God’s insistent love

Today’s readings: Job 7, 1-4.6-7; 1 Cor. 9, 16-19. 22-23; Mark 1, 29-39.

It does not always come naturally for us today to link the question of meaning in life to belief in God. We are tempted to engage in other ways of reasoning. But life is not a question-and-answer exercise.

The healing of the entire man – body, heart and soul – is part of the very core of Jesus’ message. Today’s gospel connects intimately between them the Jesus who is preaching and the Jesus who is concerned with the sufferings and distress of people.

For many it is the appalling depth and extent of human suffering that makes the idea of a loving Creator seem implausible. There have been many traditional Christian responses to the problem of evil and suffering but we continue to restlessly search for explanations and answers.

As Peter Kreeft writes in Making Sense out of Suffering, “modern man does not have an answer to the question of why. Our society is the first one that simply does not give us any answer to the problem of suffering except a thousand means of avoiding it”.

Very often we discover ourselves on level ground with the strong and seemingly aggressive feelings expressed in the book of Job. “Restlessly I fret till twilight falls.” exclaims Job in one of his frequent gasps as a man in search of meaning and understanding.

But the whole point of the book of Job is precisely that there are no satisfactory propositional arguments for why people suffer. Job actually deconstructs the theories proposed over the centuries. Job’s friends seek to argue but are rebuked in the end. Job only seeks to speak to God.

One of the most familiar criticisms of Christianity is that it offers consolation to life’s losers. The only way such sad people can cope with life, it is argued, is by inventing a god who comforts them. And we think that real people don’t need such spurious reassurance. They just get on with life. Religion is for the emotionally inadequate, it has been often claimed.

For Sigmund Freud, God exists only in the human mind as a wish-fulfilment, resulting from our desire for meaning and love. In his work The Future of an Illusion, Freud writes: “We tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life, but it is the very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”

But Christianity is not about wishful thinking. It accounts for its belief and yearning in a far more coherent and plausible way. The issue in Christianity is that of truth, not need.

We cannot be need-driven people because that makes us less human. Besides, the Christian understanding of human nature is that we are damaged and wounded by sin and that ultimately we’ve been redeemed by Christ not to succumb definitively to evil or to suffering.

Faith introduces believers into the invisible world of grace. In our distress, we may very often lose our focus on God. But the liberation of the true self comes only by ignoring the false self constantly concerned or even obsessed with personal moods and feelings.

As Belden C. Lane writes in The Solace of Fierce Land-scapes, commenting on Job who poignantly addresses the nagging question of God’s apparent indifference, when God finally speaks out of the whirlwind, the answer is that the rich mystery of life continues, stubbornly separate from all of Job’s anxious longings.

Ultimately, this isn’t an answer to Job’s nagging, but somehow it drives Job outside of himself and his need for vindication and fulfillment. Job is given no answer, but in being drawn out of himself he is met by God. Paradoxically, God’s indifference at times reveals itself to be yet another form of His insistent love.