Dying to Live: A Response to the Mystery of Human Suffering

Part II - The Old Testament View of Suffering

This article is the second part of an extensive reflection on human suffering. In our last issue Sr. Elise examined human suffering in the context of the contemporary experience. She now turns to our religious tradition as revealed in the Old Testament to seek further insights on suffering. Sr. Elise acknowledges the limitations of her reflections, limitations caused by space as well as by the magnitude of the subject. She says that, although assertions are partial, examining these can offer some insights into how the developing religious consciousness throws light on the question of suffering. Sr. Elise examines suffering from the perspectives of Jeremiah, Second Isaiah and Job. These will illustrate the developments resulting from the prevailing theology of suffering and move us into a position to see some continuity with future New Testament reflection. Space limitations prevent us from printing the biblical references. We ask your indulgence and suggest that you have your Bible with you as you read this paper.

Introduction

The story told in the Old Testament is replete with instances of suffering at every level of human experience. Probably the greatest and clearest symbol for human suffering and deliverance from it in the Old Testament is the Exodus event. This memorable experience was decisively formative of the Israelite people and shaped their attitude towards suffering for generations to come. In the light of that event and its covenantal bonding of the nation to Yahweh, suffering would be viewed in the prevailing theology of the community as the direct consequence of their unfaithfulness to their God. Sickness, loss, defeat in battle, oppression by foreign nations, natural disasters would all be explained as God's righteous anger being vindicated upon them because of their sins. Prosperity, health, power and military victory were seen as clear signs of God's pleasure in their faithfulness, especially in their unadulterated cultic worship of the One God, Yahweh. The prophetic voices rising in the period of the monarchy evaluated the authenticity of the cultic response in terms of faithfulness to the ethical demands of the covenant law--justice to the brother and sister within the community itself. Essentially, though, Yahweh rewarded the just and punished the unjust, however these terms were defined. Human suffering then was quite clearly tied in with God's displeasure and human unfaithfulness. It was a neat system that provided a certain degree of security for a people who felt they understood themselves and their God, and who, because of that understanding, exercised a certain amount of control over their own lives and destinies. Society was seen as being corporately responsible. Later, the king was endowed with a peculiar role as symbol of the community's corporate responsibility. This world view served to give the people a strong sense of identity, fairly clear expectations, and a way of explaining the events of their lives.

This is not to say that theological reflection always followed clear patterns. History gave rise to two tendencies within the nation. The Mosaic covenant grounded a way of viewing life that emphasized the people's responsibility to remain faithful to the covenant laws if God were to continue to favor them and grant them prosperity. On the other hand, a notion of covenant founded on the Abrahamic blessings emphasized the faithfulness of Yahweh and the permanence of his choice of this people. This view asserted that no matter how the people responded, God would never utterly forsake them. These two tendencies remain in tension throughout history and each offers explanations for what happens to the people. Both are called upon to confront and explain the sufferings of the people, perhaps at no time more urgently than during that historic period of the Exile.

Jeremiah

In the few decades preceding the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the people to Babylon, the prophet Jeremiah raises his voice at the command of Yahweh to reawaken the people to a knowledge of their God and a renewed image of themselves. Jeremiah speaks against a situation that has degenerated grossly under the leadership of kings who had forgotten their relationship to Yahweh. These kings emphasized exclusively the unconditionality of God's saving mercy, God's choice of David's dynasty, and the indestructibility of the temple in Jerusalem as God's abode. They legitimized an intolerable situation by which a few profited at the expense of many and Israelite oppressed Israelite for the sake of the "good life." Jeremiah saw through the corrupt nature of this situation and recognized that it contained within it seeds of destruction. The people and their leaders had forgotten who they were and by whom they lived (Jer 7:4-5, 7, 9-10, 19).

