How Friends Fail
"You are worthless physicians." —
Job
Suffering is a test of friendship. Compassion wells up within us the moment we hear of calamity striking a friend. Immediately, we respond with a telephone call, a sympathy card, a prayer, and a visit. Then what happens? We go back to our business and tend to forget friends who suffer until a guilty recollection prompts us to repeat our show of sympathy with another card, call, prayer, and visit.
Although I forget more often than I remember, I have discovered an open door for ministry by sending a card or a note to people several weeks after they have suffered the loss of a loved one. In the days immediately following death, grief is cushioned by shock — but when the shock wears off and reality returns, lonely nights and despairing days take over. As a widow of six months said recently, "My husband used to do the grocery shopping with me. Now every time I go to the grocery store, I break down in tears."
The real test of suffering on friendship is long-term. Quick compassion is commendable, but long-term love is what suffering people need. Even now, an image haunts my mind. Four or five times a year, my wife and I make an
Page 56
800-mile round trip to visit her mother, one of God's choicest servants. In her nineties and senile, she is a permanent resident of a nursing home. Each time we walk through the front door of the home, we are greeted by a welcoming committee of aged people who sit in the lobby waiting for someone to come and visit them. Their searching eyes speak volumes as they scan our faces to see if we are family or friends. Seeing no familiar faces, they only grunt when we say "hello" and look past us through the front door once again.
Job's three friends deserve our highest commendation for their genuine compassion when they hear of the calamity that has befallen him. How many friends do we have who would take the time and spend the money to come from distant cities and travel together through a wild and treacherous land to visit us in our suffering (Job 2:11)? A note or a gift might have been sufficient.
There is a time when we must go personally to family and friends who are suffering. A colleague's brother contracted AIDS and confessed a hidden history of gay encounters. Despite the dread and the disgrace of the disease, our friend said, "He's my brother. I must go to him." No one questioned his decision. Even then, his love took a jolt when he first glimpsed the wasted body of his ill brother and realized that his love was destined for a long-term test.
The love of Job's friends also was jolted when they first saw him. While still at a distance, they squinted through the desert sun at a bundle of blackened skin and bones on an ashheap outside the city gates (Job 2:12). They could not handle the sight. Ripping off their clothes and throwing ashes into the air, they fell into mournful silence for seven days (Job 2:13). Just because we know the rest of the story, we must not write off Job's friends too quickly. In the beginning, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar were the kind of friends we need when we suffer. They put everything aside to visit their friend, showed shock at the sight of him, and stayed by his side in silence after his family and other friends had abandoned him. As with most of us who confront suffering, they failed by giving up too soon.
Page 57
Giving Up Too Soon
As long as we hold a shred of hope, we can stand suffering. Job's friends gave him that hope during the seven days when they sat with him in silence. As we noted earlier, abandonment is the cause of despair and with it goes the meaning of life. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist, developed his logo-therapy out of his experience in a Nazi extermination camp. He noted a difference between the prisoners who survived and those who succumbed to brutality. Survivors were those people who had something to live for — whether faith, family, or future. Those whose lives had lost their meaning, however, died without the will to fight.
We cannot place enough value on the assuring presence of family and friends during the time of suffering. Nothing need be said. In fact, it is usually the anxiety of the visitor that forces an awkward conversation. "How are you?" is one of the most ridiculous questions we can ask. The suffering person must either lie to please us or be honest and provoke us to recite platitudes of reassurance. To the credit of Job's friends, they let their presence speak for them. The value of those moments is later reflected in Job's pitiful prayer when they are in the heat of debate:
Oh, that you would be silent
And it would be your wisdom!
