Faithful Complaining

The following mediation was written by Nathanael Cameron Hood, MA, New York University; MDiv, Princeton Theological Seminary

When I first went to grad school at New York University in the early 2010s, I became friends with an aspiring PhD student who didn’t have much regard for organized religion. He was a good man—a genius student and doting father with whom I could talk for hours about politics and art. But whenever the subject of faith arose, his entire mood would change. On good days he’d become tight-lipped and dismissive—on bad ones, he could become outright belligerent. Few such memories stick in my mind quite like one morning when he told me that he’d finished rereading the Book of Job and had decided that the God depicted within was one of the greatest villains in literary history. He snarled that he couldn’t believe anyone could worship a God who would inflict such suffering on such a good man, give him no satisfactory explanation why, and only restore his fortunes once he apologized for complaining.

Over a decade later, I still think about this conversation all the time—not because he offended me, but because I often find myself agreeing with him. The Book of Job is one of the most challenging texts in the entire Bible, inspiring passionate, puzzled, furious debate for literal millennia. Some scholars suggest it began life as an Israelite folk tale that tried to rationalize the existence of evil in God’s creation. As the centuries went by, bits and pieces were Frankensteined into the text until it resembled its current, seemingly chaotic form. One of their key bits of evidence is the book’s epilogue in the forty-second chapter where—after Job repents for rebuking God—God turns around and chastises Job’s assembled friends who’d spent dozens of chapters defending God’s goodness, declaring that Job was the only righteous one among them. The only way to explain such an abrupt 180° reversal, these scholars declare, was that different writers had meddled with the original story to help Job—and God—save face.

One would think my recent time in the scholarly trenches of seminary would see me agreeing with these arguments. But curiously, I’ve found the opposite to be true. I wonder if these researchers are missing the forest for the trees, failing to grasp that within the larger biblical story of God revealing Godself to humanity it really was Job who proved himself the most faithful because of his willingness to challenge God. Consider Job’s friends—the quick-witted Eliphaz, the accusatory Bildad, the cutting Zophar, the impetuous Elihu. In their rush to defend God from Job they ended up reducing God into a static set of rules to be blindly followed. Ah, but our God is much more than this! Though God desires our obedience, what God wants more than anything else is a personal relationship with each of us. This is why God came to earth as a human being—to live with us, to celebrate with us, to cry and suffer and ultimately die with us.

All throughout the Bible we see righteous men and women struggle with God, refusing to be silent in the face of perceived injustice and evil: Jeremiah cursing God for dooming Jerusalem, the Psalmist despairing of God’s absence, the writer of Ecclesiastes dismissing all creation as meaningless. Even Jesus challenged God at Gethsemane, begging his father to save him from the suffering that was to come on the cross. In a way, it takes more faith to assume that God will hear and respond to our complaints and petitions than to blindly accept our suffering and misfortunes as God’s will. To think otherwise would diminish God, just as Job’s friends did in the strange, infuriating, and ultimately beautiful Book of Job.

Joy,

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To read more meditations by Dr. Doug Hood and Nathanael Cameron Hood, you can purchase Nurture Faith: Five Minute Meditations to Strengthen Your Walk with Christ from your favorite book seller.

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