THE WEIGHT OF SUFFERING

“If only my anguish could be weighed  and all my misery be placed on the scales!  It would surely outweigh the sand of the seas!” (6:2-3)

Job’s immediate response to his friend’s callous words is a heartrending plea for mercy as he groans, “If only my anguish could be weighed!” His point is that Eliphaz seems to be arguing for a kind of balance-scales theology, a tit-for-tat religion in which we do things for God and then He does things for us in return. Just as virtuous deeds can, according to this view, be traded with God for tangible benefits, so all of Job’s misfortune should be able to be set right by a proper, formal repentance. Thus everything about the spiritual life can be computed, totaled up, and kept straight and tidy.

But suffering is not like that; it is not tidy and mathematical. And neither is grace. And neither are any of the great mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven. By their very nature spiritual realities are untidy. Think of how shocked Jesus’ disciples were when He first began teaching them about the necessity of drinking His blood! “This is a hard teaching,” they complained. “Who can accept it?” (John 6:60). The mysteries of eternal life are untidy because they are infinite and immeasurable. The blood of Jesus could not be kept neatly inside His body; it had to be spilled out. What was meant to cover the whole earth could not be contained for long in an earthen vessel. As Peter wrote, “You know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed . . . but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect” (1 Peter 1:18-19). Things that are perfect and eternal overflow the world’s containers; they upset the world’s apple carts; they invalidate the world’s balance scales. After all, it is not as though the atoning sacrifice of Jesus merely outweighed the sin of the world; much more than that, the cross of Christ canceled sin entirely.

No balance-scales view of God’s judgment can ever account for such a wonder. Similarly, no human effort of will—even the will to repent in dust and ashes—can ever conciliate God or take even the tiniest step towards Him. As Paul wrote in Romans 11:35 (paraphrasing, in fact, the Lord’s own words to Job in 41:11), “Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?” The love of God is not a matter of calculation and accountancy. The trouble with Eliphaz and the other friends is that their thinking leaves no room for unmerited suffering, and therefore no room for unmerited grace, or for unmerited anything. Not only is the cross not at the center of their theology—it is not there at all. While Job holds to faith alone in the midst of his suffering, his friends seem to spend their energies doing the very opposite, seeking to avoid suffering altogether and doing so in the name of faith. As Job summarizes their attitude later in this chapter, “You see something dreadful and are afraid” (6:21).

We might as well face it: it is Job’s suffering, and his suffering alone, which turns his friends against him, and which so often turns us away also from those who desperately need our love. In the words of Flannery O’Connor, who from her own battle with the grim disease of lupus had reason to know about such things, “Sickness is a place . . . where there’s no company, where nobody can follow.” How easily we distance ourselves from other people’s pain! We are so good at rationalizing and accounting for suffering, so poor at doing anything about it, and so devastated when it is our own turn to suffer. Anyone who has wrestled with serious illness in a hospital room, and received visitors there, will know that between the sick and the well, between the paralyzed life of the sufferer and the full, energetic outer world of the visitor, there exists a vast and nearly uncrossable chasm. But is the word “uncrossable” really a word in the Christian vocabulary? No, it need not be. Because of the cross of Christ, every chasm has already been crossed, every alienation bridged. If Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar were alive today and could read about themselves and their suffering friend in the Bible, they would realize that this book is the Calvary of the Old Testament. They would see that the key to the sufferings of Job, and indeed to life itself, is the cross. They would realize that suffering, far from being something avoidable, is the very heartbeat of life, and the door to Heaven.

Mason, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything. Crossway.