Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

 

A Sermon for the 13th Sunday After Pentecost 

By Bp Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

Greeting 

Blessed 13th Sunday after Pentecost! Today, we remember the blessed Saint Thaddeus on the Orthodox New Style Calendar, someone with whom I have a special relationship and whose relics grace our altar here at St. Valentine’s. May the Holy Spirit lead us and guide us into all truth! May the words of my mouth and meditations of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer! 

I say these things to you in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit! Amen.

Introduction 

This morning, we will focus on the Old Testament reading from the Book of Job, which outlines the “principle of success” that is often misunderstood, even during Biblical times, and insists that “Bad things don’t happen to Good People.” Often, people believe that if they are good enough, if they please the Lord, then God will bless them with wonderful and abounding blessings, and we will flourish and grow, without pain, suffering or impediments in life. They literally believe that their blessings are proportional to their goodness, kind of like some form of “Christian Karma.” 

As we watch the horrors of Afghanistan being turned back over to Islamic terrorists, and we hear the unspeakable suffering of women and girls, innocent children and American sympathizers in Kabul, we are left with a terrible realization about the brokenness of our world and the depths of depravity into which we humans are prone to fall. It rises questions about our integrity as a nation, about the cruelty of supposedly “civilized” people who let such things happen, and about the “universal values” and the “ultimate good” that we all believe in. It also brings into question why a “Good God” would allow such awful things to happen in His creation. How do we understand it? What are we supposed to do about it? What should be our belief in God through all of these troubles, sins and sufferings? 

Scripture Reading 

“Then answered Bildad the Shuhite, and said, How long wilt thou speak these things? and how long shall the words of thy mouth be like a strong wind? Doth God pervert judgment? or doth the Almighty pervert justice? If thy children have sinned against him, and he have cast them away for their transgression; If thou wouldest seek unto God betimes, and make thy supplication to the Almighty; If thou wert pure and upright; surely now he would awake for thee, and make the habitation of thy righteousness prosperous. Though thy beginning was small, yet thy latter end should greatly increase. For enquire, I pray thee, of the former age, and prepare thyself to the search of their fathers: (For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow:) Shall not they teach thee, and tell thee, and utter words out of their heart? Can the rush grow up without mire? can the flag grow without water? Whilst it is yet in his greenness, and not cut down, it withereth before any other herb. So are the paths of all that forget God; and the hypocrite's hope shall perish: Whose hope shall be cut off, and whose trust shall be a spider's web. He shall lean upon his house, but it shall not stand: he shall hold it fast, but it shall not endure. He is green before the sun, and his branch shooteth forth in his garden. His roots are wrapped about the heap, and seeth the place of stones. If he destroy him from his place, then it shall deny him, saying, I have not seen thee. Behold, this is the joy of his way, and out of the earth shall others grow. 

Bildad’s thesis: 

“Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man, neither will he help the evil doers: Till he fill thy mouth with laughing, and thy lips with rejoicing. They that hate thee shall be clothed with shame; and the dwelling place of the wicked shall come to nought.” (Job 8:1-22) 

 Sermon

All throughout Scripture, we have a conflict running through the text, between people who believe that those who love the Lord and uphold His Commandments will have temporal success, happiness, contentment, long life and many children, and those who see the righteous suffering. There are multiple passages where biblical authors imply that success accompanies obedience, not least of all in some portions of the Mosaic Covenant and in some of the Psalms. If we did not know the whole context, it would seem that Bildad's assumptions were correct in insisting that Job was in sin. Many places in the Prophets, God’s people are rebuked and told that their slavery, suffering and the slaughter of their people is due to God’s judgment on their unfaithfulness, and that God would have blessed them with success and temporal goods, had they kept His Covenant. However, when we read the whole story of Job, we realize that Bildad was dead wrong in his judgment. Job did suffer in his righteousness, not as a result of some hidden sin, but because God allowed it to happen because of his love for God. This is where another line of thinking about suffering becomes apparent, eloquently expounded in the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes (and equally illustrated in the lives of many of the Prophets themselves), which sees life as suffering and sees God as intentionally allowing hardships, difficulties, physical pain and mental suffering to purify and teach those who love God and keep His Commandments. In both of these contradictory impulses, one gets the distinct impression that one is “damned if they do, damned if they don’t,” and that it doesn’t matter ultimately what one does, because one will always have suffering in this fallen and corrupt world. This is the unfortunate truth that one needs a bigger perspective to fully understand and submit to in life. 

