Delivered Sunday, October 21, 2018 at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Arlington, VA
Texts: Job 38:1-41, Mark 10:35-45
Manuscript:
In the aftermath of nearly every natural or human-caused disaster, there are those who will claim that disaster as validation of a particular relationship with God. In some cases, storms are sent to punish people for their perceived slights against God. In other cases, storms are diverted to protect the faithful. Pat Robertson, for example, claims credit for Hurricane Florence not significantly affecting the Virginia Beach area, home to his broadcasting network and university. It is unclear if he considers himself correspondingly responsible for the effect of the storm stalling over North Carolina.
One need not even believe in God to adopt this particular model. There are others who consider Hurricane Michael just punishment for those in the area who vote for candidates who oppose measures to mitigate climate change–which is to say, Republicans. In this model, it seems Michael was less a punishment from an active God as a sort of karmic retribution from a more diffuse source.
The power of this narrative is so widespread that we don’t even need a specific source of blame to describe a storm as “punishing.”
The use of a punishment narrative to explain natural disasters is so deeply rooted that theologians are able to point to a specific event when it started to break down. It’s so deeply rooted that, even though that event was more than 250 years ago, it still hasn’t broken down completely.
This event was an earthquake that devastated Lisbon, Portugal, in 1755. The earthquake, now estimated to have had a magnitude between 8.5 and 9 first stuck the city on the morning of All Saint’s Day, November 1st. Many in the city responded to the earthquake by fleeing to the docks, the closest available open space. Those on the docks would have then seen the water rush out of the harbor. 40 minutes later, the water returned in a devastating tsunami. Unfortunately, the tsunami waters, despite causing plenty of destruction, neither stopped not prevented the fire, which was triggered in part by the candles traditionally burned on All Saint’s Day.
Between the earthquake, the tsunami, and the fire, 85% of the city was destroyed and somewhere between ¼ and ½ of the population died.
In the age of the Enlightenment, this Earthquake also posed a philosophical problem. In 1710, Leibniz, perhaps better known for independently inventing calculus around the same time as Isaac Newton, wrote a treatise in which he coined the term “Theodicy,” based on Greek roots which roughly mean “The Justification of God.” In this book, Leibniz argued that God has provided us with “the best possible world,” and that evil and suffering exist because of human freedom, and that any divine measure to further limit evil and suffering would create the greater evil of the destruction of human freedom.
The Lisbon earthquake caused many, including such notable figures as Voltaire and Kant, to reject Leibniz and his claim that this was the “best possible world.”
The Lisbon earthquake brought a level of destruction that the best minds of the time struggled to comprehend, one that could not be justified by blaming the residents of Lisbon, or Cadiz, where 1/3rd of the city was destroyed, or by the residents of Cornwall, Galway, or the Caribbean Islands, each of which was also affected by the tsunami.
Even in a Christian Europe still recovering from the wars of the Reformation, still struggling with conflict between Protestants and Catholics, it was too much to ask.
Even with their knowledge of Scripture, and the routine descriptions in the Hebrew Bible of setbacks to the Hebrew people, the nation of Israel, and even to individuals as acts of divine retribution, beginning in Genesis when Adam and Eve are cast from the Garden, carrying through the destruction of the Flood and the exile into Egypt in which sibling-rivalry led to the enslavement of an entire people. Leviticus and Deuteronomy lay out penal codes based in no small part on the need for the community to punish individuals so that God does not punish the community, it was too much.
I wonder if Christians of the time did not turn to Job.
Our Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament text today comes from that book. A book which offers a different, even a counter-answer to the question of evil and suffering.
The Book of Job begins with a conversation between God and Satan which turns the prevailing theodicy of the Hebrew Scriptures on its head. Satan argues that many only worship, or even respect God because God has been good to them. So God offers Satan a challenge in the person of Job.
Job is a faithful and righteous man, and also one who has been incredibly successful. We can think of Job as, at least by wealth, the Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos of his time. So God allows Satan to take all of that away, so long only as Job himself is untouched.
Satan takes the challenge, and, in turn, Job loses all his wealth. His flocks and servants are killed and taken by storms, and by thieves. His children are killed in a storm.
Still Job worships God.
God and Satan revise their agreement, so that now Job himself can be targeted, but not killed. His is afflicted by disease.
Still Job worships God.
Job’s friends come to him and argue the prevailing theodicy: that Job MUST have done something terrible to have all these things happen to him, must in some way have earned this divine wrath.
