“If the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?”
These words were uttered by Gideon at a time when Israel had been overtaken and ruled by the Midianites. It is a dark chapter in Israel’s history. After seven years of brutal occupation, an angel appears to Midian and tells him that God is with him.
“If the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?” Gideon replies.
Gideon’s question still rings true all these centuries later.
“If the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?”
It’s a question asked today in Israel and in the streets of Gaza. It’s asked in the Sudan and the bombed out streets of Ukraine.
It’s asked in the poor sections of this country, and in schools were children and their teachers hide to save their lives from gun violence.
It is asked in hospital rooms, prisons, and shelters for those who have no homes.
“If the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?”
It certainly is asked by the Old Testament character Job, whose story we have been hearing for the last several weeks.
Scripture describes Job as a “blameless, upright man who loved God and turned away from evil.” Job is also a very wealthy and prosperous man. Life has been good to him.
But then one day, in rapid succession, Job receives stunning news that his numerous livestock and thousands of camels have all been killed by fire. He next hears that his many servants have been murdered by bandits.
No sooner has that news reached him than he learns that his wife, sons, and daughters have all been killed by a great wind that blew down the house where they were gathered. Then Job himself becomes covered in painful boils from head to foot.
It’s as if Hurricane Helene were followed by an earthquake, then a raging fire, then an outbreak of Covid.
Upon hearing all this, Job, as faithful as he has always been, falls to the ground and worships God. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there,” he prays. “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
That statement, uttered when Job was in total shock, is what gives Job his reputation for patience. But anyone who reads the entire Book of Job knows that patience is not the right word to describe him.
As reality sets in, Job quits being so passive and accepting.
He now curses the day he was born and cries out to God, demanding to know why these things have happened.
Job’s friends, who have been sitting with him in his grief, begin to get nervous when Job begins questioning and getting angry with God.
The friends leap to God’s defense, offering explanations for why God has let these tragedies occur, giving us a good example of how not to do pastoral care.
“You must have sinned greatly for this to happen,” one of them says. “You better repent.”
“Think of this as a growing experience,” another offers. “You’ll be so much stronger because of it.”
“How dare you question God” another accuses. “This must be God’s will and who are we to question it?”
Job does not buy any of his friends’ explanations or attempts to console him. “Miserable comforters are you all,” he angrily lashes out at them.
But Job’s most passionate anger is reserved for God. His outrage at the world’s injustice is directed straight to the creator of that world.
“God does not care; so I say he murders both the pure and the wicked,” Job laments. “When the plague brings sudden death, God laughs at the anguish of the innocent.”
Again and again Job demands to know of God: What did I do wrong? Why have you let this happen to me?
In Job’s understanding of the universe only two answers are possible to those questions, either he has done something wrong or God has.
Job has searched his soul and honestly can find nothing that he has done that merits this kind of punishment. As scripture itself says, he has been blameless, faithful, and upright all his life.
And so that must mean that God has made a big mistake. In Job’s eyes, God is not doing a very good job of being God. What kind of God lets innocent people suffer?
This is an understandable question, an honest question, a human question – one we may find ourselves asking anytime we look at a newspaper or listen to the news, or our own prayer list each Sunday – why do good people suffer?
If the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?
Or as St. Theresa of Avila once said to God, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.”
And so Job again angrily demands a divine response to his questions and to his suffering.
When that response finally comes, it is not what Job had anticipated.
“Gird up your loins like a man,” God tells Job. “This time I will question you, and you shall answer me.”
And then God launches into such a ferocious tour of the cosmos that Job is struck dumb.
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God sarcastically demands of Job. “Who determined its measurements – surely you know!”
God’s barrage continues with question after question.
“Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?
“Have you commanded the morning and caused the dawn to know its place?
“Do you give the horse its might?
“Is it by your wisdom that a hawk soars and spreads its wings toward the south?
“Is it by your command that the eagle mounts up and makes its nest on high?”
Job is stunned into silence.
Job asks God the question we have all asked the divine – Why?
God answers with God’s own question – Are you God?
That answer may not satisfy us. It may strike us as the worst kind of divine evasion, but Job is strangely comforted by God’s response.
God has taken Job seriously. God has met Job face to face, has entered into relationship with him. There is no time or place without God – in good times and bad, in joys and in sorrow, in life and in death, God is present.
Job’s question – Why? – remains unanswered. But the lesson of Job is that even in the midst of suffering, God is still present, and that, for Job, at least, makes the rest bearable.
Belief in God does not protect us from the tragedies of life, but God is with us in those dark moments.
And what of the friends who tried to comfort Job, who came to God’s defense, trying to justify Job’s tragedy?
Scripture tells us of God’s impatience with them, “for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.”
God prefers Job’s honest anger, his passionate outrage, his demand for a face-to-face meeting over their pious platitudes.
We all have brokenness in our lives that can’t be fixed. We all have questions that can’t be completely answered.
But the one thing we know, as Job comes to know, is that the God who created the universe is present with us even in the midst of questions, anger, and uncertainties, offering us the strange but holy reassurance that God is God, and we are not.
Amen.