“One night I dreamed a dream.

As I was walking along the beach with my Lord,

scenes from my life flashed across the dark sky.

For each scene, I noticed two sets of footprints in the sand:

one belonging to me and one to my Lord”.

I’m sure that’s a poem which we’ve all come across – I don’t care for it myself as I find it a bit too sentimental. And you’ll probably know that the poem goes on to say, “I noticed that during the saddest and most troublesome times of my life, there was only one set of footprints. This really troubled me, so I asked the Lord about it. I don’t understand why, when I needed you the most, you would leave me”; only for God to reply, “My precious child, I love you and will never leave you … When you saw only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you”.

Well, that’s a comforting thought which must have helped a lot of people over the years. But I want to ask if it is actually true in our experience? You see, I’d venture to suggest that most of us, when facing those “sad and troubled times”, have cried out to God – and apparently received no answer at all. The heavens have been as brass and all we’ve done, it seems, is prove that God’s promises to be with us always are, at best, empty hopes or, at worst, downright lies. We trusted in God’s presence but encountered his absence; he deserted us just at the time we needed him most. So we feel let down and angry and ask what on earth made us believe in the first place? It’s all been a gigantic fraud.

These questions aren’t new; in fact they are fundamental to faith and are addressed in what’s often thought to be the oldest book in the entire Bible, the book of Job. Now you will all, I’m sure, have a rough idea of Job’s story – and of course it’s not clear whether this is the tale of a real man who lived at a real time and in a real place or whether it’s some kind of myth or allegory. That isn’t important. Whatwe have is the story of a man whose life was going well. He was healthy and prosperous, he was beloved by his large family, everything seemed rosy; according one modern version of the Bible, Job “was decent, he feared God, he stayed away from evil [and] was the most influential person in the Middle East”.

But then, almost in an instant, every disaster imaginable crashes down upon him. Some of his herdsmen are murdered by enemies who also steal the animals, while others are struck by lightning. The house where his sons and daughters are feasting is hit by a tornado and collapses, killing them all. Job himself develops agonisingly itchy boils. So we’re not surprised to read that he’s beside himself with anguish, pain and grief and asking, “Why didn’t I die as soon as I was born and breathe my last breath when I came out of the womb? … I have no peace! I have no quiet! I have no rest! And trouble keeps coming!” Here is a man both full of questions and gripped by despair.

Three friends – again, we’re not sure if they are historical people or literary devices dreamed up by the authors in order to present particular points of view – now appear. They each try to explain why these terrible things have happened to Job and what he should do to find a way out of his situation. They’re not bad friends, in fact they sit in silence with Job for a whole week because they see how much he is suffering. But their well-meant advice proves unsatisfactory. Job must look elsewhere for answers to his suffering – if, that is, there are any answers to be had.

By the time we get to chapter 23, the one we are looking at today, this book has turned into something of a courtroom drama. And this is the situation: despite everything that has happened to him, Job still believes that God is just. He wants to present his case before God because he’s convinced that, had God known what was happening to him, he would have intervened on his behalf. (We, of course, already know that Job is mistaken: the first two chapters of the book have presented us with the problematic picture of the Devil going to God and being given permission to test Job’s faith). Job is sure that he has an open-and-shut case: if he can only give God the facts, then God will use his power to free him from the clutches of whatever or whoever is causing his afflictions.

However it’s not long before Job realises that he has a serious problem. For God seems to have gone walkabout or simply vanished into thin air. Like some rogue trader who takes your money and leaves your house in a worse state than it was before he started work (yes, I watch “X-Ray” too!), God appears to have walked away and is no longer answering his mobile. Or like the one friendly official in a faceless bureaucracy who seemed to be your only link to justice, he is never at his desk but always tied up in an important meeting. I’m sure that many of us have found ourselves in similar situations. As one writer put it: “At the moment of greatest need, in the deepest darkness, there turns out to be a palpable nothing, a tangible absence, a harrowing bottomless depth”. Like the proverbial policeman, where is God when you need him?

