5th Sunday of Ordinary Time, B February 7, 2021
Fr. Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
Life is hard. It can be cruel and quite bitter. Job taps into this melancholy when he asks, “is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?” and when he claims, “I shall not see happiness again.” Why is life hard? More importantly, what can we do about it?
The story of Job is peculiar. Most of the Old Testament echoes the idea that the good are blessed by God and the evil punished by him. The Israelites are conquered when they are sinful and saved when they repent. The book of Job however, focuses primarily on this question: If God is good, why do bad things happen to good people?
Job is a righteous and wealthy man who loses everything. His friends, convinced he’s secretly a great sinner, try to convince him to admit his sin and repent. Job, knowing he did nothing wrong, has nothing to repent for, so he mostly just complains… a lot, questioning why God has turned on him. After almost 40 chapters of it, God finally speaks up. But you know what? He doesn’t really answer the question. Why did Job suffer? God’s answer basically just reminds us how small we are in comparison: “where were you when I founded the earth?” In short, the answer seems to be “I am God and I do as I see fit.”
This sets up a deliberate tension. God is perfectly just and loving, yet his plan includes suffering for people who have done nothing wrong. Evil men succeed and good men fail, but God who is over all is still somehow just. How can one keep faith in such a God? Well, waiting to understand before you believe is not faith. Instead of rejecting God, the logic of faith says, “if God is just and this world is filled with injustice, there must be something else, something more I don’t see.”
The hint for that answer is there in the book itself. Job starts with 7 thousand sheep and other livestock. He also has 7 sons and 3 daughters. In the end, he gets back double of everything: 14 thousand sheep and so on. But he only gets 7 more sons and 3 more daughters. Why not double them too? The book of Job doesn’t say this, but we know the reason is that, even though they died, those children still exist.
500 years later, we meet Jesus. In the midst of a broken world, many people are sick and suffering though they’ve apparently done nothing to deserve it. So, Jesus goes about healing the sick and casting out demons. Like in the story of Job, God is revealed to have absolute power. God allowed the evil to happen to Job and also restored him to even greater glory after the fact. God can and does end illness and demonic terror. But then Jesus moves on to other towns, leaving behind those who might have been helped if he chose to stay. How is this the God of Justice and love? Either our faith in God is misplaced, or there is something we’re not seeing which explains it. As with the book of Job, the answer is that there is a bigger picture. Unlike the book of Job, the Gospels do give us an answer. The Cross and Resurrection.
This belief in the cross and resurrection is crucial if we’re going to evangelize. It’s kind of the main reason for it, really. What’s just as important as the answer is the question. If we’re going to evangelize effectively, we need to be able to identify and relate to the original struggle that made the resurrection so important. We need to see the problem of evil and learn the value of suffering.
Too many people see Christianity as something it isn’t. They picture rich mega pastors promising a contented and comfortable life if you just go to church and donate generously. They picture wealthy and middle class Americans living selfish lives that look no different from those of non-Christians. They see people who claim to follow the crucified Christ yet retaliate with rage and political manipulation.
Jesus’ healings, his promise of victory, his talk of a Kingdom could be interpreted to justify some of this, if you only look at this world. But that’s why Jesus doesn’t heal every human on earth, why he doesn’t expel every demon or simply prevent them from coming in the first place. He needs us to see the bigger picture.
And simply telling people there is a bigger picture doesn’t cut it. God told Adam and Eve to avoid the tree of good and evil so they wouldn’t die. They didn’t listen. Simply telling Job’s friends that rising from the dead would address all the world’s injustice wouldn’t cut it. Jesus’ words about the Kingdom of Heaven were still somehow interpreted to be about a kingdom on earth.
No, he had to show us. After proving his power over disease and devils, he shows us that the answer to the problem of evil is not power, but faithfulness. The answer is not to take away suffering or the freedom that caused it but to suffer with us. What the world needs from us now – woe to us if we do not preach this Gospel! – what the world needs is not for us to say, “heaven will make it better.” They need to see us face evil and suffering and injustice in a way that shows them it is true, that shows them we believe it.
When it comes to evangelization, there is a time and place for letters and programs and personal invitations. It’s necessary to teach people how to defend the faith and explain our doctrine. But a non-negotiable part of effective evangelization is suffering with faith. Missionaries often become martyrs.
Basically, if we want to evangelize, we have to show people the answer – Jesus Christ – by fully living through the question – suffering – in our own lives. As Paul puts it “to the weak I became weak, to win over the weak.” Not that we go looking for suffering or that we want to be miserable. But suffering is a part of this life. Trying to pretend that having faith means you won’t suffer won’t work. We can’t sin or compromise our faith to avoid it. We must face it honestly and embrace it with patience, with charity, with faith in the greater picture. The upshot is that, if we unite this suffering to the cross, it is not wasted and can even evangelize others. This will require us to wrestle and struggle with God’s will like Job did. It will require agonies in the garden with Jesus. It will often require us to be brokenhearted. But do not be afraid, for the Lord heals the brokenhearted and what he heals ends up better than it was before.