Pain and the Call to Wholeness

In my Wisdom Literature class, we have been studying the book of Job. After hearing Job’s friends speculate about why he suffers and must repent and hearing Job repeatedly proclaim his innocence, we finally got to the part where God responds to Job’s demands for a tête-à-tête. God appears in an impressive display of power and force via a whirlwind, which is appropriate; if you ask for a private meeting with God, you should expect to have your world turned upside down! And indeed, Job discovers that the most important question for him to be asking is not why he suffers, but how God is present to him in his suffering. From the whirlwind, God does not address the reason for suffering but basically says, “I have great power, but what I choose to do with it is to nurture all of creation,” which, of course, includes Job himself.

It is interesting in the story of Job that it is not God who inflicts the pain Job experiences (though God allows the pain to occur). God’s desire for us is not suffering, but healing. As Jack Wintz, OFM, observes, “The best way to know God's attitude about human suffering is to watch Jesus. Jesus embodies God's wishes toward humanity. What do we see Jesus doing? He goes about healing—saving. We never see him inflicting blindness, leprosy, lameness, insanity upon people but setting them free of these misfortunes. Jesus is, indeed, the best gauge of God's true intentions toward us. To follow Christ in the Gospels is to follow a trail of discarded crutches, stretchers, bandages and oppressive bonds of every kind. If Jesus is the embodiment of God's will among us, as the Gospels teach, then certainly God's will is our healing.”

We all know that being human means we will experience pain and death. We don’t know why this is so, and it’s likely we never will during our human existence. However, we can choose how we will respond to this reality. When we resist pain and death, question it, and view it as a sign that we have been abandoned by God, we suffer. When we trust that, as Jack Wintz notes, “The power of God that raised Jesus out of suffering and death to new life will raise us also,” we can face pain and death with a sense of peace. In some way beyond our knowing, out of the whirlwind, God’s power is at work, bringing all creation to wholeness.