There seems to be a real tension on the Bible between assurances of God’s presence and human feelings of being deserted by him. For we have beautiful verses such as Exodus 33:14 in which God says, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest”; but we have others such as Psalm 88:14 where the writer cries, “O Lord, whydo you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me?” And then there is a most puzzling verse of Isaiah 45:15 which declares that “The God of Israel, who saves his people, is a God who conceals himself”. That makes God sound like one of those brave people who pulls a drowning man out of the water and then vanishes into thin air without waiting to be thanked. The difference, of course, is that we don’tcall on Godfor help just once but need him on a daily basis – so how dare he run away and hide?

Someone who has written about what he calls “God’s silence” is the last Pope, Joseph Ratzinger. In a meditation on Easter Saturday, that silent day between Jesus’ death and resurrection, he tells us that the experience of God’s silence or absence is one of the most unsettling we can have. Whether it’s because of the death of a relationship, the suicide of a loved one, the face-to-face confrontation with unspeakable evil, the approach of one’s own death; or even through lesser traumas such as a burglary, our settled world is turned upside-down. It’s then that we may turn to God and encounter his absence when we’d been seeking his loving care.

So how does Ratzinger answer this dilemma? He begins by focussing on Jesus’ cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, which he calls a raw prayer of abandonment. But he then takes things further: he sees this cry as marking Jesus’ entry into hell, the world of the dead. If that’s true, it means that he is one with us even in our moments of utterest desolation, for he has been there too. Ratzinger says: “In his passion Christ went into the abyss of our abandonment. Where no voice can now reach us, there is he. Hell is thereby overcome, or, to be more accurate, death, which was previously hell, is hell no longer … There is life in the midst of death, since love dwells in it”.

Those thoughts are, I think, helpful. But I’d also like to tell you about an Orthodox monk called Silouan. who had another way of looking at things. He was originally Russian called Simeon Ivanovich Antonov, but in 1893 he moved to a monastery on Mount Athos in Greece, where he stayed until his death in 1938. Early in his spiritual journey Silouan received a vision of Christ; however that faded which made him feel dry and abandoned by God. As time passed, God’s presence seemed to return – only to vanish again. Silouan began to reflect on this ongoing “oscillation” between God’s presence and his absence and, eventually, came to believe in a paradox: that longing for God is not in fact evidence of his absence, but of his presence.

For Silouan came to believe that we can only long for God because we have, in fact, already experienced him. A person who wrote about Silouan says: “Absence follows presence, and therefore absence is its own kind of presence. So without diminishing the pain of this cycle, I am learning to embrace this truth: if God seems to be near, it is good; but if God seems to be absent, then he is still present in my longing. Longing, after all, is a response to God’s desire for union, not a self-initiated pursuit of God”. I think I can see what is meant here: after all, I can only long for (say) a holiday in a tropical paradise because I know that such a thing is possible; I couldn’t long for it if I’d never heard of the Caribbean and didn’t know it existed. But I also would respectfully say that watching a TV advert andsaying, “If only …” isn’t quite the same as being stretched out on a sun-lounger!

There are no easy answers to give to this question that Job faced. I’d never want to offer the trite response that “God is really with you all the time, it’s just that you don’t recognise it just now”. Not would I give you the cheery cliché “Things can only get better”, a mantra which can only be spoken by people who are worry-free and contented. Those answers just won’t do for the mother whose has lost her children to Covid or the businessman whose company has collapsed or the husband whose wife is dying of a painful degenerative disease. For there are no easy answers; suffering is agonisingly real and far too common. But the one thing we can say – as Job could not – is that. whether we sense his presence or not, the crucified and dying God does suffer alongside us. That might, perhaps, give us a tiny bit of consolation as we hope for a brighter future when God once more feels close enough for us to touch.