God on Trial

Din Torah

By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch

October 7, 2012

World Communion Sunday

Job 1:1, 2: 1-12

Yaffa Eliach, a highly respected Jewish historian who is herself a survivor of the Holocaust, tells the story that in 1979, she was a member of President Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust.  The commission, who would ultimately lay the groundwork for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, had visited sites of countless atrocities and collected stories from Holocaust survivors. After visiting Auschwitz, the commission held evening services at the ancient Rema Synagogue in Cracow, Poland.  In the middle of the worship service, “Miles Lerman, a former partisan and sole survivor of a large Jewish family,” stepped forward, banged his fist on the bema, the pulpit, “and declared that he was calling God to Din Torah—summoning God to court!” In English, he laid out the charges:

“‘God! How could you stay here when next door are Auschwitz and Plaszow? Where were you when all over Europe your sons and daughters were burning on altars? What did you do when my sainted father and mother marched to their deaths? When my sisters and brothers were put to the sword?’”

Lerman’s bold theological challenge is similar to Job’s, albeit it is Job’s situation multiplied by a million. Job has lost his children, his wealth, his property, and his health, all despite the fact that he’s been a good person and a faithful believer his whole life. What is the nature of God if even the righteous suffer and children die for no apparent reason? That’s what Job wants to know.

Lerman’s question assumes that God is present in the world. The question he was asking in the Rema synagogue is, How is God present in the world? Is God present only if we keep our appointment with God at the house of worship? Is God too holy to leave the synagogue to be with God’s people in their most urgent time of need?

One of the disturbing things about the passage of Job that we just read the way God distances Himself from Job’s suffering. God “allows” Satan to cause Job to suffer. Essentially God gives divine permission to Satan to kill Job’s children and ruin Job’s life. It looks as if he’s saying, “I didn’t do these awful things—Satan did them.” It’s antiseptic—impersonal.

Archibald MacLeish wrote a play, JB, that modernizes the story of Job. Nickles, the Satan character in JB puts the problem this way:

If God is God, he is not good.

If God is good, He is not God.

Take the even, take the odd.[1] 

Here’s the problem in a nutshell. Here’s why suffering is a theological problem. We say that God is both all-powerful and all-loving. If that’s the case, there shouldn’t be suffering. So either God is all-powerful, but uncaring; or else God is loving and kind, but not all-powerful. Take the even, take the odd.

Lerman, the crusty resistance leader and Holocaust survivor, makes the prosecutor’s case for the first premise, that “if God is God, he is not good.” The problem is that a God who is all-powerful but allows suffering is also impersonal—uncaring—unconcerned with humanity. Lerman is outraged because he believes God has committed fraud—He’s pretended to care for us but actually is too holy, too high and mighty, and too concerned with the running of the universe to pay us any attention unless we’re groveling before Him in worship.

And if that’s the case—Lerman is right. Faith in a good God is a monumental fraud. I should be standing here, on World Communion Sunday, banging my fist on the communion table, calling God to Din Torah for the suffering of Syrian families living under olive trees, children with sores on their faces, while Syrian Air Force planes strafe their hospitals; for Haitians still living in squalor, with no government support, nearly four years after they were hit by an earthquake; for those we know and love struggling with mental or physical illnesses that make their lives and the lives of those who love them a living hell. If God will only condescend to deal with us if we come here to church and sing praise to God’s name, everybody here should just get up and leave and never come back. We should sell St. Stephen to TCU and let them put up a parking lot. You know they want to.

After that service in Cracow, Eliach, Lerman, and the others walked to the door of the old synagogue, and “an old Cracow Jew” asked Eliach, “‘What did your American friend say, in the language of dollars?’” She told him that Miles Lerman had called God to Din Torah. The man shook his head. “‘Tell him THIS is not God’s synagogue. This is Rema’s synagogue. God likes, these days, big concentrations of Jews, congregations with many quorums. God now dwells in [the concentration camps and mass graves]—Plaszow, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and many other such synagogues! God does not live here anymore.’”[i] 

The old Cracow Jew is presenting the other side of MacLeish’s verse: “If God is good, He is not god.” God is good and loving. God is with us in suffering and misery and death, even more so than when we’re worshiping God, or when things go well for us. God doesn’t end human suffering, but instead God suffers with us, is one with us in our most desperate time of need.

That sounds a bit more like the God we Christians understand, the God we know through Jesus Christ. It’s the God we remember and celebrate every time we come to this table—the table where we lay out Christ’s body broken for us, and Christ’s blood shed for us. This is the God who truly loves us, deeply understands us, and has chosen to shed His godly majesty to share in both the joy and suffering of human experience, to live as we live, to die as we die.

But is this also a powerless god—a God who means well but is really impotent against the forces of evil and suffering, and so even God becomes a victim?

The next few weeks, as we study the book of Job, we will ask these questions. We may not find comfortable answers. So it seems important that we begin our journey, as Christians, here, at this table.

Here we affirm our faith, a faith that is often shaken by the difficult realities of the world in which we live.

Here we affirm our faith, a faith that is often shaken by the difficult realities of our daily lives.

Here we affirm our faith, and it IS faith—because faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

Despite the evidence of what we see, this table is the evidence of what we hope for. Our God is both good and powerful.

The God we meet at this table is the God who honors human experience so much that God shed the divine distance that separates Himself from us, and became a human being, bound by time and history and physical limitations and human needs and by death itself.  The God we meet at this table loves us so much that He died, giving His life to rescue us from the power of death.

The God we meet at this Table was and is so powerful that though He willingly submitted Himself to death, death could not contain Him, and after three days He arose again from the dead. His resurrection is the promise of resurrection for us all. It’s the proof that this man Jesus who died wasn’t just a great prophet or a crazy man with grandiose illusions—He was God in the flesh, because only God can defeat the power of death.

But it’s not only that. When we come up here to take our piece of the bread that represents His body and dip it into the wine that represents His blood, we are receiving the power to live Jesus’ resurrection here in the world right here and right now. Eat this bread and drink this cup and you not only partake of Jesus’ death, you partake of His resurrection. You’re living Jesus’ resurrected life in our wounded world.

When you take the bread and wine, you’re becoming one with those who suffered at Treblinka, or who are suffering in Syria and Haiti, just as God through Jesus became one with us. And you’re also empowered to do something about it–in your small way as an individual, in our larger way as a community–to make a difference to those who are in need, to be the change that the world needs to make. You are empowered in a small, incomplete, but nonetheless real way, to be the presence of the resurrected Christ in the world.

The God we meet at this table is so powerful that He took the very worst thing that humanity could do—to execute God in person!—and turns it into the very act that is saving the world, and will completely overcome evil and suffering and death itself, and bring about the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God.

As we work through the book of Job the next few weeks, we’ll confront the uncomfortable questions that faith in a good God inevitably raises. I hope that what we find will be enlightening and edifying. But it will never resolve all the questions. So in starting our journey it’s important to remember again the faith that brings us to this table in the first place, the faith that stands against the darkness, the faith that sees us through to the other side—that nothing in life or in death can separate us from the love of God found in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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