To be a prophet of doom to those who live in comfort, prosperity, and security is inevitably to invite rejection. Jeremiah's message erupts out of a heart brimming with fear, desolation, grief, and despair. His feelings for his people are deeply involved with his own painful experience of being a prophet to whom no one will give credence. He is faced with terrible questions about suffering, not only the suffering and destruction of his people which he lives to see and which vindicate his prophecies, but the even more anguishing question of his own personal experience. Jeremiah's message is strongly grounded in the Mosaic-covenant tradition. This is emphasized in Jeremiah 7:22-23.

This tradition was longstanding in the community. It offered the people a way of understanding their suffering that supported their notions of Yahweh as a perfectly just God. It was grounded in the sense of corporate responsibility. However, we cannot limit Jeremiah to a simplistic view of corporate sins. This would fail to do justice to the deep penetration of the mystery of suffering that is revealed in his work. In Jeremiah 31:29-30 he grasps a sense of individual personal responsibility. This offers a glimmer of hope, the possibility that though the society end and all symbols be destroyed, individual persons will remain free to know God and to enter into new covenantal relationships with God. (See Jer 31:33-34).

But individual responsibility only seems to intensify the problem of suffering. While Jeremiah proclaims a judgment on the people based on their sins and he offers a glimmer of hope for the future based on individual faithfulness, he anguishes daily over the incomprehensible reality of his own suffering. He laments the unfairness of the suffering he bears because he is trying to be faithful to Yahweh.

We perceive Jeremiah grappling with the mystery of why the just suffer persecution. His experience contradicts his tradition. If suffering is punishment for sin and if God looks to the heart of the individual in his judgments, how can this just God allow the anguish of persons who are innocent? God is perceived as treacherous. God's assurances in Jer 15:20 seem to lack integrity. God's words are experienced as empty and false by a prophet against whom his enemies do prevail and from whom he is not being saved. Jeremiah voices his anger and frustration in Jer 20: 7, 18. He did end his days in sorrow and shame, his prophecies were fulfilled with the land desolate, the temple destroyed, the people carried off into exile. The unanswerable questions rising from Jeremiah's life and prophecy would continue to haunt the tradition, challenging it to broaden its estimation of who God is and who human beings are.

Deutero-Isaiah

This expanded view of God, of life and of the people is caught up in the prophetic work of Second Isaiah. Hope permeates this unknown prophet's utterances, comfort is the word of God to the people, forgiveness abounds as we see in Isaiah 40:1-2. This prophet struggles with the same questions as Jeremiah, but with more objectivity. The attitude shaped by the Exodus-based Mosaic-covenant tradition emphasizing human responsibility, and that shaped by the creation-based Abraham-promises tradition emphasizing divine faithfulness are synthesized. This is seen in the context of a changing historical condition. Babylon's days are numbered and the moment of hope has come for the exiled community.

Second Isaiah focuses on the Persian Cyrus as a liberating instrument in the hands of an ever-faithful God. The community is called to a renewed life of faith and hope. The prophet appeals to the memory of the people, reminds them of the great acts of God in the past, encourages them to make these memories live again as God prepares to be once more their deliverer.

In Isa 43:14-17 the focus is on the Exodus event but in Isa 43:18-19 the people are warned not to limit God by expecting the new liberation to be the same as the old. The prophet recognizes that from this particular suffering situation the people, in a very real sense, cannot go home again. The triumphant procession back to Jerusalem is not a simple reward for punishment justly endured. Israel after the exile is not the same; Jerusalem after the destruction is not the same. God's people must see themselves in a new light, more universally oriented to a world towards which they carry the responsibility of mediating a God who is greater than they had ever before realized. It is this God who breaks forth in Second Isaiah with all the force of a creative power at work to shape a new people who will speak to a world in need of new life and new hope. Ironically, it is the Persian king, Cyrus, a non-Jew, who will lead them (Isa 44:28).

The Israelites view of God is being stretched. This God can do whatever God likes. Promises do not limit God; rather the promises work to expand their view of themselves and their world. Called to be servants of God for the sake of others, the Israelites are invested with the gift of ministry. The Lord has made the salvation of the world depend on these, his chosen ones. This mission necessarily entails suffering.

