Why Me?

Part I

WHY ME, LORD? WHY MINE?

"There once was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright…." Job 1:1

[First in a series of four sermons on evil and human suffering]

On July 26 a Concorde jet roared down a Paris runway carrying 113 passengers and crew. The passengers were German vacationers who had chartered the flight for a rendezvous at New York and an eventual cruise to the Caribbean for the trip of a lifetime. Many had saved for years for this vacation. As it came down the runway a piece of metal no more than a yard long which had fallen off a previous plane and had not been picked up lay in the jet's path. Apparently, as the Concorde passed over it the metal was flipped into the air and caught one of the jet's engines. Immediately the jet was spewing fire.. Within ninety seconds all on board were killed in a fiery crash.

Many ask, how could God let a terrible thing like that happen? Why does God allow evil and suffering? If God is just and loving how could God permit his people to be afflicted with needless pain and hardship? And if suffering is simply pointless, what does that say about God? Why bother? It is the most difficult question in Christian theology.

Some have put the question this way: if God is all-loving, and these things happen, then God is not all-powerful, and if God is all-powerful, and these things happen, then God is not all-loving.

Any Christian worth his or her salt must face this issue squarely and come to grips with it. The author of the Book of Job did just that and we can do not less.

Today I begin a four part series on the book of Job, one of the all time great writings on this theme in any literature. Job asked "Why me, Lord? Why mine?" As great as the book of Job is, however, no one should read it thinking here is The Answer. Anyone with an easy answer to the problem of suffering is not worth listening to. Job itself does not pretend to give an easy answer. It is a response to the problem and a fairly profound one, and its profundity lies precisely in that it doesn't pretend to know it all.

The New York Times political columnist William Safire wrote a book on Job a few years ago and called it The First Dissident. That is, Job is very much like a political dissident who objects to the way the country is being run. Andrei Sakharov was a political dissident in the former Soviet Union; he objected to way the country was being run by Mr. Brezhnev. Job objects to the way the universe is being run by God. It takes a courageous man to be a dissident against someone who is All-Powerful. In the core of the book, the sections of poetry, Job as much as drags God into court and it does not appear that God has a very strong defense.

But two things must always be remembered, Job never stops believing in God, no matter what has happened to him, and he never doubts God's omnipotence, that God indeed has the power to make things right - and that's exactly why he drags God into court. You don't sue someone who isn't able to do what you want, you sue someone who is able but doesn't.

Rabbi Kushner, who wrote a best-selling book Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People, concluded that he finds it easier to believe in a God who is love but who is unable to prevent evil from happening than to believe in a God who is powerful and chooses not to prevent it. He'd rather believe, if you will, in a God who is a loving but weak parent than one who is guilty of neglect or abuse. His book has been an enormous help to many people, especially as it grew out of his own personal experience in the loss of his son to a childhood disease. But, you can see, the rabbi's answer is less profound than Job's mighty questions because he basically rejects God's omnipotence.

We can briefly recapitulate the story. Job is a devout and prosperous man with seven sons and three daughters, 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, 1000 oxen and five hundred asses. He has many servants. He always blessed God in all he did and always prayed to God at every feast. In a heavenly counsel Satan argues, in effect, of course your man is pious, you've blessed him so much, his herds increase without measure, but what if you withdrew your hand of blessing? God agrees that Satan can test Job.

Quickly, Job hears word from a lone herdsman that a band of attackers had swooped down and carried off all his oxen and asses and killed the herdsmen, all but one, who escaped to tell Job.

Then a fire flashed from heaven and destroyed all his sheep and burnt them up and only one shepherd escaped to tell about it.

And while he was still speaking, another arrived to say that another group had come and stolen all his camels and killed all the drivers of the camels, and while this messenger was still speaking along comes a fourth to say that his seven sons and three daughters all perished in a tornado - the Bible calls it a whirlwind.

And you thought you were having a bad day!

It is a succession of unbearable tragedy for Job and his wife. Job's response is "the Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord." This response by Job in the first chapter has been held up as the classic response by people of faith. It is identical to the response one hears, for instance, in the Muslim world - whatever happens is God's will, our responsibility is simply to take whatever God dishes out. In the second chapter, which was our reading today, Job says repeats his confidence in God: "Shall we not receive from the Lord the good and also receive the bad?"

But if that had been all that the book of Job was about it would not have claimed people's interest for thousands of years. You don't, after all, need forty some chapters to say "grin and bear it". It's the middle part of the book, the core, which has made Job powerful and appealing reading for millions of sufferers through the ages.

Next week we will look at the "answers" given by Job's friends, and the answers often given today to the problem of suffering. None of these answers, including those given by Job's friends, is totally wrong, because they all have elements of truth in them. They would not have been repeated over the centuries if they did not have elements of truth in them. But they all somehow fall short when they try to explain everything by one formula.

That is perhaps the key to it, that there is no key which unlocks every door on this question.

Finally, behind every discussion of this issue for Christians there is always the cross. Enter any church and there is the cross. Christian faith is the only faith which has dared to put an instrument of torture and suffering at the center of its life. With help from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah we understand Our Lord as "the suffering servant". Jesus is not painted in the gospels as someone who showed a human path to the divine by his own unique relationship with God and that sat down and watched, or who was a great warrior, but rather as a suffering servant: He took our infirmities and bore our diseases. He carried our sins on the cross and he entered into our grief with a unique intimacy, and there on the cross we know he stood with us. The Christian believes God does not stand aloof from our problems but enters into them and uniquely entered into them in Christ's death on Calvary. As James Denny used to say, holding up a cross, "God loves like that." And it was an entirely new and earth shattering definition of love which defied all previous ideas of religion. It is not an answer to the cause of suffering, but it is a way through suffering, to know that it is exactly in our trials and our struggles that we have with us one who is known as "Emmanuel" - God with us. "When you pass through the waters, I shall be with you….."

Martin Luther often used to wind up his sermons by simply saying, "more on this next time". And though I am not by no means the great Reformer that is what I will do now. More on this next time.

Go to "WHY ME - PART II"