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Day by day, morning by morning, the hours of daylight are getting shorter. Winter isn’t far off. Like people of ancient times, many today dislike the dark and think of the light as symbolising goodness. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light, wrote the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, using a metaphor to evoke hope of better times to come.

Now in that land where Isaiah lived, many people must be wondering when the light of hope and of goodness will return. At times, for those who are believers, hoping against hope for that goodness – keeping faith in God – can almost be a burden. Can we really be expected to believe that suffering is somehow good for us?

Some years ago, when I was being treated for cancer and I was in the Today studio, presenter John Humphrys asked me off air, what did I think of God now? Could I make sense of suffering? I can quite honestly say that serious illness did bring me blessings, not least the care and love I experienced from family, friends, and my doctors.

Would I be some sort of spiritual failure if I could not see God in the midst of what happened to me? Are the people of Israel and Gaza expected to endure what is happening and their burdens be made even greater by lambasting themselves for not finding God amid their suffering?

In the Book of Job, one of the books of Hebrew and Christian scripture, Job enjoys a life of privilege and comfort. But then things go badly wrong. He loses everything. Job is mentioned in the Quran too and In Palestinian folklore his place of trial is close by Ascalon, today’s Ashkelon, where people’s lives were destroyed by Hamas’s rockets.
Job rails against God, for what has happened to him. His friends, though, berate Job, saying that all that happens is part of some harmonious whole of God’s making.

The last chapters of the book have God speaking about what is happening to Job. Job’s friends were wrong, their ideas too simple, God says. Job has spoken rightly about God. The book of Job doesn’t answer the age old question of why bad things happen to good people. But it does show that it’s absolutely fine to wrestle with the impossible. Sometimes, things are just awful. We need to cry out, to be angry, to grieve for what is lost. It’s not always possible to see the light in the darkness. To me, God seems to be saying: place your pain and grief in his hands and leave him to shoulder it.

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