It is in the Songs of the Suffering Servant that we discover the prophet grappling directly with the mystery of suffering and particularly the suffering of the innocent. In the first song (Isa 42:1-4) the Servant is confronted with a strong sense of his mission for others. Later (Isa 49:4) he experiences dejection over the seeming meaninglessness of his faithfulness to the mission. Nevertheless, the Servant is graced to make a deliberate act of trust in Yahweh out of the midst of incrediblesuffering and beyond his power to comprehend or make sense of what is happening to him (Isa 50:5-6).

Finally, the Servant is led to surrender himself totally in the faith that this act is somehow the way God will accomplish God's purposes among the needy of the earth. The prophet evaluates this act in a way that brings a new dimension into the Israelite understanding of suffering. The expiatory value of the suffering of the innocent for others is asserted for the first time (Isa 53:10-12). This is still grounded in the sin/punishment model but it nevertheless constitutes a new breakthrough. It affirms the graciousness of Yahweh to save creation by gifting it with "a...perfect Israelite, whose consecration to the divine will, even in the midst of overwhelming suffering, takes away the sins of many." (Carroll Stuhlmueller, CP, "Deutero-Isaiah," from Jerome Biblical Commentary, 1968, 22:5)

It is clear that the willingness of the Servant to suffer is ultimately his claim to future glory. The prophet indicates some kind of reward for the Servant that transcends his death. For Second Isaiah to make these claims, it is necessary that he reflect on a God who is not limited by the temple, by Jerusalem, by the kingdom. Israel begins to deal with a God that breaks out of its national and religious categories.

Second Isaiah creates a hopeful theology which makes new inroads into the seemingly senseless events that disrupt the lives of the Chosen People. He calls them to a transcendent trust. He calls a suffering people to hope in the joyful confidence that God can do something quite new and unexpected.

Job

The book of Job primarily addresses the question of the suffering of the innocent. The polemic is against the world view represented by the "friends" of Job who insist he must have sinned in order to have been so afflicted, because God cannot act unjustly. In a sense, God is on trial in this poetic drama. Job rebels against a world-view that so readily writes off his justice in favor of God's. The struggle is between Job and God. The ultimate response is Job's submission to a power greater than himself, to a mystery which he recognizes as beyond his ability to grasp (Job 42:1-6). Job is the human person come face to face with creatureliness. It is no longer a question of human justice against divine justice. It is no question of justice at all. It is a creation-rooted question, with the creature acknowledging the contingency of creaturely existence. Job submits to his creaturehood before the sovereign freedom of this divine reality experienced as far transcending the human's own reality, yet deeply and lovingly involved in it. Job's submission is the ultimate act of trust which surrenders before the mystery, only to discover beyond this act, new life and new hope, a new vision of reality.

Summary

These three works provide an extended meditation on the suffering of the innocent, lifting the question from the realm of "problem-solving" to the realm of response to mystery. They do not provide answers but push against the limits of the tradition's "conventional wisdom" clearly revealing its inadequacy. They suggest that God transcends all that humans can comprehend; yet faithfulness is required regardless of human's inability to understand their own experiences. These works further assert that the human agenda does not correspond exactly with the divine. To suppose it does is to invite, if not disaster, at least an ineffective life-view, unworthy of the human destiny and the divine freedom to move humans beyond their present reality to what is truly new.

Editor's Note

We are again grateful to Sr. Elise Saggau for permitting us to use an edited version of her paper on the mystery of human suffering. We feel that an organization founded to promote the study of the theology of suffering should, from time to time, address this theology in a more extensive manner, and this solid study provides us an opportunity to do this. We believe the reflections on the Old Testament response to the mystery of human suffering are insightful and relevant, and we sincerely hope that this very pertinent study will contribute to your understanding of this mystery. A third issue will address the New Testament view of suffering and a final issue will provide a ministerial response to a suffering world.

Elise Saggau, O.S.F. is a Franciscan Sister of Little Falls, MN. She has an M.Div. from the Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Franciscan Studies at the Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure, NY.