What Does the Pastor Say

WHAT DOES THE PASTOR SAY IN RESPONSE TO WHY?

I have carefully phrased my topic. Not if but when. Garrison Keilor, an

American storyteller, a modern Mark Twain, in one of his many stories observes that if you have not yet had bad luck, don’t feel left out. It will surely come. While I prefer a different word than luck, I agree with his conclusion. Bad things happen to all people, even to good people and ordinarily one does not need to wait long.

When bad things happen to bad people we may feel some sympathy, but underneath we often conclude they had it coming. We use the analogy of farming, whether the aphoristic “sowing wild oats” or the biblical statement that “you reap whatever you sow.”[1]

It is when bad things happen to good people that we struggle. It is at such times that the question WHY arises. We learn quickly in life that suffering is indiscriminate and strikes all, whether they be good or bad. Although health and wealth gospel people will challenge this assertion, empirical data support it.

Now we can play games with this whole issue and thus dismiss its significance, as did the three comforters in Job, by denying his goodness, alleging[2] and ultimately cataloging his sins which they claimed produced his sufferings.[3] There must be hidden or secret sin which has finally overtaken him, or his suffering is due to the sins of his children,[4] or that the sins of his youth are finally catching up with him.[5]

Clearly such modern comforters abound who attribute or attempt to attribute

all suffering to sinful thoughts, words, or deeds. By denying that the suffering are

good, by invoking “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”[6] they think

that at least they minimize the problem and at best they eliminate it. But thinking and observing persons are not satisfied with such tactics. People who are good do suffer.

We simply do not resolve the issue by scrutinizing closely for unrecognized sins for we are still confronted with the question of divine justice relative to commensurate suffering. Job seems quite willing to concede some failure but challenges any concept of commensurate suffering.[7] In crass terms did he do enough bad things to lose ten children, all of his wealth, and ultimately even his health?

The issue of innocent suffering is not resolved by denying goodness and investigative efforts to establish guilt.

Rabbi Kushner observes:

Virtually every meaningful conversation I have

ever had with people on the subject of God and religion

has either started with this question [why do the righteous

suffer?], or gotten around to it before long….The misfor-

tunes of good people are not only a problem to the people

who suffer and to their families, they are a problem to

everyone who wants to believe in a just and fair and

livable world.[8]

I might parenthetically note here that even if the suffering seems somehow deserved, the pastor must still address it and seek to help the sufferer. In fact, such situations provide opportunity for the pastor to minister to some who under more favorable circumstances would not turn to the church. But I will not pursue this further since the primary focus of my presentation is the suffering of the righteous.

However, suffering resulting in a potential open door for ministry, leads to another approach that some use to minimize or eliminate the enigma. Once again it is an assault on an adjective for not only is the adjective GOOD qualifying people challenged but also the adjective BAD modifying things. Strange that any would attempt such an approach but they do. The argument is that since good can come from suffering ultimately suffering must be good.

Now I will not deny that suffering can be instrumental in our development.

Philosophers call it soul making. We are created in God’s image but we need to move into his likeness and the way we do that is through suffering. In fact, suffering is the only way and hence we should accept our suffering and allow it to shape us. In more popular parlance “one can see further through a teardrop than through a telescope.”

But even though bad things sometimes result in good, this does not change the fact that suffering must be viewed as physical evil. Cancer is still cancer. My Jewish friends remind me that no matter how much good some may claim resulted from the Holocaust, the reality remains that millions of Jews died, creating untold anguish.

The following exchange between Lieutenant Shiesskopf’s wife and Yossarian in Catch 22 articulates the difficulty of making suffering good.

“Good God, how much reverence can you have for a

Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include tooth

decay in His divine system of creation? Why in the world

did He ever create pain?”

“Pain?” Lieutenant Shiesskopf’s wife pounced upon

the word victoriously. “Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is

a warning to us of bodily dangers.”

“And who created the dangers?” Yossarian demanded.

“Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell to notify us, or one

of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon

tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead?”

“People would certainly look silly walking around

with red neon tubes in the middle of their foreheads.”

