Jesus finds himself frequently among the suffering and the dying. He seems to have embraced those who suffered, just as he himself would fully embrace suffering and death at the end. As we see in todays gospel extract, the sick sought him out in great numbers. He was a source of hope and, ultimately, healing, for them.

The classic exploration of meaningless suffering and depression is of course the Book of Job. Many of you will be familiar with the figure of Job. Struck down with all sorts of illness and misfortune, he abandons the town and makes his way to the local dump. There he is, sitting on the dung-hill, covered in sores. As so often happens, passers-by stop to gaze upon this curiosity. They offer the unfortunate Job advice, explanations and spurious comfort in that order. Many of you will be familiar with the direct descendants of Job's comforters: 'Pull yourself together, for God's sake.' 'Time is a great healer!' 'It's the will of God.' Or the real 'pick me up': 'didn't Jesus go through worse!'

Anyone who has been through such an experience as Job will recognise the athenticity of Job's own language and imagery. It is a world removed from the pious placebos pedalled by his comforters: "Months of delusion assigned to me, nothing for my own but nights of grief. Lying in bed I wonder, when will it be day; risen, I think, How slowly evening comes. Restless I fret till twilight falls."

In fact, in the first centuries, when the Church was trying to decide what Jewish works should be included in the Catholic canon of Scriptures, a very strong case was made for the exclusion of Job. Job was though to be too pessimistic, too hopeless, too despairing. But another group took the view that this book faithfully recounted one aspect of our relationship with God. Depression and blackness, and a strong sense of God's absence, reflects the reality experienced by many, many people, at some stage in their lives at any rate. To ignore this aspect of human experience would be mere escapism or false optimism. This latter view prevailed and Job survived to continue his realistic if uncomfortable message. Because of the inclusion of the Book of Job in the Canon of scriptures, the bible becomes all things to all men. It presents us with the full panorama of the human experience of God, from desolation to elation, from the despair of Job to the almost arrogant confidence of St. Paul. And the great treadmill upon which all were tested was suffering.

Suffering and death are central to our lives. All of us, to differing degrees perhaps, have been touched by the sufferings and pain of close friends or family members. Perhaps we have ourselves suffered and been changed in the process. Many of us will have experienced the harshest blow that live can give: the death of a loved one or a close friend. Understandably, we run scared from contemplating such experiences; we shrink from considering such possibilities. We will go to great lengths to avoid discussing them. As the Americans would put it, we go into denial in the face suffering and impending death. And this attitude is not confined to the personal dimension. Institutions too can go into denial when confronted with unpleasant reality. The more senior among you will recall the Chinese throwing Mao Tse Tung into the Yanksi river on his 80th birthday. The message was that this man will live forever. Indeed the authorities in Rome are not beyond pulling similar stunts! For three years the Vatican publicly denied that the Holy Father was suffering from a progressive illness. Yet he himself comes across as a man of great inner strength. He does come across as being more capable than most of dealing with infirmity and the feebleness that comes with old age. Here was an opportunity for him to be a universal teacher; to point out to the world that this condition, this stage was a natural progression on the road to God. His minders, I fear, followed the ways of the world. They denied his illness, they strove to disguise his deterioration. An 80 year old man in a wheelchair is, apparently, not an acceptable image. Despite all that the man himself had taught and preached, at the end the cult of youthful vigour must prevail. His minders have fallen for the trap that he himself so often excoriated. In doing so, they are following the mind-set of cosmetic surgery and superficial panacea: Superficially, we have convinced ourselves that life is clinically manageable, that suffering and death have, at worst, been banished to the margins of old age. Yet we know in our hearts that illness, depression, pain and death are all very much part of life, that they are not confined to the domain of old age alone.

Since suffering and bereavement forces us to ask some very fundamental questions about our life, it naturally leads us to question our religion and our God. To put it bluntly, if someone close us you falls seriously ill or dies, our first question will be, "Where was my God when I wanted him?" "Where was he when we called upon him in our depression and desperation?" The Book of Job eats like a worm at the heart of the Old Testament. The book presents Job had been a wealthy man, highly regarded among his own tribe. He had a wife and family whom he greatly loved. Gradually, through sickness and famine, he loses everything that he held dear. He himself contracts leprosy and he is reduced to scavenging for scraps on the rubbish dump outside the city. Ensconced on the dump, he discusses his awful predicament with three friends who came to comfort him. "Why has God allowed this to happen to me?", Job asks in anger. His three comforters have an abundance of pious answers. But the glory of Job is that he rejects all these. The book closes with the problem unsolved. The book functions as a passionate demonstration that life and its complexity cannot be reduced to the personal predicament of one individual. Life is greater and more mysterious than any one of us.

Successive generations since Job have asked the same question, and it will continue to be asked for as long as human beings survive as a sensitive and questioning creatures on this planet: "Where is my God now when I need him." Normally people in such circumstances see themselves as reduced to two option: they will either abandon their belief in a God who seemingly does not care; or, more often in our tradition I suppose, they will see suffering as somehow coming from God, as forming part of God's plan for them. This is I think akin to the pious answers offered by Jobs comforters. In other words, it is no answer at all. It is a mere platitude.

While Christ has not offered us an answer to suffering, he has offered us an approach to it. Through his own agony and death, he is saying to those in agony, "Look, I am with you in solidarity, I am suffering beside you, you are not alone. I have made your suffering my own" Far from being a detached God, he is suffering with his people. The only answer we can offer to a neighbour who is suffering or is bereaved is our presence beside them. That presence will be all the more effective if it is a silent presence. The last things that suffering or bereaved people need are pious platitudes.

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