From the Campus Pastors at Virginia Tech

The following meditation was sent out to the Lutheran community at Virginia Tech by its ELCA campus pastors, Bill King and Joanna Stallings. I found it deeply moving and worth sharing. - PS

The book of Job is the Bible’s most extended wrestling with the mystery of incomprehensible, pointless, “how-can-a-loving God-who-cares-one-iota-about-humanity-allow-such-absurdity” pain. It spills oceans of ink in trying to come to terms with the inexplicable. I remember reading the comments of a great Old Testament scholar who noted that after Job’s life falls apart, his three friends came “and they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.”[2:13] The scholar notes, “And that is the last thing they do right in whole book.” The rest of the way they offer long-windedexplanations of Job’s agony. They blame Job. They defend God. They try to tie up the loose ends that make no sense. They leave Job hurting.

Over the past few days I have been struck by the temptation to frenzy, the compulsion we feel to do something—anything—just so we don’t feel so impotent. We babble. We organize. We probe the minutiae of the timeline. But the really hard thing to do is to simply sit with peoplewho suffer. I would love to have brilliant answers to why this absurdity has visited our campus. I wish I had glib words about divine care and providence which would pull the poison paralyzing us right now. But pat answers are the stuff of Job’s comforters, not the core biblical witness. The Bible does not give us answers, it gives us a witness. God deals with suffering, not by making it reasonable, but by sharing it and asking us to be willing to sit with those whose agony is almost too much to bear.

One panel of Matthias Grunewald’s magnificent Isenheim altarpiece depicts the crucifixion. John the Baptist stands at the foot of the cross and points at one of the most excruciatingly detailed pictures of human suffering you will ever see. No words. No explanations. But it seems to say, “This is God’s answer to suffering, to all the evil we do to one another—Emmanuel, God with us.”

Brothers and sisters, recovery is not going to be a sprint; the road to healing for our community is a marathon. There will be many opportunities to sit in silence with those who suffer. Resist the temptation to explain. Just…listen…and wait on the healing which God will provide in due season.