(avg. read time: 7–14 mins.)
What is to date the last sermon I have preached was about Job 13. It was inspired by my practice of praying through a chapter each morning as I go through the various books of the Bible. This chapter was also brought to my attention because, at least in my experience, at least American Christians do not tend to talk about the Book of Job all that often in church settings. So I made it a point that, if I ever got the chance to preach again, I would preach about this text. And it worked out that my pastor asked me not long afterwards to fill in for him for an expected absence. It also helped that my friend and former pastor Brian had preached a sermon the previous week (just after the 20th anniversary of 9/11) about mourning. It seemed like a natural lead-in and, at least as was the plan at the time, what was supposed to be my pastor’s next sermon was on taming the tongue in Jas 3, which was a natural follow-up. After all, what Job is addressing in this text are people who are trying to address his suffering, his grievances against God, and yet they are saying all the wrong things. Job thus warns anyone reading this book of how we can end up compounding problems of suffering and grief when we think we are helping. So what I explore through this text is how we approach these difficult situations to help without hurting.
But first we need to set some groundwork about Job and the context of this speech. One of the reasons you may not hear many sermons on Job is because of how raw it is. Traditional theologies of suffering, retribution, and God’s policies in the world are presented and challenged back and forth and God himself speaks only at the beginning and the end. In between, Job, his three friends (Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar), and a zealous young man named Elihu who no one asked and everyone ignores, go back and forth about Job’s innocence or lack thereof and why God has done what he has done. The problem it is all trying to address is the fact that Job is suffering. He was a rich man with ten children who lost almost everything, including all of his children, one day and then became severely ill. We are told from the beginning that God knows Job is righteous and so that is never in question as far as the overarching story is concerned, but characters in the story constantly argue about it. But what is really at issue is God’s policies in the world. By the end of the book, God has rebuked Job and his three friends. He has not answered all questions, but he points to his wisdom and its expression in creation as a basis for trust and hope. Thus, the majority of the book is not anything we should take as straightforward teaching. I cannot pull something from a speech by Zophar and say, “This is what the Bible says about X.” The story of Job reminds us that the Bible often teaches by negative examples, showing us what not to do or what not to teach. But we also cannot dismiss everything in this central portion of the book, because there is much of value in what is said and much of the negative example comes from truths that are misunderstood and misapplied. In the repetitious struggles over the questions that concern this book, we see reflections of common ideas in popular theology that persist to this day and the objections to the same. There is an unrelenting honesty about human responses to suffering and this book helpfully lays them out and shows us the flaws in them.
Chapter 13 in particular aids us in understanding how to be helpful without being hurtful. This is part of a response to Job’s third friend, Zophar, at the end of the first round of exchanges that began in ch. 4. Each of the three friends has offered counsel in turn, with Job responding to each. In their own ways, all three friends have insisted that Job must be suffering because of some sin of his, perhaps because he is ignorant of it, or, as Zophar claims, he is deliberately concealing it. Zophar’s patience as he has listened to the conversation has already run out and he is the most reproachful in making direct accusations against Job. Job’s response begins in ch. 12 and continues through ch. 14, as he responds not only to Zophar, but to all three friends, as we see all of them implicated here. From Job’s response, we can derive at least three simple tests or filters that we should all consider before we seek to provide words of comfort or response to someone in their suffering and grief.
The first filter is: Is it necessary for me to say something? When Job’s friends articulate common beliefs about how God operates in the world, they do not tell Job anything he does not already know. They only pretend to know better. Job even calls them “worthless physicians,” because they have not only misdiagnosed Job’s problem, they have made the situation worse by threatening their relationships with him. He then says rather forcefully, “If you would only keep silent, that would be your wisdom!”
Though it is stated as a rebuke here, this is honestly good advice. A lot of what I call “ad hoc theology” happens when we think we need to say something, anything, to drown out the uncomfortable silence. When I say it is “ad hoc,” that is a way of describing something meant to address a specific, immediate problem without consideration for implications or general applicability. Ad hoc theology happens when people try to engage in theology purely for the sake of addressing the problem at hand. These times have a way of pushing people into theology when they are not otherwise used to thinking theologically, and that is where they start asking for trouble. Anytime we either pass on theological cliches that only come up in specific situations—like “God needed another angel in heaven,” as Brian mentioned last week—or try to tailor some answer about why God has allowed a person to go through this particular kind of suffering, especially without having the biblical back-up, we are engaging in ad hoc theology. We develop habits of saying such things because we have misdiagnosed the necessity of saying them. Many times, it is better for us to remain silent or to admit ignorance, rather than pretend like we can figure something out and offer comfort with a quick answer or, in the case of Job’s friends, a quick solution to the problem. 1st Peter 3:15 says to always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you. It does not say to always be ready to answer every question presented to you, especially the tough ones that come from suffering.
Zophar’s case is especially illustrative. I won’t go through ch. 11, where he gives his speech, but you can see that he is the most accusatory of the three. Despite Job’s insistence that he has done nothing to bring all of his suffering on himself, and you cannot draw a direct line between his actions and anything that happened to him and caused so many others to die, Zophar insists that Job knows he has done wrong. It reads as if Zophar is actually trying to assuage his own troubles about what Job is saying. And in that we see a negative example of something to consider when asking yourself if what you would want to say is necessary: Am I trying to comfort them or comfort myself? Am I taking what they are saying personally when it is not actually about me?
