Uncertainty
Job 38:1-7, 34-41
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Job wants answers. Don’t we all. Job would like some kind of explanation for what he’s endured. Wouldn’t we all like that. After all the conjecture of his friends, all of their conventional religious sentiments about Job’s suffering, its cause and what Job’s response should be, it is God who ultimately has the final word in the matter. But what God had to say probably wasn’t what Job was expecting, and as answers goes it most likely falls short of our expectations too.
On February 23, 1927, a young German physicist named Werner Heisenberg sent a 14-page letter to his contemporary, Wolfgang Pauli, outlining a new principle in quantum mechanics born of a thought experiment about the measurement of electrons at an atomic level. Heisenberg had been dissatisfied with existing quantum models for the behavior of atomic particles, claiming that since a person couldn’t actually observe the orbit of electrons around a nucleus, such orbits couldn’t really be said to exist. In setting out to come up with a quantum mechanics that relied only on properties that could theoretically be observed he came to articulate what has come to be known as the Uncertainty Principle. Because what his thought experiment revealed was that in attempting to measure the position of an electron, the energy used to observe it would change its momentum in an uncertain way. In fact the more precisely a person attempted to measure its position, the more uncertain its momentum would become. Now, this idea has been taken to all sorts of absurd extremes to suggest that nothing can be truly known. But that isn’t quite what the Uncertainty Principle is about. Rather, it is about the dual properties of matter behaving as both particle and wave. Observing its position created uncertainty in terms of its momentum, while seeking to define its momentum created uncertainty about its actual position. It doesn’t follow that nothing can be known, only that nothing can be known with absolute certainty. The more precise our attempts to approach and say definitively what something is, the truth of it, the more uncertain that truth becomes. Which is where Job comes in. Because Job has a very good reason for wanting some definitive understanding of his situation. He wants to know where he went wrong. He wants to know what he could have done differently. He had been an upright man. He had followed the rules, led a blameless life, and still found his life in ruins for no good reason.
The setup for the book of Job can be misleading. And the truth is that there is some evidence that it was tacked on at a later date, the Hebrew of the opening gambit is as different from the rest of the book as our own language is from Middle English. A friend of mine in considering this fact proposed that Job’s story really has nothing to do with wagers or challenges between God and the divine accuser, the Satan. Job’s story is about suffering. It is about what Rabbi Kushner tried to suss out in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Even the good Rabbi knew better than to write a book about why bad things happen to good people. We don’t really know the answer to that one, and that is what the book of Job is really about. It’s about all the constructions and theological gymnastics we do to in an effort to reconcile our belief in a loving and all-powerful creator of everything that is with the reality of suffering in this world. The ten dollar seminary word for this question, by the way, is ‘theodicy’.
There is a famous passage in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov in which Ivan is talking with his brother Alyosha in a tavern about the meaning of life, as characters in Russian novels are wont to do. “I meant to talk about the suffering of mankind in general,” Ivan begins, “but better let us dwell only on the suffering of children.” Ivan then launches into a litany of abuses suffered by children, accounts Dostoyevsky simply took from reading the newspapers of his day. They are horrible stories. He then says, “if everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering,” echoing a bit of the wisdom offered by one of Job’s friends, “pray tell me what have children got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible… Therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to ‘dear God’ in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears!
“I don’t want harmony, for love of mankind I don’t want it. I’d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on my harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket …. It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket.” To which his brother responds, “That is rebellion.”
This is the question inherent in the problem of theodicy. There are three paradoxical statements that people of faith hold to be true. First, that God is all powerful. Or, as our baptismal creed begins, “I believe in God, the Father, the Almighty.” There is nothing that is beyond the power of an Almighty God to do. Second, we assert that God is all loving. This is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian, to follow in the way of Jesus, who is the physical embodiment of God’s love for all of humanity. No exceptions. Lastly, and perhaps most obviously, evil is real. That is perhaps the one for which there is the greatest evidence. These three form an un-resolvable problem; namely that an all-powerful God who loves us unconditionally also allows us to suffer so unmistakably in a world that awash with evil. It is a problem that creates in us a fair degree of uncertainty. Maybe, with so much evil, God isn’t as powerful as we think, or worse, maybe God’s love for us isn’t quite so full of grace as we have been led to believe by Jesus. Or could it be that it’s all in our heads, that things aren’t really as evil as all that; that we’re all just doing the best we can with what we’ve been given. Try selling that last one to someone who has lost a child to some horrible random form of tragedy, or worse, to one that is deliberate.
Like Heisenberg’s principle of quantum mechanics, when we move too definitively toward one of these three propositions, we create uncertainty in the others. Maybe that is why God answers Job the way he does. Because in the end there may be no good reason for the innocent suffering of another, just bad ones. So what God offers Job instead is two things. First, he offers Job some perspective about all that he doesn’t know. Because that is one of the things that suffering does to us. It makes our world very small until it becomes reduced to realm of our grief over all that has been lost, all that we mourn. There’s no shame in that. It’s completely understandable, but the world of our suffering is not the whole world. It is this moment, this season, but it is not absolute. And so the words that we have to describe our experience and what it means are incomplete. They are words without knowledge. That doesn’t mean that they are not valid, or important. They are. But to move toward them too definitively as a way of understanding where we are is to move away from a fuller understanding of the direction we are headed. It is to define what is happening to us purely in terms of Friday’s pain, or Saturday’s darkness, without allowing for the transformation of that pain and darkness with the dawn of Sunday’s resurrection. Conversely, if all we are doing is looking forward to some idealized future, if all we can talk about is where we are going, then we lose touch with where we are, and where God is with us, in the present moment.
That is the other thing that God offers Job out of the whirlwind. As much as he would like a reason for what has happened to him, as much as we would like a reason for any form of innocent suffering in our own lives or in the life of the world, that is not what God has to offer any of us. We want to believe that everything happens for a reason. We even find ourselves, like Job’s friends, saying that to others with the best of intentions to assuage the pain. But while it might provide some measure of comfort, I’m afraid that not everything happens for a reason. Kate Boller at Duke University has written a fantastic book about just this idea titled, Everything Happens for a Reason, and other Lies I Have Loved. Such lies may brings us comfort, but it is a lie nonetheless. God never does offer Job a reason because no reason that we give can lessen the suffering of another, and often it just makes the suffering worse. No, what God offers in addition to the perspective of the one who created it all, is God’s own self. Ultimately, that is what we need when we find ourselves in a place of pain. We need to know that we are not alone, that as vast and incomprehensible as the universe is, as unknowable as the one who made can be, as small as what we experience can make us feel, in the end God has not and will not abandon us. We need to know that God is with us in that whirlwind, just like God was with Job. God is not indifferent to our suffering, but hears our cries, sees our pain, and then shows up. The mistake Job’s friends made wasn’t in showing up. The mistake Job’s friends made was trying to explain something for which there is no satisfactory explanation, instead of simply being there for their friend.
The great theologian Paul Tillich once wrote something like the opposite of faith isn’t doubt. Doubt, he said, is very much a part of faith. Rather, the opposite of faith is certainty. Certainty might make us feel better, but it ultimately obscures the truth of the one whose answer to our suffering isn’t an explanation, but a steadfast and presence that accompanies us all the way through whatever we are going through, until it is transformed.