“When Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that had come upon him, they came each from his own place... and they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” (Job 2: 11,13)

It is an uncomfortable, painful, and sometimes even embarrassing experience to be a witness to the extremities of human emotion. In a culture where we are very guarded about our feelings and expression of them we can be lost for words when the agonies of someone’s heart are displayed. It is hard to understand and empathize. There is the fear that we will amplify the pain by trying to offer whatever inadequate comfort we can summon (Job’s ‘comforters’ give us a helpful 33 chapters on how we can do this even with Scripture).

Perhaps this reaction to deep pain and anger is one factor of why atonal music grates so uncomfortably on our ears. Atonal music
is music with no key; it has no central note or chord that our ears are guided towards. Tonal harmony (like Mozart) is based upon
a journey, a set of relationships whose purpose is to eventually lead us to a home key and a sense of stability. Atonal music lacks the gravitational pull of a central pitch; instead we are wrenched sidewards with angular and angry dissonances that compete for dominance and purposefully unbalance the listener.

The proponent of this development to musical language was the Austrian Jew Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951). As a Jew living in the 20th century he had a very personal connection with much of the brutality that took place. Philosopher Roger Scruton comments on atonality, ‘it was motivated by an expressive intention: a need to render into audible forms the complex and harrowing emotions that arose with the collapse of spiritual order in Central Europe.’ One of the concerns of composers who produced atonal music was to push the bounds of musical harmony. to a breaking point. They felt the musical language of previous centuries was banal and trite; it lacked the emotional and expressive depth to convey the horrors of a world savaged by war. What music could give voice to such a hollow and searing pain?

Jesus spent a significant proportion of his last teachings to the disciples on his identity as the Messiah who had come to suffer. On the cross he achieved our justification as he suffered for an atoning purpose. However, he also endured pain in a sinful world so that he would be equipped to support us and mediate for us. Christ is the author of our salvation (he begins saving work in us) and he is also the perfector of our salvation; (by sanctifying us through his Spirit he completes his saving work). It is a great source of comfort to us that the one who sanctifies us knows the trials of this life. The author of Hebrews reminds us of this theme, Christ, “the founder of our salvation (is made) perfect through suffering” (Hebrews 2:10). Not that he was lacking in moral perfection, but he was being perfectly equipped to be our High Priest forever, a mediator for a suffering people, one who knew himself what it was to suffer. Jesus is not just moved with compassion for us; he has had experiences that place him in the position to empathise with us. He can say I’ve been there, I’ve felt that, I know intimately how it is to exist in this experience. This means that Jesus has personal, close knowledge of how to speak to and support the broken, how to draw alongside someone and walk with them
through the storm.

“The Sovereign Lord has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary” (Isaiah 50:4). 

Jesus’ words of comfort are formed on a tongue that has been instructed by suffering.

“Blessed be the God... of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4). 

Notice what Paul draws attention to here. As Christians we are equipped to comfort others (in any affliction!) but not with any comfort which we devise ourselves. We comfort others, “with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” Who is the comfort God offered to us in our affliction? Who became our comfort while we still walked in darkness under the burden of our guilt before a holy God? Jesus.

Silence is often wise. Those in pain may initially need a gentle listener and we should not skip lightly over suffering in our haste to point to a cure. But we cannot hold our silence forever when we can bring people to the perfect comforter. When we come across the jarring, the dissonant and the aggressive emotional expression in music and art of the 20th/21st century we
don’t need to be afraid about confidently locking horns with the worldviews behind them. There is nothing new under the sun, and the answer to atonalism’s question is the suffering Saviour who sits with us in our pain,

“a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief ” (Isaiah 53:3).