The Belief in Contractual Blessing

While Orthodox Christians often scorn the superstition and illiteracy of Charismatic “Name it, Claim it!” Christians and the ridiculousness of the popular “Prosperity Gospel”, equating all of Protestant theology with Joel Olsteen and equally vapid preachers, we often harbor similar understandings of contractual success in our own hearts. I remember hearing a good friend from the Middle East tell me that she had made a pact with a particular saint, that if a particular good thing that was desired in her family came about, then she would donate a beautifully adorned icon and kiot (shrine) to her local church and sponsor her feast day with gifts of food for the whole community to share in honor of the saint with whom she had contracted. She attributed her family’s later success to this deal that she made with the saint, and told others to do so, because such would bring good grades, good health, long life, and success in business. This is not an unusual story amongst Orthodox Christians. 

I often see the same kind of mercantilism come through in people’s understanding of spiritual things when they experience difficulty in life. Many Christians feel that their failure is a judgment and shows God’s wrath and displeasure. They feel that they must do certain things, or God will use pain and suffering to hurt them. Conversely, if someone has success, makes money, has good grades, or finds an attractive spouse, people often wonder what they did differently and “right” in order for God to bless them. This leads to an enormous amount of fear for those who experience difficulties in life, and judgment from the community, who, like Bildad, think that “things wouldn’t go wrong if you didn’t have some area of hidden sin in your life.” 

What The Prosperity Gospel and Magic Have in Common 

The worldview of both magical practices and this mercantile approach to Christianity overlap when the mentalities are examined side by side. Both assume that spiritual realities can be bargained with and exchanges made in order to achieve the human party’s goals. The Prosperity Gospel believes that God wants our goodness and compliance with His laws, as if living according to His commandments is a kind of sacrifice, for His good rather than for ours. It assumes that by being “a good person,” by our work, God is obligated to do something for us. This is the category that much folk Orthodoxy falls into, so it is not an exclusively Protestant phenomenon. Very close to this idea is the “Easy Believism” of the Evangelicals and the Baptists, who think that, if we simply pray a prayer in faith, God is legally obligated to not only forgive our sins, but also to give us an eternity in heaven. Such magical thinking strikes to the very core of how these Protestant groups develop their End Times theories, making Christian suffering through a final “Tribulation” unthinkable and leading to the recent innovation of Rapture Theology. 

Good People Often Become Martyrs 

The New Testament is full of the testimonies of “good people” who died as martyrs for their faith in Christ. Church history is full of even more stories of those who chose the crown of martyrdom, rather than following the path of the convenient or expedient. Does the fact that these good people suffered in immeasurable ways, sometimes in a worse and more painful way than the Savior Himself, make their lives less valuable and their testimony of God’s sufficient and all-powerful grace any less real? Does the fact that they did not have houses, cars, private planes, yachts, mega churches, and huge book sales any less of the expression of God’s Truth though His Church through the ages? No! The very opposite is true. These great saints are remembered in glory proportional to their suffering. “They overcame him (the devil) by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimonies.” (Revelation 12:11) They are remembered for “resisting unto blood.” (Hebrews 12:4) 

Siding with the Losers of History 

Jesus overturns this Old Testament vision of temporal success being a result of spiritual good conduct. He sides with the Psalmists in the estimation of “How often have I seen the wicked rewarded?” (Psalms 37:35, 94:3, Ecclesiastes 7:15, Jeremiah 12) When the Pharisees asked Jesus about the “sin” that resulted in a man being born a cripple, He responded that it wasn’t because of sin, but for the glory of God. (John 9:2-3, 11:4) Jesus siding with the weak, the poor, the downtrodden, all the losers that had been judged as suffering because of spiritual stains or curses, broke the traditional assumptions that people had about why bad things happened. Even more, by dying on the Cross, naked, alone, scorned, and displayed as the “trash of society”, Jesus showed that suffering was not always the result of sin, but could actually be something that was willingly taken up for the salvation of others. Jesus was perfect and never sinned, yet very few people have suffered like He did. 

