Chapter 2

What to Do about Evil

Although the patience of Job has become a legendary cliché (originating in James 5:10–11), the Book of Job could just as well be called “The Impatience of Job.” Impatience, even outrage at God’s refusal to do justice, is the primary focus here.

Harold Kushner’s excellent bookWhen Bad Things Happen toGood People deals with the identical problem. It is a universal dilemma that we are forever forced to confront. We struggle to reconcile a good God with a seemingly evil world. But we are never able to make the answers fit. In the East, some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism have resolved it by a kind of denial, a kind of repression of desire — looking the other way and pretending the bad doesn’t happen. It’s a rather successful way of dealing with it. Grace has surely worked through these great religions for much of the world. Human beings had to survive through so much pain and disappointment.

Good God, bad things

We can’t say God is bad, or we will go nowhere. All religions begin with the assumption that God is good. But then we look at the reality in front of us, and there begins the most unnerving problem: why the just person suffers.

Job is described at the outset as a good and just man. It seems fair to say that this saga does not create Job’s faith; rather, it identifies and names it. His troubles don’t make Job into a saint. They confirm the goodness already there. (Holiness = reunited to the whole = goodness = whatis.)

Job, essentially, just holds his ground. He threatens and curses the Lord, but there is already a freedom within him that the Lord recognizes from the beginning. He has identified the meaning of his life within himself, in terms of his relatedness to the Lord, rather than drawing it from without. His “ontological mooring,” as Gabriel Marcel would call it, is in his union with God and not in his