“They certainly look beautiful now writhing in

agony, don’t they?”[9]

This is not to deny that suffering such as Christ’s can be exemplary in that it is redemptive[10] and that as Paul observes we enter into and complete that suffering for the sake of the church.[11] But this still does not change the nature and character of suffering. It is still physical evil and Christ died to destroy it.

So we must not play games with the reality of innocent suffering by resorting to semantics. Bad things do happen to good people.

Such is the thrust of Job in the Old Testament and I Peter in the New

Testament.

The book of I Peter was directed to believers who were suffering and struggling with the why of it. A form of the word suffer appears 16 times in this book.

This text emphasizes that such suffering does not reflect on the character of the believer. Not all suffering is deserved. Their suffering was not to be seen as “something strange”,[12] as an anomaly, but rather something that believers can and will experience. The suffering of Christ are cited as evidence that suffering can and does happen to the faithful.[13]

So rather than deny suffering, we must expect it and enter into it. In the words of Willimon:

Fidelity is not a matter of efficiency, results, or success,

but rather a matter of congruence with the way Jesus

lived and died….The cross keeps judging our lapses

into a theology of glory, keeps setting before us the

narrow way of a suffering God, keeps mocking our

clerical lapses whereby we substitute worldly wisdom

for gospel foolishness. The cross unmasks the evil

behind worldly standards of success and achievement.[14]

But by far the best biblical book for addressing the suffering of the righteous is the book of Job. Andersen’s characterization of the man Job effectively presents and describes Job’s goodness:

Job was as faultless as a man can be. He is not

Everyman; he is unique….as such he presents the case of

the innocent sufferer in what is almost its acutest form.

In one Life only is Job excelled, in both innocence and

grief: in Jesus, who sinned not at all, but who endured

the greatest agony of any man.[15]

While time does not permit a detailed consideration of Job’s righteousness, the fact of it is quite apparent. Even a casual reading of the text will show it. His goodness is described in universal terms. He was blameless (‘complete’) and upright (‘straight’). These two words used together indicate thorough rectitude.[16] The third quality (‘feared God’) suggests that Job was religious, devout. The final quality (‘shunned evil’) indicates a deliberate rejection of evil and thus means ‘moral’.

So critical is Job’s righteousness that the writer presents it in the opening verse of the book, then has God attest to it (1:8; 2:3), and also the wife of Job (2:9). Even Satan does not challenge it. The significance of this has already been noted. If Job can be shown to deserve his sufferings, as his friends insist, the book loses its meaning and purpose. In the words of Andersen: “The book of Job loses its point if the righteousness of Job is not taken as genuine.”[17]

But this establishment and assertion of Job’s goodness brings us back to the question of why. Why does the innocent Job and others like him suffer? What is the answer? Atkinson notes our obsession with finding answers:

Much of our modern world is concerned with finding

answers. Our technological mentality sees the world as

something we can understand and control. We tend to see

life in terms of questions which need answering, in terms

of problems which need solving; in terms of causes and

effects.[18]

Newbigin challenges this common view:

Today we are becoming sceptical about this approach.

We are coming to see that there are ‘problems’ in human

life for which there are no ‘solutions’. The question has to

be asked whether we do not need new models for under-

standing our human situation.[19]

New models? Why even this ancient book of Job serves to remind us that there are many problems which occasion many questions for which there are no answers, at least no easy answers. In the words of Atkinson:

There is precious little that will count in the way

of an ‘answer’ as we usually understand that term. We

are face to face with a good and godly man who suffers –

suffers intolerably and seemingly endlessly. He catches

us up into his pain, into his misery, into the injustice of

it all. He envelops us in his plea to God to tell him what

on earth, or what in hell, is going on.[20]

But for our consideration today I am most concerned with Atkinson’s per-

ceptive and penetrating assessment of our pastoral preaching and ministry in the light of the book of Job which “brings us to the edge” of failure:

It confronts with failure, and with suffering for which

there is no explanation. It faces us with the inadequacy of

ministry; with the inappropriateness of some forms of preach-

ing; with a God who seems silent, callous, unfair and remote.

