God, Job, Jesus and Natural Disasters
In a whirlwind God finally answers Job’s persistent question: Why do the innocent suffer? The Book of Job, that great work of the Old Testament, rejects all the ‘easy’ answers often trotted out to explain suffering. No, we do not suffer because we are sinners deserving divine punishment, because we have broken divine laws (perhaps laws of which we may even be unaware). We suffer because…we suffer.
God’s answer to Job is to present him with a universe over which Job has no control. And Job agrees to ‘repent in dust and ashes’. Actually, the better translation of the word is in fact ‘endure’. Innocent suffering is sometimes part of the process of cosmic evolution, the arbitrariness of a universe that God has initiated and endowed, as with us little humans, with what is in effect cosmic free will.
Sometimes orderly, sometimes chaotic, the universe evolves along its path – from its beginning divinely willed into being to its final end. The rise and demise of species, the evolutionary twists and turns that organisms take, and the destruction and waste that is inherent in natural phenomena like earthquakes, floods, mudslides, tsunamis are part of the process. Human stupidity may occasionally ‘cause’ indirectly such catastrophic events. In all these cases, innocent people suffer evil.
Suffering is the side effect of this freedom. We may rage at suffering, we may wonder whether God was wise to give us all such free will. But we have it and it cannot be taken from us. The question, rather, is how God responds to our suffering – and how we grow somehow from it.
The great early Church theologian Irenaeus of Lyon argues that evil and innocent suffering are means whereby God helps us to truly grow in both God’s image and likeness. Created as we are in God’s image, suffering takes human reason, emotion, compassion and love – the characteristics of God that make us God’s image – and gives us the opportunity to grow more deeply, more fully in them, so that we mature into God’s very likeness.
In the suffering and death of Jesus on the Cross we see God’s deepest solidarity with the suffering of a humanity that does not try to run away from this becoming God’s likeness. It is a harsh a terrible solidarity, one that, argues the great 20th century theologian Jürgen Moltmann, leads to an almost unbearable tension in the heart of God.
But ultimately Jesus does not back out of his mission that leads to his brutal murder by the religious and political tyrants of the day. Nor does the Father suspend or abolish the free will given to all creation, not even to save the Son from death. Redemption comes through the Cross and the Resurrection, which is a powerful insistence that even in the greatest of innocent suffering God is present, a presence that breaks the power of death itself.
Our challenge as disciples is, like Job, to endure suffering and relentlessly struggle in solidarity with the victims. In doing this we become the likeness of God in ourselves and to those who suffer. How many, I wonder, of the often thoroughly secular people who rushed to aid the victims of tsunamis in Asia and the earthquake in Haiti realize this?
