Then
his wife said to him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God, and die.”
Job 2.9
You
may have noticed over the years that I am not always as steady on my feet as I
might wish to be. You may even have
thought to yourself, “He needs to take more water with it.” However, I can assure you that my
unsteadiness is in no way related to the consumption of alcohol. It dates from a sporting accident that I had
in my teenage years, which required a long period in an orthopaedic ward, five
operations involving bones and bits of steel, and quite a period of time before
I could even walk again properly without a stick. As people will tell you, if you have ever had
a trauma to joints in your body, even if you appear to make a full recovery –
which I did – eventually the orthopaedic chickens will come home to roost. Can you hear the faint sound of clucking?
I
lay in a bed for many weeks in an Oxford hospital and there were times when I
thought that I should never walk again, which was a sobering thought for a
teenage lad who had reached the age when chasing girls seemed to be a good
idea. How can you chase girls when you
cannot even walk? However, there was not
one single moment when I cursed God for what had happened to me. Then his wife said to him, “Do you
still hold fast your integrity? Curse
God, and die.” It was not God’s
fault. It was not Satan’s fault. It was my fault. No… if anything, when I got downhearted, I
remembered that story of Jesus healing the crippled man let down through the
roof by his friends: I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home. One day, I used to think, I shall do just
that.
Can you afford to be so apparently
noble or optimistic when you have a condition that you know will never
get better? Now, that may well be a
different matter, although we all suffer from the condition known as
mortality. We know that that will
never get “better”, in the course of the normal run of things, as far as the
ending of our life is concerned.
Obviously, eventually, we are all going to die. But here we are thinking more of conditions
like blindness. My grandfather went
blind when he was just turning fifty, in an age when there were no drugs to
control the blood pressure which often used to cause the blindness. Because of that, I greatly fear
blindness. All my books, which I have
loved for so long, would be closed to me.
Driving an Italian sports car would no longer be possible.
With British forces engaged in wars
overseas, conditions that will never be reversed are the result of daily
injuries – blindness, perhaps, and loss of limbs, general mobility and the use
of hands. Prosthetic limbs may restore some
ability to face everyday life, and the example of Douglas Bader probably still
inspires those so injured. Bader, after
all, still played golf with two artificial legs – and flew a fighter
aircraft! But it is not the same as the
way that God made you.
The story of Job and his afflictions
opens with the episode of the challenge of what appeared to be irreversible
disfigurement with constant pain.
This is awful even to contemplate.
Was this likely to have been leprosy?
Perhaps it was some other chronic skin infection, disease, or
condition. Was Job’s wife not therefore
reasonable in asking him: “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God, and die.” The significance of the instruction lies in
the belief at the time that if you were to curse God, he would bring about your
immediate death, which, in Job’s case, would bring an end to his unendurable
pain. These days, if you cannot face
living, you do not have to bother to curse God in order to die – you just have
to go to Switzerland.
In the nineteen-sixties, Paul Simon
wrote the famous folk song, “The Sound Of Silence”, and he and Art Garfunkel
sang it. In a sense, it was a
counterpoint to Bob Dylan’s “The times they are a-changing”. It was a song of angst-ridden youth and of
the lonely disaffection of contemporary urban living, and it contained the
immortal line, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway
walls.” Well, I saw the words of the
prophet quite recently on the London Underground. They were in the form of a piece of graffiti
scrawled on a poster advertising the sort of religious course, like Alpha,
which promises to give you the secret of life, the universe, and everything, in
several easily digestible sessions. The
poster had on it the question, “Is there a God?” and underneath in large
letters were three possible answers: Yes, No, and Probably. After the Yes, somebody had added, “and it is
a sadist.” When you read the Book of
Job, you could be forgiven for agreeing with that sentiment. But note carefully the exact words
which suggest total despair: It is a sadist. In the piece of graffiti, although the writer
affirms that he believes that there is a God, not only does he then
suggest that God is wilfully vindictive, but he also removes any possibility of
seeing God as a personal being – It is a sadist. Now that is despair indeed.
