Last Tuesday the youngest of the survivors of the 7/7 London bombing addressed a gathering in Hyde Park. She had been just ten days short of her 15th birthday when she was caught up in the blast at Aldgate. She had been on her way to her work experience placement at a legal firm in Tower Hill. Though she was not injured she was scarred by her experience – the kind of experience a teenager ought not to have to remember. As she said in Hyde Park:
‘The fact is [terrorism] may not have broken London but it did break some of us….All of us lost our innocence on that day, our naivety, the thought that “something like that could never happen to me” or even to London.’ She added that she had ‘struggled a lot afterwards’ because she was scared of being ‘weak’.
‘It did break some of us.’ That may have been something that the people assembled in the Park didn’t want to hear. Though it was a day of mourning, it was also a day for celebrating courage and healing and the fact that London had pulled through; just as we pulled through the Battle of Britain 75 years ago.
How do we react to the phrase, how might the people in the crowd have reacted – ‘but it did break some of us.’? We might I suppose feel a little angry – she came through without a physical injury – she was one of the lucky ones. Or we might want to find something to say to make her feel better. We might want to contradict her – you’re not as broken as you think, you have come through it, you have the strength to survive deep within you even though sometimes it may not feel like it. We might even want to talk about God. We might want to point out how wonderful life can be in god’s world – we might want to talk about hope. Or we might say, well it was a little young to learn the lesson – but we all have at some stage to grow out of the naive view that nothing will ever happen to me. We have to adjust to what life can be like – the pain, the sickness, the disaster, the loss which can come to anyone and which we have to face up to. Or we might just do what Prince William did and give her a hug.
‘It did break some of us.’ How are we to respond?
The phrase ‘Job’s comforters’ has become an idiomatic part of our language. It means ‘A person who, in trying to offer help or advice, says something that simply adds to the distress.’ For example:
She keeps telling me I’m going to die soon anyway so I shouldn’t worry about anything.
Only a Job’s comforter would try to argue that yesterday’s stock fall announcement could bring anything good.
The originators of this phrase were Job’s friends Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. We heard part of the supposedly comforting speech of Eliphaz in our first lesson. And out of context we may have thought Eliphaz made some good points.
He is honest about the fact that human beings are born to hardship. He advises laying all that has happened to us before God. He describes God as performing wonders that cannot be fathomed. He gives examples of the goodness of God, as a demonstration of the fact that the poor can indeed have hope – God is on their side. He suggests that some of the things that happen to us can be for the building up of character and he seems to say that ultimately God will rescue us from calamity. In this passage he doesn’t say that suffering can be a form of punishment – but it’s there in the other speeches of Job’s comforters, as though somehow Job must have deserved this.
It is not quite what we might have thought of saying to Emma Craig, but there are several similarities.
But, “It did break some of us”, was Job broken by the destruction of his goods and his children and the sores that cover his body? Job curses the day of his birth, he questions why he should ever have been given life, if this is what it was to be like. But he does not curse God or accuse him of injustice. He demands an answer from God and he forcefully maintains that he is a righteous and innocent man – there is no sense in which he deserved this.
The book of Job is a complex and subtle text. It raises some fundamental religious questions, which we have always asked and which we have never quite been able to answer. Is abstract and disinterested piety possible – is there some sense in which we believe in God out of self interest? To what extent are we both free and able to love God for God’s sake?
And then again, what effect does the disproportionate suffering of the innocent have on our trust in God? Is suffering ever appropriately described as punishment? As we have seen there are some things in Eliphaz’s speech which we might agree with; but the point about the ironic use of the phrase ‘Job’s comforters’, is that they take some simple and undeveloped religious truths and exaggerate them, in the conviction of their own rightness. As Eiiphaz says at the end of our text, ‘We have examined this, and it is true. So hear it and apply it to yourself.’ He has completely failed to understand how language about God works and how it is affected by context. The comforters ‘have studied God as a subject to be analysed, predicted and understood’. (Jerusalem commentary) They fail to own up to the fact that at a deep level they don’t know what to say, and yet the situation forces them to say something if they are to hide their own inadequacy rather than accept it.
‘It broke some of us.’ Perhaps the first thing we have to learn from such words, is not try to smother them in other words. Let the words simply sound, let them be heard, let them sink in, let them make you feel as helpless as the speaker who was scared of being weak. The desire to say something is perhaps a recognition not of faith but of the weakness of a faith that cannot accept the unsayable, the unthinkable, the opaqueness of God. Yes, there are many words of faith to be said, but in some situations they cannot be said. And silence is the best witness of faith.