(Job 13:5)
There is good reason for the silent presence of family and friends during the time of suffering. When a person is in pain, whether physical, psychological, social, or spiritual, the atmosphere is heavily charged with sensitivity to the cues that betray our unspoken feelings. As a former hospital chaplain, I remember the faux pas of a ministerial student who read the Psalm, "The Lord will not suffer thy foot to be moved." His patient was a man whose right foot had just been amputated! I also remember a family who had just been informed that their father had a fatal disease. When they entered his room, they tried to hide their feelings by engaging in bad jokes and nervous chatter. The father instantly perceived
Page 58
their awkwardness and stopped them in mid-laughter with the question, "It's over, isn't it?"
We forget that the suffering person has all five senses sharpened to a razor's edge, along with an intuitive sixth sense. Again, in the hospital chaplaincy, we were warned that a muffled whisper across the room may be heard as a shout by a dying person. Or that a lowering of the eyes in answer to a patient's question can expose a visual answer that we cannot dodge with the most nimble of verbal sidesteps.
Job's friends lack these insights. After seven days, they give him up for dead and walk away. Little do they realize that their presence gave Job hope. Even less do they realize what their leaving means to him. When they walk away, Job sees something through fevered eyes that drives him to a violent verbal reaction. Hysterically, he screams after them:
Why did I not die at birth?
(Job 3:11)
For the thing I greatly feared
has come upon me,
And what I dreaded
has happened to me.
(Job 3:25)
The sight of his friends walking away triggers the fear of abandonment that each of us feels deep within his being. Job faces what we fear. As close as Job might have been to God, he still needed the assurance of a human face. With the loss of his friends, Job not only feels abandoned but will test a relationship between himself and his unseen God without the benefit of human support.
Failing to Listen
By his own admission, Job's cry is angry, rash, and bitter. How else can we cry "Why?" from the brink of death and despair? If our cry is genuine, it cannot sound like a mere academic question raised in a neutral setting. Many interpreters of the Book of Job fail at this point. They sterilize the setting and intellectualize the "Why?" Put yourself in Job's
Page 59
place. His suffering is total, his death is imminent, his righteousness is intact, and his last three friends have given him up for dead. Who wouldn't cry, "May the day I was born be cursed"?
From the innermost recesses of his being, Job vents the bitterness which suffering people feel, but are usually afraid to express. Perhaps our guilt holds us back. If so, we understand why Job does not hesitate to vent his feelings. He is a righteous man for whom guilt is no barrier. His cry comes right from his spleen, the source of the body's most bitter bile.
Job's friends couldn't handle such an outburst. They heard his words, but do not listen to the meaning of his cry. To them, Job violates every rule of moderation that characterizes the wise man. In Job's rash words, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar hear only the raving of a fool and the rebellion of a blasphemer (Job 15:2-6). If only they had listened to the meaning of Job's cry, they would have heard a desperate appeal for help from friends in whom he still had confidence. They were his court of last resort in the human context. But instead of hearing his appeal, they stumble on protocol and condemn their friend. Because they refuse to listen to the meaning of Job's cry, they provoke a dialogue of escalating rage and deteriorating substance that ends in a silent, sullen stalemate.
During the campus revolt of the early 1970s, a student leader spewed venom against me as president of a university. Years earlier, I had learned never to respond to a personal attack in public, so I invited her into my office. Knowing her parents and caring for her, I asked her why she had resorted to such tactics. Her answer surprised me when she said, "Don't you know when you hear a cry for help?" Since then, I have tried to listen for the meaning of people's words, especially when they are hostile. So often, the sound and the meaning are not the same.
Job's dialogue with his three friends illustrates the consequences of failure to listen. After Job cries out in anguish, the dialogue falls into this deteriorating pattern:
Eliphaz: "You have sinned" (4:17)
Job: "You are no help" (6:21).
Page 60
Bildad: "You are full of hot air" (8:2).
Job: "God is my adversary" (10:16).
Zophar: "You mock God" (11:3).
Job: "You mock me" (12:4)
Eliphaz: "You are a fool" (15:2).
Job: "You are miserable comforters" (16:2).
Bildad: "You shut up" (18:2).
Job: "You crush me" (19:2).