Rejecting Triumphalism, the Inevitable Success Myth, and the Prosperity Gospel 

Strangely, in Orthodoxy, we have a great desire to revel in the perceived triumphs and advantages of the Church, to focus on lost “Golden Ages” where the Church held unrivaled political and military power, and to see countries where Orthodoxy still uses force to coerce people to do what we deem morally right and good as supposedly superior. We promote the “Triumph” of the Church over heresy and apostasy, all the while forgetting that our lack of spiritual power and holiness are proportional to the number of lies we accept and the violence we use to get our own way. We talk about the “Pan-Heresy of Ecumenism” while completely forgetting that pride, even in a group rather than in ourselves, is sin, and that the true “Pan-Heresy” is the Heresy of “Pan-Triumphalism.” Not only is there no “Golden Age” to remember, but Churches that use force in order to create a semblance of these mythic ages merely create a pharisaical paradise in which the tombs are whitewashed, but inwardly still host all of the “dead men’s bones” of every imaginable sin. (Matthew 23:27) 

Christianity, in its theologically consistent and philosophically defensible form, is literally siding with the losers of history, remembering that the “poor are rich in faith,” seeing the truism that “power corrupts,” and remembering that persecuting the other and projecting guilt are exercises, not in Christlikness, but in a satanic desire to control and in the Machiavellian belief that religion is merely a mask to justify temporal power to the fearful, weak-minded and the superstitious. 

Embracing Suffering and the Hope of Ultimate Salvation 

The same people who assume that truth and goodness lead to success and protection are often devastated when bad things happen in their lives. Doesn’t God care? Where was God to uphold his part of the bargain? Doesn’t God know how hard I tried to be good? Why would this horrible thing happen to me if God is real and believing in him is supposed to lead to blessings? This view of God’s protection and blessings set one up for the classic “Exvangelical” or “Un-Orthodox” deconstruction story, in which a devastated former-Christian realizes the trite argument of countless generations of atheists, that, “If God is good, why do so many bad things happen in the world?” 

This classic “Argument from Evil”, while feeling extremely persuasive, makes no sense of why God would chose to enter into this broken, disobedient, cruel, dysfunctional, suffering world, and, instead of “changing it for the better,” come and experience it with us in all of its unbridled and unmitigated brutality. Why? Because God obviously does not believe that being good relieves one from suffering - because God is the definition of goodness, and yet He suffers with us! God loves us enough to allow us free choice to love or to hate, and the result of this freedom is “ungodly” and cruel. And, choosing to receive the results of such disobedience, God still comes to us and lives with us in this mess of our own making. He employs His will to take up the results of our infinitely inferior and deficient choices, and in this, He transforms them into a vehicle for His grace and reconciliation. Through the pain, through the co-suffering, He fills the fallen with the uncreated, and makes death a pathway into new life. 

Ultimate Good Vs. Personal Blessing 

Suffering is not “bad” in and of itself. Suffering reveals incompleteness, brokenness, and need. It can be an engine of change and transformation, just like it can, through self-pity and anger, become a trap that keeps us in the dark and disallows the light from reaching us in our depths. Pain is inevitable. Death is inescapable. Suffering is the human condition. We should be immensely grateful for every good thing that occurs in life, happy with the unusual occurrence of goodness and blessing; but, by the same measure, we must accept and embrace the suffering in our life as a prompt towards holiness and goodness. 

We do not love Jesus because He can save us from punishment in Hell. Following Christ is not a pathway that we should chose because of fear or the threat of future suffering. No, instead, our thought process should be centered squarely on love. Christ’s love for us, His willingness to come and be with us, so that He could “be tempted in all things, yet without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15) Rather than fearing suffering, we should embrace the God who chose to come and be with us in the midst of all of it, bestowing hope of restoration and resurrection, and allowing us to rise through the suffering of this world into the glory and shared life of an eternity spent with the perfect love and fellowship of the Holy Trinity. 

Summary 

This brings us back to our initial questions about why God allows such horrible things like the fall of Afghanistan to misogynistic terrorists who rape and kill innocent children, why such evil exists in the world, and how we are to respond to it back to the fore. Christ chose to die with us, so that the world could be set right. This is the same self-sacrificing love that we see in the eyes of the few soldiers who sat on razor wire to lift women and children to safety in the Kabul airport. Christ chose not to leave us, to stay with us, and even though we are the ungrateful, arrogant, self-loving and self-aggrandizing Taliban, He chose to receive the violence and scorn, the assaults, beatings, and the losing position, so that we could be saved. What should we do, then, in emulation of our humble and loving God? Save all those that we can, lay ourselves down, and fight the evil of broken humanity with the “Blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony.” In our loss, we will experience our only gain, and God will show His power in our powerlessness. 

The Collect 

Almighty and everlasting God, grant to us an increase of faith, hope and love; and, that we may deserve to obtain what you have promised, make us love what you command; through Jesus Christ your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, God, for all ages of ages. Amen