Judging Sorrow (Job 9:1-15, 32-35)

[a brief comment from the Daily Office]

The book of Job is interesting because Job questions the understanding of justice found in the rest of the Deuteronomic canon: the idea that if a person is suffering, it’s because of his sins. The idea that the conditions of a person’s life reflect whether God is rewarding or punishing her for things she has done.

Job says, “No, I have done nothing to earn me this pain and hardship.” Job rebels against the biblical interpretation of suffering that other people around him believe.

But that doesn’t mean he thinks he’s perfect, either. He asks, “how can a man be just before God?” (9:2). On the one hand, he means that no one can sue God, as it were, for wrongful suffering and expect to come out of the lawsuit justified as the winner. There’s no one to oversee the trial because no one can judge God. God is not a human being, and everything He does is just. Being angry at God because he’s suffering is not the answer Job is looking for – he has no illusions that God will take responsibility for causing unjust sorrow.

On the other hand, it also isn’t possible for anyone to be just before God, to stand before Him and call oneself sinless. Just because Job has tried to live a good life and hasn’t done anything horribly wrong doesn’t mean he’s sinless. Everyone is a sinner, and God alone is just.

Then why, Job asks, do some people suffer while others don’t? More than anything else, Job wants people to know that bad things haven’t happened to him because he is a bad person who did bad things. They’ve simply happened through no fault of his own.

We all have something to learn from Job because we all reflexively judge people based on what we see of their life. Psychological studies have been done on things like the ‘halo effect,’ for example: we have a cognitive bias that makes us think beautiful people are also good people. The bias also works in reverse. We often assume that a person is very poor or homeless because of his own bad decisions. As a society, we’ve made some progress against the belief that sick people are to be shunned because there’s something wrong about them – we aren’t ashamed about most cancers anymore, because we don’t think a person somehow did something to deserve it. But we do have problems when dealing with mental illness. We do still think people just aren’t trying hard enough to get better when they’re depressed, and we still back away from the psychotic. We also sometimes blame victims of crime for putting themselves in a dangerous position or not being careful enough.

These knee-jerk responses are natural: we’re cognitive misers (our brains are wired to think as little as possible) and evolution has set us up to make certain connections. But Job reminds us that those connections aren’t necessarily true. His suffering, which found a place in the Bible, tells us that we have to work harder at being compassionate toward those in distress, and that we shouldn’t blame them or abandon them. No one is perfect, but no one deserves to suffer, either.

Prayer of the day: Lord, we pray for all people who feel abandoned under the weight of sorrow, illness and despair. We ask that each of them finds in their friends, family and community a place of comfort and respite, and a source of strength. We ask also that we be given the grace to better support the people who depend on us for help, and that we receive the wisdom to see beyond suffering to the human being who suffers.