Zophar: "You insult us" (20:3).
Job: "You listen just once" (21:2).
Eliphaz: "You are wicked" (22:2-3).
Job: "I will trust God" (23:10).
Bildad: "You are a maggot" (25:6)!
(End of conversation.)
The heated debate ends with a demeaning and dehumanizing insult. Silence follows. Close friends who once loved each other have nothing more to say. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar came to comfort Job. Instead, they aggravated his suffering and added to his grief. To them, a beloved friend became a groveling worm. If only they had listened!
Spiritualizing Too Easily
Job's friends also failed him when they glibly spiritualized his suffering. Spiritualizing comes in many forms and has two extremes. One extreme is a Pollyanna attitude. The most common form of a spiritualized Pollyanna response is to quote the Scripture to a suffering soul, "For we know that all things work together for good for them who love the Lord." Try telling that to Job on an ashheap!
During my college days, a student friend worked in a local woodworking shop to pay her school bills. In an unguarded moment, she placed her hand on a running table saw and severed it at the wrist. After coming out of surgery, she was "comforted" by her employer with this spiritual Pollyannism, "Thank God it was only a hand. You might have lost an arm." Try telling that to Job on an ashheap.
Evidently Job's friends tried a bit of spiritual Pollyanna
Page 61
on him. At least at the beginning of their exchange, they balanced out their indictment of his sin with poetic promises of restored health, prosperity, and peace. In a biting response, Job reminds them:
I also could speak as you do,
If your soul were in my soul's place.
(Job 16:4)
While Job's sarcasm is primarily intended to refute their "windy words" and "miserable comfort," he is referring to their easy spiritualizing as well.
The other extreme of spiritualizing is worse than the Pollyanna panacea. When Job splits the air with his anguished cry, "Why was I born?" his three friends interpret it as an attack on God rather than a cry for help. Of necessity, then, they take it upon themselves to defend God — the most arrogant of human assumptions. Fanaticism is the result. A fanatic is appropriately defined as a person who acts as God would act . . . if God had all the facts. Or a fanatic approaches issues with the attitude of a young boy who purported to draw a picture of God. When informed by an adult that no one knew what God looked like, the confident artist answered, "When I'm through, they will."
Job's friends speak as if they have all the facts and know God's thoughts ahead of Him. So, they jump to judgment and diagnose Job's distress as the result of sin. The truth of the matter is that Job's outburst is a personal threat to their security and authority. Suffering people often do shocking things. One of the gentlest spirits I have known thrashed and raged in the final hours before death. His wife reported that the nightmare of those hours will never leave her because she did not know how to handle the shock of his reaction. In similar fashion, Job's angry and bitter call after his departing friends terrifies them. Job, whom they had known as a thoughtful man who modeled the moderation of wisdom, exploded in a rage that they could not handle. Job himself said to them, , "You see terror and are afraid" (Job 6:21).
Suffering determines whether or not we can accept a violent and unexpected reaction from a friend, particularly when it might be interpreted as a personal attack. In his book
Page 62
Dialogue of Despair, William Hulme draws the difference between responding and reacting to the expression of a friend's frustration. If, he says, the needs of the other person are the center of our attention, we respond by accepting his outburst as an expression of these needs. If, however, the focus is upon our own needs, we will be threatened by the needs of others and react defensively against them.1 Friendship that serves only to bolster our own needs will break down under such a test.
More than their security is at stake. Job's violent reaction is a threat to the authority of his three friends. Eliphaz, for instance, is the eldest and presumably the wisest of the three friends. His first response to Job is spoken in the tone of a benevolent father. Yet, by appealing to a special nighttime vision as the source of his authority, Eliphaz declares that sin is the root cause of Job's suffering. When Job disputes Eliphaz's authority as an elder and contends for his innocence, Job is defending the essence of his self-esteem. Bildad labels him a "bag of wind" (8:2), and Zophar indicts him for mocking authority (11:3).
