Brief synopsis of the readings: In the book of Job we see him despairing of life. He feels like a slave and describes life as a drudgery. His nights are troubled and his days end without hope. The readings end with “I shall not see happiness again.” In Mark’s Gospel Jesus finds Simon’s (Peter’s) mother in law with a fever and cures her. Once cured she rose and served them. That evening, after sunset, the whole town gathered; Jesus cured diseases and drove out demons; he didn’t allow the demons to speak as they knew him. The next morning Jesus rose before dawn and sent off to a deserted place to pray. His disciples found him and told him that everyone was looking for him. Jesus then went into the nearby villages and taught in the synagogues. He preached and drove out demons “throughout the whole of Galilee.”

There’s no way around the fact that the book of Job is hard to read, and if it doesn’t make you uncomfortable you’re probably not really reading it. The book begins with a dialogue between God and “an adversary;” we’re not told exactly who that is. God bragged to him that Job was a faithful servant but the adversary countered that Job was only faithful because God had blessed him. God and the adversary then made an agreement to test this: the adversary can take away everything Job has. The adversary bets that Job will break faith with God and God bets that he won’t. Job’s herds were stolen and his herdsmen were killed; his children were then killed when the house collapsed on them. Finally Job’s skin was covered with boils and his friends found him sitting on a pile of dung.

Little wonder Job felt a little down on life. Spoiler alert: in the end Job kept his faith in God and God gave him larger herds and more children. As modern readers we’re no doubt horrified by this. Simply put Job was a pawn in a game and larger herds and newer children can hardly be seen as adequate compensation. It’s important to recognize that this book is not historical and these events didn’t happen. This book is a long parable meant to tell us something.

And that something is the fact that suffering happens, not just to those who deserve it. This question is hardly one that we haven’t thought about. The question of why bad things happen to good people goes to the heart of what we see as justice and the fact that we struggle so much with this question shows how much we seek and value justice.

Too often, though, we strive to seek easy meanings. I’m a fan of the book When Bad Things Happen To Good People and the author devotes several pages to horrible things told to people who are grieving in their attempt to find meaning. They are told that God won’t give us more than we can handle (so this wouldn’t have happened if I were weaker) or that God has a plan (why won’t he share his plan with me) or that this must be a punishment for something (what parent punishes a child but doesn’t say what he did wrong). I once ran a grief support group where a young woman described getting a call that her 25 year old fiance died suddenly from a stroke. In her tears she told me that a well meaning friend told her that God must have someone even better in mind for her; imagine her hesitancy in dating someone knowing that another mistake would also be fatal to this guy too.

As hard as it is to accept I believe that we need to understand that some suffering is simply random; we didn’t cause it and it isn’t in response to something we did. But, and this keeps coming up for me in my life, we need to shift our attention in another direction.

If suffering can be random, so can healing. Today’s Gospel gives us several experiences of healing. We don’t know what caused the fever in Peter’s mother in law but we know that Jesus healed her; the fact that we can treat fevers with acetaminophen doesn’t take away from Jesus’ power to heal. We also don’t know what caused the suffering of the others, though I’m certain there was spirited debate about it.

But not with Jesus. He had the power to heal and he did it. And in our world we sometimes overlook our ability to heal. This isn’t part of today’s first reading but in addition to all his suffering Job is also visited by three friends who insist that he must have done something to deserve his suffering. Their problem is that they never considered that they might be able to help Job.

In creating us in God’s image we are also given the ability to heal. I know many of us feel bombarded with ads for St. Jude’s Childrens’ Cancer Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee but there is great healing there. Childhood cancer scares everyone but since St. Jude’s opened in 1962 they have made incredible strides in treatment and cure. Countless people are alive today because of the generosity of donors and the determination of scientists.

And while mental illness continues to defy easy cures or treatments we are learning what we can do. There are medications and therapy but we’re also learning how to be kind and generous and how much of an effect that can have. I belong to a church that was home to a parishioner with autism. He had great difficulty reading social cues but desperately wanted to belong. One of the priests recognized this and reached out to him. This priest made time to understand his struggles and taught him how to behave during mass. It was still a struggle and it stretched the patience of many of us, but this autistic man came to find a home in the parish.

Please understand that I don’t wish to take the focus off of suffering. But we believe that, like Job, suffering is never the end of the story. Healing does.