Suffering and the means of our salvation

In his commentary on the ninth chapter of Job, Robert Alter, writing specifically on the second independent clause of the second verse- "how can [a] man be right before God?"- notes that these words refer to "being vindicated in a court of law." The essence of Job's complaint at the beginning of this chapter is that because God and human beings are equal, "he bitterly recognizes that he will never have his day in court." Even so, Job could never win. My whole point in fleshing this out is to get to a wonderful comparison Alter makes: "One detects a fundamental idea that will lead to Kafka's The Trial."

Josef K., the main character in Kafka's work, is arrested but, despite the cloud of suspicion hanging over him, he is never brought to trial. The salient moment, the one to which I believe Alter refers, is a story told to Josef by a priest in the cathedral of the city in which he lives and to which he has accompanied an Italian client. The story is Before the Law.

In Before the Law, a man from a rural area tries to gain access to "the law." He wants to gain entry through an open door. The doorkeeper informs the man he cannot go through the door now. So the man waits, not just a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, or even a few weeks. He waits for years to be admitted. Over that time, the man uses everything he has to bribe the doorkeeper to let him through. While the doorkeeper takes all the man's bribes so that the man can be assured has not "left anything undone." Just before he dies, the man asks the doorkeeper why, in all the years he has waited, has no one else sought access to the law. The doorkeeper replies by saying, "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."

There are reasons that authors like Kafka and Samuel Beckett were fascinated by the Book of Job. Believers should be as well. Job demonstrates that, even for those of us who believe in the God of the Bible, there is no "good" or acceptable answer to the problem of evil. This is even true for Christians in light of Christ's death.

In Waiting for Godot, Beckett has Vladimir worrying about why Jesus assuring the "good thief," whom Tradition has named "Saint" Dismas, is only found in Saint Luke's Gospel, despite the fact that one of two being saved seems to him "a reasonable percentage." It was Saint Augustine who asserted that just because Jesus only assured Dismas one should not assume that the other, less convinced thief was damned.

Redemption, justification, salvation are serious. I think, at least to some extent, Lent is a time to take these things with more seriousness. We tend to think and speak of these things, if we think or speak of them at all, lightly and live our lives until the moment of suffering sets in. Suffering, in case you haven't noticed, is, to use a common business phrase, "baked into" human existence. This captured well in Preface III of the Sundays in Ordinary Time when we pray:

For we know that it belongs to your boundless glory,
that you came to the aid of mortal beings with your divinity
and even fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself,
that the cause of our downfall
might become the means of our salvation...

Our traditio for this First Friday of Lent is Tom Jones singing a Gospel classic, which is a track on his Praise & Blame album, "Did Trouble Me."