Job & The Joker

BY: REV. RAMIRO RODRIGUEZ Associate Pastor of Evangelism

This issue comes out during Advent and will be out until the beginning of Lent. I have a choice: I can write an article which ties these two important seasons together, or I can write something that has nothing to do with either. I think y’all will be able to quickly tell which path I chose…

As I write this, I am tantalizingly close to finishing a 9-week long study of the book of Job. We were supposed to finish it last week, but I had to conduct a funeral, and we couldn’t finish it this week because I have a mandatory 3-day long conference retreat. The good people who have faithfully shown up at my class week after week have been eagerly anticipating this final class. My class wants closure. They want to feel like the time they have spent exploring this amazing, dense, beautiful- and at times exhausting – book has been well spent.

Much like Job, they want answers. Why is this happening? Why is God doing this? Why does God allow needless suffering? My class wants to find these answers, but they are also asking a question Job wasn’t. What motivates people to be good? Are we good because we’re afraid of what might happen to us if we are bad? Are we good because we are chasing after some kind of reward? Are we good because we – not unlike dogs - like to hear people tell us how good we are?

Job was described as blameless and upright, he was a man who feared God and turned away from evil. It’s fair to say Job was righteous, but why was he righteous? Was he righteous because he believed his righteousness was rewarded by God?

Let’s not forget, in the beginning of this story – before he loathed his life - Job was described as being the greatest man in the East. Job’s righteousness seems to have paid off for him, at least in the beginning. But would Job have been so righteous if he was an outcast? Would he have been blameless and upright if he was someone whom the rich and powerful shunned? Did Job worship God because God is worthy of worship, or did Job serve God because he believed God was serving him?

I think this is an important question for all of us. It is a question we should all ask ourselves. Why do we serve God? Do we serve God because we find reward in our service? Would we dedicate our lives to serving God if we didn’t get something out of it?

Many of the good people in my Bible study will be disappointed with next week’s class. They will be disappointed because the Book of Job doesn’t really provide us with many answers. In a lot of ways, it’s like the movie Joker. Well, maybe not a lot of ways, but definitely in some ways. Many people went to see Joker because they wanted to see the origin story of this infamous villain. They wanted to see how the Joker became DC Comics' personification of evil. They wanted to see where evil comes from.

And without giving away any spoilers, I can say that the origins of evil in this movie are unclear. We leave this movie unsure if this character’s evil came from illness, or from suffering violence. We don’t know if his evil came from being oppressed and shunned by the rich, or from living in an uncaring, garbage-strewn world. We don’t know if he became evil because he was warehoused with other desperately lost souls.

Like Job, Joker has way more questions than answers. And this is a good thing because the truth is we will never know – definitively - where evil comes from. We will never know why good people suffer. We can theorize, we can believe we know the answers, but no one can say with any degree of certainty that they know why bad things happen to good people.

Job and Joker bring up questions which are ultimately unanswerable, but that doesn’t mean we should stop asking these question. There is value in asking ourselves questions which we are completely unequipped to answer, but there is even more value in asking ourselves difficult questions which require serious reflection.

Questions like: Why do we serve God? There’s value in this question, but we find even more value by simply serving. Good people suffer every single day, and even though some of us are uneasy with the word evil, how can we look out into the world and deny its existence?

Evil and suffering exist and while there’s value in contemplating where they come from there’s infinitely more value in asking ourselves a difficult question which all of us are equipped to answer: “What are we going to do about it?”