Finally, Job cries out in anger to God.
And God answers.
Our text today is the beginning of this divine response.
God confronts Job with Job’s ignorance. God asks Job “Who are YOU to question ME?”
In so doing, the text offers another theodicy. One which philisophers might call “Epistemoligical.”
This is behind Jesus answer to his apostles in today’s text from Mark. James and John ask for places of glory and honor with Jesus in the time to come. Jesus responds to them in much the same way God answered Job, albeit in softer language.
James and John came to Jesus without full knowledge. James and John did not yet fully comprehend the cup that Jesus was to drink. The cup that even Jesus would later ask to be spared: the crucifixion. James and John were not, could not, be expected to be ready for the path to Jesus’ glory.
Like Job, like Aquinas, like us, they had insufficient knowledge. They were, in essence, asking for a short-cut.
One which, thousands of years later, Aquinas would revive by describing a tapestry.
Seen from the front, and in total, a tapestry could present a beautiful picture.
Aquinas argued that the tapestry of the universe could only be seen in total by God. That humanity, with our limited knowledge, confined to a single, small stretch of time and space, could only see in part…and only from the back.
The back of a tapestry, even a beautiful one, often looks like chaos.
There are times when this answer is better. There are times when it can help us to contextualize our own suffering, and there are times when we can accept the idea that our immediate pain is part of something greater.
This though, is not always the case.
One of the common ideas about theodicy, or the problem of evil is that it’s very hard to find an answer that is satisfying on both a pastoral and intellectual level.
Leibniz answer, that this was “the best possible world” was filled with attempts to use logic to justify this world as the best possible because it was the best balance of three kinds of suffering: sin, pain, and loss of freedom. Many others have taken similar logic filled approaches.
The pastoral problem is that while this might explain why some level of suffering is necessary, we inherently want to know why that suffering has to befall us, and not someone else. Why North Carolina and not Virginia, as Pat Robertson prayed for with Hurricane Florence. It leaves us praying that someone else might suffer so that we might be spared.
I cannot accept this as a good answer.
Many others cannot.
In 2008, the BBC produced a teleplay called “God on Trial.”
This teleplay is based on a semi-apocryphal story that Jews in Auschwitz held a trial with God as the defendant. The charge was breaking the Covenant.
The characters represent a broad swath of those swept up in the holocaust. We have rabbis from multiple Jewish sects, doctors, lawyers, judges, and a physicist. We have a non-Jew who is there as a convicted criminal, and even a “Jew-hating German” who first learned he was descended from Jews when the Nazis arrested him.
The trial covers much of Jewish history, and addresses the epistemological argument as many say that humans cannot know the mind of God. Some argue that there were prior periods of suffering from which the Jews emerged, including Noah’s flood, the Babylonian Captivity, and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. Characters point out that, through it all, the Jews remain, the Torah remains, even as the Babylonians and Romans are gone.
Some argue that this is a needed purification, and that something greater will come of it. They are told that “who will survive? The brutal, the vicious, the cunning. Are they the ones who deserve whatever future greatness will come?”
Others argue that it is their fault, that this is punishment for their sins, including individuals who abandoned the Torah, those who married outside the faith, but they are silenced by another, from a nearly entirely Jewish village where, in the face of their poverty, the Torah was their palace. If this is punishment for abandoning the Torah, why are they also there?”
As the trial concludes, one character gives a passionate speech. He asks who brought the Jews out of Egypt, but also who sent the famine that took them there in the first place. He asks how the Jews were brought out—by the plagues. Who did God choose to kill? The first-born, from the child and heir of Pharaoh to the first-born of the Egyptian slave at the mill. He asks why God closed the sea while the Egyptians were crossing, and not before they had entered, for were they not also created by God.
He asks other questions, but I want you to watch it, so I will stop listing them.
In the end, they convict God as the Nazis come to collect those who are to die that day.
But then someone asks, “what are we to do now?”
And the answer is “we pray.”
So they do.
They pray as they are led into the gas chamber. They pray as they await the gas.
They pray.
I do not have an answer to the problem of evil.
I do have an answer though, to the question God poses Job: “Who are you to question God?”
Because much as a Trial of God, much as the crying out in pain of Job, much as the crying out of Jesus in Gethsemane and on the Cross, much as even those of us who have cried out to God “Why this?” “Why me?” “Why now?” crucially presuppose the existence of God.
God’s response to Job provides its own answer.
Who are we to question God?
We are Children of God.
And so what are we to do but pray?