I Have No Right To Complain

Henry David Thoreau once wrote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” One such person comes to us in the name of Job, a person whom you’ve all heard references to his story in the Old Testament, I am sure.

We enter his story finding Job as a successful businessman, enjoying good health, great wealth, at the peak of happiness, surrounded by a loving family and married to a good wife.

But good fortune is like the wind. Suddenly everything changes. Savage bandits who slaughter his servants, steal his flocks away from him. A dreadful desert storm takes the lives of all of his children. Under terrible stress his health fails and his entire body is covered with sores, the medical consequence of unendurable inner pain, pressure and stress.

In the end his beloved wife tells him to “curse God and die.”

What was the reaction of his friends? “Well, obviously God is punishing him for some horrible secret sins in his life.” We hear the same judgment today when we find people saying, “Well, people with AIDS deserve to have it for the sins they have committed.”

But while most of us have not suffered to the extend that Job did, some of us have experienced similar suffering in some way…never-ending sleepless nights filled with fear, anxiety, guilt, and self-punishment. Some of us may have felt tempted to literally curse God and die. Certainly a number have cursed the Church and died.

And then there are the days that follow those nights…long, long days filled with drudgery, pain and hopelessness, days that appear one after another without end. Some of us may have experienced this, when every moment we see nothing else but those dark days and nights ahead of us.

Then there’s the loss of people whom we love and care for through sudden death, or loss through lingering illness and finally a merciful death. I am not sure which is more painful, the sudden losses or the long, long lingering sickness followed by a final merciful death beyond the point of exhaustion. Living life over the long haul carrying a load of hidden pain and loss that few realize we carry is a daunting challenge to faith. The temptation to curse heaven, blame God, or blow God away, and then die in nothingness is a very real temptation for all too many people.

Finally there was Job’s wife – the woman he lived with and loved throughout the entire ordeal. In the end he suffered a pain worse than being impoverished, suffering horrible losses of ones that he loved, even his children. And the one he trusted, loved and depended upon, the one he cherished, walked out on him, advising him to “curse God and die.”

Jesus, whom we find in the Gospel awash in human pain, suffering, neediness, and loss, sets out in the face of it all to pray. In the face of it all He goes directly to God. Indeed, in the Garden of Gethsemani he directly and personally experiences all of human pain – Job is a shadow of Christ before Christ’s light came to earth. Job, in the end, keeps his faith in God. When all of his friends had tempted him to give up on God, Job’s response was “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Jesus, in his lifetime, cried out to us: “You have eyes to see and ears to hear!” He challenges us to see God and find Him, to hear God and love his Word. Jesus challenges us to do that in the midst of whatever life throws at us, in success and in failure, in gain and in loss, in sickness and in health, in happiness and in suffering. Jesus reveals to us that God is in it all, in spite of our petty and pathetic judgments about God’s absence, about why we suffer, and finally about who is damned and who is saved.

When I was diagnosed with this illness, my first initial feeling was despair. I found myself at a lost and didn’t know what to do. In the beginning, I was blaming everyone, including myself and God, about my condition. I was telling myself, how could this happen to me? Why me? Why do I have to suffer now for life? Is there any escape to this life-long suffering? Then I began to read and seek answers from the Holy Scripture. I started to read the book of Job, a person who knows what real suffering is. Then, one day, while praying in Church, I directed my attention to the man who was hanging on the cross. Jesus was hanging so helplessly, his head bowed down, his hands and feet are nailed down to the cross, and water and blood flowed from his side. In a moment of silence, I began to understand that my little suffering is nothing compared to what Job and Jesus have undergone. In truth, I have no right to complain. Then I began to see that there are people out there who are suffering more than I am. With them, I share and participate in the suffering of humanity.

So when you are tempted to despair, remember the story of Job and receive Jesus, a man acquainted with suffering and whose life not even death itself could take.