I have to confess that that piece of
graffiti shook me considerably.
Initially, I wondered if it had been a smart, glib, throw-away line
scrawled by some smug atheist. But I
thought probably not. This was not just
a philosophical witticism. It was an
emotional response to a real personal tragedy.
I tried to imagine the sort of person who might have written it. Was he suffering from loathsome sores, like
Job? Was he in constant pain, with no
possibility of improvement, but just a slow decline until the darkness overcame
him? Did he have a wife like the wife of
Job? Then his wife said to him,
“Do you still hold fast your integrity?
Curse God, and die.”
I began to imagine the
possibilities. Perhaps it had been
written by somebody on the way home, having received news of a terminal condition
from his doctor, and the smugness and the simplistic idiocy of the poster was
too much for him to bear. Perhaps it had
been written by somebody who had received devastating news, not about
themselves, but about someone whom they loved, dearly and deeply… a wife, a
parent, perhaps even a child. For the
suffering of children is the most grievous thing to contemplate or to
witness. After the shock and the anger
and the despair, in such circumstances, what do you do then?
I have been called many things in my
life, but one of the most interesting emerged when a tutor at my theological
college accused me of being a Stoic rather than a Christian. Do you remember who the Stoics were? They came, of course, from Stoic Newington…
No, they didn’t! They were ancient Greek
philosophers who maintained that there was complete nobility and virtue in
meeting and resisting suffering, both physical and mental, and all the
disappointments in life, without any emotion whatsoever. We still say of people, “He accepted his fate
stoically.” The most striking example of
stoicism in a film occurred near the beginning of “Lawrence of Arabia”. Do you remember the scene? Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole, has struck
a match in front of somebody in his office and demonstrates how to extinguish
it by sliding his thumb and forefinger up the shaft of the match until the
flame goes out. The man who witnesses
this, aghast, asks Lawrence what the trick is in doing this. Lawrence replies, “The trick is not minding
that it hurts.”
My reply to the accusation that I was
a Stoic was to say that my intention was to exercise Christian fortitude when
confronted with suffering, because if I myself was not prepared to try to do
this, how could I encourage the members of the church whom I was trying to
serve to do it? Since those days lying
in a hospital bed (forty-five) years ago, I have always held the opinion that,
in life, you have to play the cards that you have been dealt. Life is not a card game where you can
exchange one or two cards with the dealer.
It is not a game of Scrabble where you can miss a turn and exchange all
the tiles that you don’t like. You have
to play what you have been dealt. Which
is better? To be constantly trying to
horse-trade with life for insignificant advantages, or to face life with a
Christian hope, trusting that if God cannot or will not remove its trials for
your sake, then he will at least give you the courage to face them, and to live
through them, even if, at they end, they appear to have defeated you.
That is the story of the Passion of
the Christ, is it not? It is the story
of Gethsemane. It is the story of
Calvary. But if you read the Gospel
story to the end, what appears to be the end isn’t the end! Evil does not win… eventually. Suffering does not win… eventually. Death does not win… eventually. People who believe in resurrection can afford
to trust the power of God’s Holy Spirit to give them the courage to live a life
of Christian fortitude.
Of course, Job was not a
Christian. He wasn’t even just a
Stoic. When his wife said to him,
“Do you still hold fast your integrity?
Curse God, and die,” Job decided that life was too precious to
take her advice. He decided that
integrity was more significant than suffering, and that giving reverence to God
was more significant than his own personal fate. Originally, Satan had effectively said to
God, “All men have their price of divine betrayal.” Yes, we probably do. But let us set the value of the life that God
has given us infinitely higher that the price of betraying it. What else can we do with integrity? Play the cards that you have been dealt, and,
as a Christian, by the grace of God, you might just win. In the end – as a Christian – by the grace of
God, you will eventually take the rubber.