- Fr. Dr. Jacob Chanikkuzhy
“Very few men had fewer than ten wives; those who had only four or five were considered unmarried and unfortunate.” This is what Herodotus reports about the marriage customs of the Thracians, who in antiquity lived in regions that today include Bulgaria, Romania, and parts of Greece and Turkey. Herodotus also describes another striking custom among these people: when a child was born, relatives would sit around the new-born and lament, listing all the sufferings and miseries the person would face in life. When someone died, however, they would rejoice, saying that the person had finally been freed from life’s hardships.
This pessimistic attitude toward birth also appears in the famous dictum of the Greek tragedian Sophocles: “Not to be born is best of all. Once born, to return as soon as possible to where one came from.” The idea is not foreign to the Bible either. In Ecclesiastes 4:1–3 we read: “The dead are happier than the living—and the unborn happier than both.”
When Job’s friends came to visit him, neither Job nor his friends uttered a word for seven days. Finally, Job broke the silence, by cursing the day of his birth. He curses not only his birth but even the moment of his conception. He cries out that it would have been better for him to die immediately after being born. He wonders why God allows human beings to endure such indescribable suffering. Readers may be startled by these raw and vehement expressions of grief from such a righteous man as Job.
It is noteworthy that Job did not complain when the calamities first struck him. Instead, he blessed God with firm faith and trust: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). Such a response seems worthy of a righteous person of his stature. Yet later his calmness and composure give way to cries of anguish and confusion.
This often happens in human life. When we are first struck by an accident, a serious illness, or the loss of a spouse, parent, or child, we somehow endure the sorrow amid the consolations of friends and family, and the rituals that surround the moment. But later, when the crowds disperse and silence settles in, when we are left alone with our unending pain, our irreversible losses, and our piercing memories, our strength begins to fail. Then we sigh, we groan, and we weep.
Job’s unfiltered words of complaint raise an unsettling question: can a truly righteous person speak to God in such fierce language? His raw and unpolished words reveal the depth of his suffering and remind us that even the most righteous person can fall into despair and darkness. Some believe that raising complaints to God—or even speaking against God—is disrespectful and a sign of weak faith. Their reasoning is simple: a person with strong faith should endure suffering silently. Yet others see these honest and piercing expressions of grief as signs not of weakness but of profound humanity—and even deeper faith.
We question God in the midst of suffering because our experiences seem to contradict what we believe about God’s character. It is precisely our faith in a God who is love and goodness that compels us to wrestle with the mystery of human suffering. Our cries, our laments, our restless questions, our outbursts of sorrow and confusion—these are not denials of faith but expressions of it. After all, the unbeliever has no reason to complain to a God who, in his mind, does not exist.
The Bible does not present silent, stiff-lipped suffering as the ideal. Instead, it gives voice to the cries of figures such as Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, and David. Many of the Psalms themselves are raw cries of lament, rising from hearts shattered by pain and longing. The final words of Jesus on the cross were themselves a piercing lament: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” What followed was an even louder cry, wordless yet searing—a cry that must have rent the heavens like the temple veil torn in two, revealing that God’s presence endures even amid abandonment. In our grief, in our wailing, in our desperate questions and doubts, we join in this timeless chorus of faithful lament, knowing that to cry to God is itself an act of faith, a declaration that we believe, even in the darkness, that God is listening.
