Life Is Not Fair. How

¶ … Life is not fair. How often have we been told this, after we have worked hard, yet not been rewarded with what we desire? It is not fair that some children get cars on their 16th birthday, while other children in the world do not have enough to eat. Yet, too often, we expect religion to provide easy answers to difficult questions about the nature of justice in the world. We as humans try to create fair systems where justice is blind to govern our own societies. We expect God to reward the good, and punish the evil. But the world that God created, and that human beings live in, does not work that way, despite our best efforts, for reasons that are not immediately obvious, even to devout believers.

The lesson of "The Book of Job" is not simply that suffering is everywhere and can be inflicted upon anyone, but that quite often in the moral economy of the world, the good are punished and evil is not punished in kind. Still, suffering must be endured because there is nothing else a sufferer can do. This lesson is seen, not simply in the example of Job, a good man deprived of his children, wealth, and health, but in the contemporary examples of Hurricane Katrina, children suffering from cancer, or people who lose their homes in an unexpected whirlwind of a tornado. People take the good with the bad, and sometimes a person wins the lottery, even though they are ordinary, and sometimes one home is destroyed in a natural disaster and another home is not. This is the nature of life, and there is no bargaining the universe, just as there is no bargaining with God. Perhaps the most striking images of "The Book of Job" are those in which God is compared to the impersonal forces of nature, like fires or the ocean, which cannot be reasoned with, merely endured. "Speak up: Where is the road to light? Where does darkness live...you have been there and are older than all creation" (70). Only God knows these answers, because God is older than creation.

Yes, Job gets back what he has lost. But it would be mistaken to read this as a reward for his fortitude in the face of adversity. Rather, it is evidence of the arbitrary nature of God's justice. God decides to test Job, because Job has many emotional and financial riches, even though Job is not the richest, or the happiest man in the world. The test happens by chance, and the return happens by chance. It might seem as though Job has a good reason to curse God, but although Job wails and regrets his fate he does not turn against the Lord, although at first he cannot understand why his suffering has occurred.

Job attempts to look back, and wonder if blasphemous thoughts are the reason, if not actions. But he always knows it is useless to curse God, because God is so powerful, as God reminds Job and his friends at the end of the tale, and also, as the translator Stephen Mitchell suggests in his preface, perhaps because Job is so shell-shocked by what has occurred, he does not have the energy to curse God. Instead, Job damns the day he was born, but not his creator. One breath from God and things can shrivel up, one blast of God's rage and things burn -- unlike human anger, God has control over anything and everything because He is the creator (7). Like forest fire, God's wrath, in the eyes of humanity, is unstoppable and incomprehensible.

Finally, Job, after his initial and understandable sorrow and rage he enters into a kind of Zen-like state of acceptance of his fate, of the fact that as a human being, he cannot resist the nature of the world. God has created all things, unlike humans, who are simply God's creation (23). The world is full of bad as well as good. Job was not given good fortune in proportion to his goodness, although he was a good man, and so the reverse is also true. True, Job never neglected the poor, made the innocent suffer, or let the poor go hungry (67). But like all human beings, he was not perfect and things came to him by chance.

Job's friends are not better or worse than Job, either. Rather their comprehension is more ordinary and more foolish, as they assume Job or his children were evil and thus must deserve their fates (15). Job's condition has given Job, if nothing else, spiritual insight. Again, this is not a reward, rather it is what is extraordinary and instructive about Job's example, otherwise the world would be filled with Jobs, who merely find out that life is not fair and little else. Job's friends think God lives by the Golden Rule, like humans should do, and makes sure that He acts towards the good as they would act towards Him. But Job says, unlike a human person, "no man can argue with God" (17).

If God was good to people in proportion to their kindness, that would mean, by this easy logic, that Donald Trump was 'better' because of his good fortune, than an ordinary real estate salesman, because he had been rewarded with 'more.'