Job’s friends assumed that Job must have done something wrong. Their theology was clean cut and rational: God blesses good people and makes evil doers suffer. They therefore reasoned that Job must have done some evil to suffer as he did. Job’s reply exposes the foolishness in their reasoning. He says: “Indeed, I know that this is true. But how can mere mortals prove their innocence before God.” In other words, Job’s friends were right about some things, but the truth is not so simple. No one is innocent, says Job, so the neat system breaks down. It is no consolation to a person to have reasons for their suffering. In fact, the more you try to rationalise a person’s suffering the more you invalidate their pain and isolate them. Suffering is just bad. Whether it is deserved or not is beside the point. In one sense we all deserve to suffer; in fact, from a corporate perspective, the broken world we now live in is precisely the world we deserve. As it is, God preserves us from more of the consequences of our actions than he allows us to suffer from. There is therefore no good reason why one person must suffer more than another. So let’s leave ‘reasons’ out of it. The way to respond to the suffering of another person is not to draw back and analyse the situation, Rather we must draw near and empathise; we must even allow ourselves to share the grief, because after all, we are all in the same situation. To love another person is to treat their suffering as though it were our own.
Think about how you can share the grief or pain of someone who is suffering at the moment.
Read Job 11