When our egos are threatened, we seldom choose a direct counterattack. No one really wants to admit to a tender ego. So we find a more acceptable base from which to launch our counterattack. Religious people, in particular, may choose to spiritualize the issue to gain a formidable weapon. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar choose this tactic for their counterattack on Job. By posing as the defenders of the faith against a person whom they progressively label as sinful, rebellious, and wicked, they presume to be on God's side.
On my desk at this moment is a letter of criticism which begins, "Before writing to you, I sought the mind of God . . ." The writer then goes on to make caustic judgments against a person whom he does not know and draws damning conclusions without the facts. Neither love nor reason prevails.
Under the same guise, Zophar attacks Job. Presuming to speak for God, he goes beyond Eliphaz and Bildad's accusation of sin to denounce him as a "wicked man" who is pervasively evil (20:29). What defense does Job have? He chooses the only alternative open to him — a direct appeal to God.
Job's friends fail him when they give him up for dead. If
Page 63
they had continued to walk away from his anguished cry, it might have been the end. Ironically, they may have saved him by turning back and contesting his cry. Job still has something to live for because he has something to prove. So often, our will to live in times of stress is created by adversaries who want to see us defeated and dead.
Not long ago, I went through a crisis which my adversaries turned into an issue of my survival. Their tactic backfired. Once I knew that my survival was at stake, I found untapped resources upon which to draw. Just this week a student said, "I see confidence in your countenance. You minister to me." We must never underestimate the capacity of human beings to survive.
When human survival is threatened by outside forces, the will to live can give us a strength never known before. Job's gritty refusal to give up hope is a reminder that even when the threat to life is spiritualized, we have untapped resources upon which to draw.
The Man of Sorrows
Job's friends fail him because they give up too soon, listen too little, and spiritualize too easily. Jesus suffers a similar fate at the hands of His family and friends. When Isaiah envisions Jesus as "a man of sorrows" he puts the description in the context of Jesus being "despised and rejected by men" (Isa. 53:3). Members of His family give up too soon on Him. When friends came to them reporting Jesus' radical statements about His divine identity and His redemptive mission, the family reacts with embarrassment: "He is out of His mind" (Mark 3:21).
Time and time again, Jesus introduces or concludes His teaching with the admonition, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." He is appealing for an understanding of the meaning of His words over and above admiration of His authoritative style. Of course, those whose security and authority are threatened by His teaching turn their attack into a spiritual confrontation. By exposing the pious protocol upon which the Pharisees rely, Jesus undercuts their personal security and their religious authority. Not unexpectedly, then, they
Page 64
charge Him with heresy and blasphemy against the Church and with treason and sedition against the State. As if this were not enough, their spiritual attack climaxes with the outrageous claim that Jesus is in league with the devil!
Of course, Jesus' closest friends also give up on Him too soon when they abandon Him in the Garden or the palace courtyard. Despite all the hours He spent with them trying to convey the promise of the Resurrection, they never hear the meaning of His message. And, despite the flashes of spiritual insight that came to the disciples during their time with Jesus, they still doubt Him and cower in fear until the day of Pentecost.
Because we now know how friends fail us in our suffering, we also know how they help us. If our families and friends stay with us during our suffering and never give up hope, we will not despair. If they listen for the meaning of our cries, we will know a love that accepts us as we are. If they respond to our needs rather than spiritualizing our anguish, we will have a chance to grow in faith.
In the midst of his suffering, Job reverses roles with his three friends for just a moment. Initially, he reacts against them as they have reacted against him:
I also could speak as you do,
If your soul were in my soul's place.
I could heap up words against you,
And shake my head at you.
(Job 16:4)
Then, out of the insight of his anguish comes the response which he hoped his friends would give:
But I would strengthen you
with my mouth,
And the comfort of my lips would
relieve your grief.
(Job 16:5)
When we suffer and ask "Why?" there is no substitute for the special ministry of friends.