We are forced to rethink our prejudices; rethink our theology;

rethink the meaning of pastoral care in the face of injustice

and suffering; rethink what we say about God. And though

at the end of the day, the book brings us back to the all-

sufficiency of divine grace….there is a long, painful and

arduous path to climb before we hear the Lord speaking, as

he does at the end of the book, from the whirlwind.[21]

Rather than deny or qualify human pain we need to address it, as awful as it might be, in honesty and integrity. Here, as pastors, we can learn from the three comforters who present us with both a negative and positive model.[22]

On the positive side they show up with the intention of consoling and comforting Job.[23] They entered into his suffering by way of the traditional gestures of grief: they wept, tore their robes, and poured dust on their head.[24] Then they sat on the ground with him; not above him, not aloof, but they sat where he sat. Most significantly they were silent, not saying a word.[25]

Presence! Stanley Haverwas has picked up on this in the title of his 1988 book, Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally

Handicapped and the Church.[26]

Dykstra expresses it this way:

Presence is a service of vulnerability. To be

present to others is to put oneself in the position of

being vulnerable to what they are vulnerable to, and

of being vulnerable to them. It means being willing

to suffer what the other suffers, and to go with the

sufferer in his or her own suffering. This is different

from trying to become the sufferer. Presence does

not involve taking another’s place. That would be

demeaning. It would suggest, ‘I can take your suf-

fering better than you can, so move aside; I will

replace you.’ Instead, presence involves exposing

oneself to what the sufferer is exposed to, and being

with the other in that vulnerability.[27]

Silence! At times there is nothing to be said and silence can be more eloquent than words and more profound than brilliance. I remember hearing Rabbi Kushner say that early in his ministry, when visiting a hurting person and hearing the question WHY, he believed they wanted a theological answer, that which he had learned in seminary. So he would rattle off a 15 minute theological answer. But as a wiser and more mature rabbi, he learned that people are not asking for theology but support and love.

On the negative side the three comforters are more concerned with their theology. They see Job as a threat to their dogmatic theology. They arrive with their answer and are insisting that Job fit that answer. They are belief centered, rather than people centered. Job is expendable; their theology is not. Thus Job pleads with them to look at him; to be occupied with him rather than their pet ideas.[28]

Such a contrived and impersonal approach causes Job to lash out and to

compare these comforters to a wadi which promises relief to a thirsty and expectant caravan but disappoints them because of its dryness.[29]

At this point Job makes a pronouncement that all pastors need to hear: “Those who withhold kindness from a friend forsake the fear of the almighty.”[30] While the pastor must be prophetic at times, thundering the word of God, times of intense suffering call for a more priestly approach in which the pastor as a friend ministers to the sufferer. Here the words of Rabbi Kushner are helpful:

Job needed sympathy more than he needed advice,

even good and correct advice. There would be a time

and place for that later. He needed compassion, the sense

that others felt his pain with him, more than he needed

learned theological explanations about God’s ways. He

needed physical comforting, people sharing their strength

with him, holding him rather than scolding him.

He needed friends who would permit him to be

angry, to cry and to scream, much more than he needed

friends who would urge him to be an example of patience

and piety to others.[31]

In conclusion note these words of Atkinson:

We need to be prepared to be confronted, as Job’s

friends were, with the horror of some human pain. We

may need to let our defences down in a way that his

friends found hard to do, and allow ourselves to hear

Job questioning God, despairing at the way God runs

the world. May God help us stick with it in a way that

his friends could not. They could not live with the

human suffering which Job embodied. They had to

search for answers. They were uncomfortable when

face to face with that which defied the logic of their

own theological position. They had to proclaim the

truth. They insisted on treating suffering only as a

problem to be solved, rather than being willing to

cope with the uncertainty of facing its mystery. And

they received a pretty sharp word from the Lord at

the end of the day for doing so. This book asks us

to walk with Job right through the depths of his

struggle, open to wherever he takes us, for only so

will we catch the significance of the Lord’s gra-

cious voice at the story’s end.[32]

[1] Galatians 6:7 Eliphaz also uses this analogy in his first speech “As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.” Job 4:8. All scriptural citations in this paper are from the NRSV.

[4] The comforters also attribute his children’s death to Job’s sins. Job 5:4, 15:30; 20:10.

[5] Even Job questions the relationship between his present sufferings and the iniquities of his youth. Job 13:26.

[8] Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen To Good People (Sydney: Pan Books, 1982) 14.

[9]