Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Job chapter 12:1 and 14:18-22:
18 ‘But the mountain falls and crumbles away,
and the rock is removed from its place;
19 the waters wear away the stones;
the torrents wash away the soil of the earth;
so you destroy the hope of mortals.
20 You prevail for ever against them, and they pass away;
you change their countenance, and send them away.
21 Their children come to honour, and they do not know it;
they are brought low, and it goes unnoticed.
22 They feel only the pain of their own bodies,
and mourn only for themselves.’
Yesterday a friend commented on yesterday’s Lesson on Job’s suffering and spoke of a past personal experience with significant suffering. He said the first Noble Truth of Buddhism — “Life is suffering” — had been helpful to him in this time.
Life is suffering. This must be accepted and normalized. Just as running water slowly wears away a hard, so too does time wear away at our bodies. And the rock is harder than the skin, and the sting of rejection a poison to even the strongest of hearts.
We have to learn to accept the fact that life necessitated that suffering will come our way. We have to normalize and cease moralizing this. When pain and suffering afflict us, it is not necessarily because we are bad people and deserve it. That is a moralizing tale. The deeper truth is that suffering is unavoidable; it is human.
Moltmann wrote titled “The Suffering God”. In it, he wrote about the radical Christian understanding of God having entered into our suffering with us in Jesus. Jesus came to enter into our suffering, to redeem it — to show that all suffering is not morally self-inflicted. Jesus suffered and died a death like all humans to show that suffering and death are absolute facts of life.
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