It is usually not a bad thing if you are silent or unable to answer certain questions, as long as you are present. Think back to times when you have grieved, when you have been suffering. I think of when I lost my paternal grandparents, when I was heartbroken, or the time when I thought my life had hit a wall after I graduated from seminary, and I built up a lot of anxiety only to fail to get into a doctoral program. Plenty of people said things to me during those times to comfort me, but I don’t remember most of what was said. What I do remember was who was there: people who were willing to listen to my frustrations, people who asked me questions, people who didn’t foist unsolicited opinions on me, people who simply gave me the gift of their company. If you think about it, that is how it tends to be for us when we reflect on the darker times in our lives. You would be lucky to remember any of your loved ones saying something truly profound that just totally changed your way of thinking. It is even less likely that that effect happened overnight. But when you think back on those times with people you tend to say, “He or she was there when (fill in the blank).”
However, people do also remember horribly misplaced words or horribly misinformed statements. And at times when people are especially vulnerable, engaging in ad hoc theology and just saying anything to drown out the awkward silence can have devastating consequences. By this point in Job’s story, the relationships between Job and his friends are already becoming frayed. It gets to the point that God must prescribe terms of reconciliation between Job and his friends at the end of the story. It is much easier to avoid such potential outcomes if you ask yourself about whatever you want to say, “Is it necessary?”
The second filter is this: Is what I am going to say true? Job has criticized his friends for worthless counsel, but now he makes a more serious charge, in that they have spoken falsely on behalf of God. This is a violation of both the third commandment, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and the ninth commandment, bearing false witness. If God himself were to examine their defenses, he would show them for the lies that they are, which God does in fact do by the end of the story. Diluting the voice of God with false testimony on his behalf is the most damaging kind of testimony, as that is ultimately engaging in the type of testimony the devil specializes in. It is a kind of idolatry, attributing to God that which is not of God. Thus, it is incumbent upon us to ensure as best we can that we are only speaking truth in testimony to God in comforting people.
One of the common threads that has run through all of my sermons at All Nations UMC is the importance of biblical and theological learning and the formational role it has for us. This has been a regular emphasis of mine not only because I’m a PhD candidate in biblical studies, but also because of personal experience. There was a time in my life that I refer to as “the Dark Age” between when I graduated from Truett Seminary in December 2015 and moved here in August 2017. That time was not all bad by any means, but I was stuck. Stuck in a place that wasn’t great to live in. Stuck in a job I didn’t enjoy and was too far removed from what I had trained to do for years. Stuck wondering why I didn’t get into the places I applied and what I could do to make things better for my next round of applications. I had hit a wall and I could not figure out why. But in late 2016 I learned at least one reason why I had to be there. A friend of mine had just taken a turn for the worst in his life. I knew conditions had been deteriorating for him at home, but they had quickly accelerated to the point where his family had abandoned him. I knew he would need to come over to my place to talk. But what I didn’t know until he arrived was that he was so shattered by what happened that I was going to need to talk him out of committing suicide. That was one of the hardest trials in my life, featuring a lot of long, tough conversations over the course of a few days, first to talk him out of suicide and then constantly preventing him from slipping back down the road of despair that led him to consider it in the first place. I spent a long time being unwilling to let him out of my sight, just in case he tried something.
The reason why my biblical and theological education was important to those conversations is that our conversations involved a lot of digging through despair to identify false beliefs he had about himself and his situation, then rooting them out and replacing them with the truth. Doing things like this involves asking good questions and being able to articulate the truth. You do not need to be able to answer every tough question posed to you in such times, but, as 1 Pet 3:15 says, you do need to be able to account for the hope that is in you, and you need to be able to identify lies that lead to despair. Nothing better equips you for such tasks than becoming familiar with truth. I am not saying many here will be faced with this particularly harrowing situation, but what I am saying is that in situations like this when suffering and grief may lead to people convincing themselves of lies, you can be sure that the first filter of “Is it necessary?” has been passed. Composing ad hoc theology in such cases is not going to work. Instead, you need to examine what you want to say, preferably ahead of time, by asking “Is it true?” This is also why prayers for discernment are crucial, especially during times like we’re talking about, because God promises to give us words to say in times of trial (Matt 10:19–20; Mark 13:11).
The final filter does not come so much from this particular text as from Job as a whole: Is it applicable? As I have said before, Job’s friends are not just spewing lies throughout this text so that we can safely ignore everything they say. But the things they say that are true are misunderstood or misapplied. Most obviously, there is a principle that God wills to prosper the righteous and punish the wicked, but it is a misapplication of that truth to make it a universal and individual—rather than a proverbial and collective—statement and thus to assume the corollary: that those who prosper are righteous and those who suffer are wicked. There are too many complicating factors and this principle is not the only one that expresses God’s policies. One of the things we can learn from the negative example of Job’s friends is that we should be circumspect in thinking about how applicable such a statement is. While some suffering may be easily explicable, we are generally going to be on more secure ground when we avoid trying to explain why suffering is happening when we don’t actually know. This is another reason why we need strong familiarity with truth, to know what it is and to know when it applies. If we have determined that it is necessary in this situation to say something and that what we want to say is true, we must then be careful about sticking with what we know, rather than venturing out to engage in ad hoc theology by another route. To do this, we must ask of what we say, “Is it applicable?”
We as the Church have a message of hope from the God who raises the dead. We do not mourn as people who have no hope. But we do still mourn. And we still suffer. In the midst of it all, we must proclaim the gospel that tells of our basis for trust and hope, and we must proclaim it by word and deed. We also need to proclaim it with wisdom. We need wisdom to know what approach is best when, what people need when. We need wisdom to distinguish between when we are speaking the gospel and when we are trying to do something else. From the Book of Job, we see the counsel of wisdom for comforting those who are suffering and grieving. We must ask ourselves three questions. First, is what I want to say necessary? Second, is what I want to say true? Third, is what I want to say applicable? If we are attentive in passing through these three filters for our speech in times when we need to comfort those who are suffering and grieving, we will be able to help without hurting.