It is a very big thing every year at our local high school: Drive Your Tractor to School Day. The FFA (Future Farmers of America) have permission that one day to drive their family’s tractor to school. This past spring it didn’t happen because of COVID, so, one evening in July, social distancing and all, the FFA kids drove their tractors to school—and paraded around the community. It wasn’t the same, but—well, it was something. They all wore the T-shirt you see in today’s picture.
It makes sense to me that high schoolers would see 2020 as the year that COVID messed everything up. Learning has been virtual—which pretty much every teen sees as “no fun.” Last spring, graduation didn’t really happen, and football has been canceled this fall because one of the players had the virus. You can’t even go sit down in McDonalds. Most of the opportunities for fun and just “hanging out” don’t exist. There’s not much to make a teen happy.
We adults, too, have had many of our even simple pleasures curtailed. In many ways we are experiencing what Job experienced. You could say that 2020 is a “Job year.”
Job
Today we begin a week long study of the book of Job. Like Ecclesiastes and Proverbs last week, Job is considered “Wisdom Literature.” The Wisdom Literature was written during the Babylonian exile to help people make sense of their experience of exile, regain their sense of dependence on God, and have a new vision of hope for the future.
Job is a “teaching story,” NOT historical biography. A teaching story’s message is Truth, but the story itself may be fiction (like the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan) . I think this is important for us to remember as we follow Job’s journey this week.
In fact, the passage today might bring us up sharp if we do not see it in context. The book of Job begins with a conversation between God and Satan. They exchange pleasantries, then God brags on Job. Satan retorts that Job loves God because everything is good in his life; Job is happy. God disagrees, then gives Satan permission to do evil to Job. Right away, all in one day, Satan causes the death of Job’s family, people take his cattle and his camels, and fire comes down on his sheep and shepherds.
Our modern minds, with awareness of Christ and 2000 years of church history, recoil at such a picture of God. Would God let Satan kill my family to prove something to Satan? If I thought God cared that little for people I love, my loyalty to God would be sorely tested.
However, we need to think of Job as a teaching story—like Dante’s Inferno, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or the movie The Wizard of Oz. The people for whom it was written could easily enter into the plot via this created scene in the beginning. The Satan-God dialogue would have fit with their world view. If I see it as a story created to get me to consider what St. Pope John Paul II identified as the greatest threat to faith, the problem of suffering, it entices me to enter into its dialogues with at least a search for Truth.
Suffering and Happiness
In his encyclical Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae), St. Pope John Paul II says, “More than anything else, it is the problem of suffering which challenges faith and puts it to the test. How can we fail to appreciate the universal anguish of man when we meditate on the Book of Job? The innocent man overwhelmed by suffering is understandably led to wonder: ‘Why is light given to him that is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it comes not, yet they dig for it more than for treasure?’ (Job 3: 20-21) But even when darkness is deepest, faith points to a trusting and adoring acknowledgment of the ‘mystery’: Job goes on to say: ‘I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.’” (paragraph 31)
As St. Pope John Paul says a few pages later, “Life is always a good.” Even when there is great suffering. Why? “The life which God gives man is quite different from the life of all other living creatures, inasmuch as man, although formed from the dust of the earth, is a manifestation of God in the world…. The life which God offers to man is a gift by which God shares something of himself with his creature.’ (paragraph 34)
We know what Job and his original audience did not: we know that when Jesus came to be with us, he suffered—to both redeem us, giving us entry into eternal life within the love of God—AND to rob Satan of his power over us through suffering.
Happiness depends on circumstances. Rare is the person who is suffering and is happy. Joyful—maybe; happy—no.
Do We Worship the Great God Happiness?
Happiness is a gift of circumstances. When we have a lot of things that naturally give us happiness, happiness can become an expectation. When we expect happiness, it can plunge us into depression, despair, resentment, anger, fear, anxiety, rebellion….(the list goes on) when the circumstances which give us happiness are taken away.
Life is such (even without COVID) that circumstances which give happiness come and go. I am disturbed by the many messages my grandchildren receive that tell them: happiness is what is most important. Be happy.
That frame of mind can lead to selfishness in relationships (“I’m not happy, I want a divorce”), addictions of every kind (“It feels so good”), and mental turmoil (Look at our epidemics of depression, anxiety, bipolar behavior, ADHD). It can lead to an insipid internal dishonesty: “I don’t feel happy, but I’m supposed to be, so I better ignore the reality of circumstances and my thoughts and feelings. I will pretend to be happy.”
When we think of it that way, we can see that too much pursuit of happiness leads eventually to misery instead. In a very real sense, we sell our souls to a god who is not God at all.
Job, COVID, and Perspective
The world-wide death count from COVID will reach 1,000,000 this week. More than 200,000 of those deaths are from the US. Job was written when people were experiencing distress—as we are. Job does not blame God. He does not give up on God—or himself. He faces his dilemma with fortitude and honesty. He suffers and names his suffering. He is overwhelmed and sits in his misery. He and his friends question the meaning of suffering and of life. He runs from nothing.
Through Job we can face suffering in a story, and, through the story, have the courage to acknowledge some of the Mysteries and questionings in our own lives. We can question the lesser god, “Happiness.”
God is faithful. Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life, and have it more abundantly.” Perhaps by considering Job’s life this week and contrasting his questions and statements with our own we will be more deeply aware of the goodness in life and claim it—not as happiness, which comes and goes, but as living in relationship with God—in good times and in bad, through sickness and health, til death do us JOIN for all eternity.
Prayer:
Lord, give me the courage to read Job this week and let myself enter into his mystery. Use the story of Job and this COVID time to discipline me to put happiness in its place. Let the absence of happiness at times not overly discourage me or lead me away from fidelity to You. You are the great God, not happiness. Happiness is not as good as it gets.
