I just mentioned: that God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving (even though we’re told that God is all of these things); the other pins it on human free will — the idea being that that we, in some way, are responsible for much of our own suffering and that which we inflict upon others (which still doesn’t explain why God doesn’t put an end to suffering when God could do that). And so, despite all of the ink that’s been spilled on this topic throughout the centuries, none of the solutions is completely satisfying.
Maybe we just need to accept the fact that we’re not going to figure this one out — at least during our time in this world, anyway. And so, as theologian Justo González sums it up, “Perhaps the best solution is no solution at all, for what makes evil such, what gives evil its enormous power, is the very mystery of its existence — the fact that it cannot be explained, and yet it is there.”
As the author of Ecclesiastes observes, “the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to those who sacrifice and those who do not sacrifice…. This is an evil in all that happens under the sun, that the same fate comes to everyone.” In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus states that God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends the rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Deep down, we all know that this is true because we see it all the time. Bad things happen to good people (and to bad people too); good things happen to bad people (and to good people too). But we just can’t accept this because that’s not the way it’s supposed to be — it’s not fair, it’s not just, it’s not right. And so we long for an explanation as to why it’s true.
The search for answers to these questions of theodicy is the quest of Job (and of the one who writes about Job too). We have no idea who wrote this book, and we don’t know where or exactly when it was written. Job was apparently from the land of Uz, and while there’s been much debate about where exactly Uz was — and whether it’s even an actual place— it really doesn’t matter because this story could be set anywhere, at anytime — modern retellings of it (the Coen Brothers’ film A Serious Man from 2009, for example) testify to this.
Job is a text unlike any other book in the Bible (or any other book anywhere, for that matter). Nestled between it’s prologue (parts of which we heard earlier) and it’s epilogue, is a dizzying combination of prose and poetry, a series of dialogues between Job and his friends, and a lengthy speech by Job, and Job’s dramatic argument with God.
“There was once a man in the land of Uz who’s name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil,” is how the book begins. It should be clear already that this is a work of fiction; we’re told four times in one sentence what an exemplary man Job was, and no one is that good of a person.
We’re then taken to the heavenly court, where the Accuser presents himself before God in order to secure approval for a very disturbing project. In Hebrew, the Accuser is ha satan — the Satan. To be clear, this term isn’t used here as the proper name of any specific being, let alone the one who later stands in opposition to God in the New Testament; here “the Satan” refers to a role — the one who tests and prosecutes sinners on God’s behalf.
The Satan somehow manages to talk God in to letting him push Job’s faith to it’s limits in order to see what happens. God seems to have full confidence in Job’s ability to resist but, let’s be honest, the very idea that God would allow this at all is hard to come to terms with. Did this actually happen (I can’t say)? Is this what God is really like (I sure hope not)? Is the author of the story simply exercising some poetic license to make a point (Maybe)?
In any event, with God’s permission granted, the Satan afflicts Job with sores from head to toe (and will eventually do a whole lot worse to him). At the end of today’s reading, we find poor Job sitting atop an ash heap, scraping his irritated skin with the shards of a broken pot. And his faith, though tested, still seems to be intact.
For most of the rest of the story, Job’s friends sit with him there on the ash heap, trying to get him to fess up to what he did to provoke God’s wrath. But they can’t come up with anything. And they can’t come up with anything because there’s nothing to come up with — as unbelievable as it may seem, Job is every bit as good as the prologue says he is; he really hasn’t done anything wrong. As much as Job’s friends may want to prove how Job got what he deserved, as much as we may want them to prove how Job got what he deserved, that’s just not the way things work.
Bad things happen to good people in this world that God created and, as God will eventually make perfectly clear, after hearing more than enough of both Job’s complaints and his friends’ misguided attempts to figure it all out, the reasons for this are well beyond their ability to understand them. At some basic level, the whole situation is summed well by this statement from the theologian Karl Barth: “God is God.”
God is God. And the unspoken conclusion to be drawn from these three simple words (which are anything but simple) is kind of obvious (but also not simple): We are not. God is God, and we are not.
Why is there evil and the suffering in the world? I don’t know, but no one else knows either, and I guess that makes me feel a bit better about my own ignorance.
Yet, there clearly is evil and suffering in the world; we all know that this is true even if we don’t know why it’s true, and it stinks.
And so we read these ancient texts trying to glean some bits and pieces of God’s wisdom on the matter;
we get angry at God for not fixing it all and for not explaining it all;
we bring our frustration before God in prayer and in song;
we write stories (even ones in which God seems okay with awful things happening to good people) as an expression of our anger and frustration;
and we hope against hope that there’s a reason why life is like it is here,
that there’s more to it all than what we know here,
that the God who created the heavens and the earth will make it right somehow, somewhere, someday.
What else can we do, really?
We can love God, we can love our neighbor as ourselves because that’s what God calls us to do, and bad stuff is still going to happen.
We can be blameless and upright and turn away from evil because it’s right to do these things, and evil and suffering will inevitably come our way.
We can put our trust in the God who promises to be with us when we pass through the deep waters, because God doesn’t ever say that we won’t have to pass through the deep waters.
Why isn’t life on this earth a meritocracy? Why doesn’t everyone get exactly what they deserve?
Because God is God and we are not.
I wish I had a better answer for you than that, but maybe that’s the only answer there is.