WHERE'S GOD WHEN IT HURTS?

This question has probably created more atheists than any other question. Worse, the seething anger that sometimes lies behind it has probably created more insane people than any other. And justly so. While faith in God doesn't logically stand or fall just on this matter, it hinges on it more than any other so far as our experience of life and faith is concerned.

If that offends some of you, tough. True, we have no right at all to expect or demand a suffering-free state of false bliss that would leave each and all of us as bored dilettants living a sterile and stupid life. That is, if you can call something 'life' which has no challenges, no repentances, no learning, no growing, all of which only come through trial, error, taking part, success, pain, loss, and suffering. (We can safely ignore the many fools who think that way.)  But does there have to be the kind of suffering that some people go through? Suffering of unquenchable pain, immeasurable loss, utter hopelessness, total abandonment - or at least, apparently so? The very fact that there is such suffering gives good cause to doubt not only the value of the whole human race, but also the existence of any God that can be said to care in the slightest for what's been created, any God who has power over all things, any God who is anything other than a horrible brute who finds sadistic whimsical joy in squeezing every last drop of suffering out of them. It would seem to rule out anything even vaguely resembling the God that Christians speak of -- and rule in a God who deserves our utter hatred not our worship.

Except for one thing ........

Except that God knows this is true, and set out to do something about it. Not by overriding the freedom God had put into nature and into creatures, especially the human ones. Not by working instant repairs on the universe so that all is blissfully well (that would be a jerk-God, a more powerful version of the fools I wrote off earlier), or by pulling a string here or there from a distance. But by choosing to fully take part in what is happening. The choice : God chose soiled ancient diapers, skinned childhood knees, and dirty adult feet. God felt what acceptance and rejection are like at a human level. God walked among people in the same way they walk among each other, talk to them at their level, with their sufferings small and large, face to face, person to person. God taught them in their language, with sound waves instead of spiritual whispers, from within their tradition, from within the world they knew, a world teeming with truth smothered in their own lies. But even more : God had to face the ultimate in human rejection -- to be publicly executed for having spoken and lived the truth. That's not something even God wanted to go through, but the whole point of it all was to go through things that noone wants to go through, if that's what it takes to complete the task at hand, for real. (In fact, that's what 'for real' is all about.)

Every Christmas, Christians celebrate (or are supposed to celebrate) this choice. Every Good Friday, Christians mourn (or are supposed to mourn) how far it had to go. Every Easter, Christians revel in the empty tomb, the risen and present Lord of all, whose love meant that death could not be -- must not be -- the final answer.

Jesus was that choice. Jesus is the divine answer to suffering. Jesus is the answer a Christian has to the problem of suffering. Jesus knows. Jesus cares. And Jesus is suffering alongside each one who suffers, ever more so as the suffering increases. The 'why' of suffering is a mystery, you'll never know the reason why, or even if there is a reason. The reply of God is no mystery, or at least, no more mysterious than love itself.

BUT, HE'S NOT HERE ANYMORE ...

Yet Jesus is not the Christian's answer to suffering by Himself. The phrase that the New Testament used for describing the church was "the Body of Christ". There are many angles to this, angles which are marital, sexual, medical, and so on. But let's use an angle that's useful here : Jesus is the head of the Body. That, of course, means that Jesus is not the arms, legs, hands, and such. That is what the believers are. As Paul saw it, they are a unit, a whole, just as a human body is a whole, yet each believer is an identifiable part with a function in the overall Body.

Jesus is no longer physically here. His role as head is signalled to the Body through the Spirit, the nerve impulses that cause the Body to work. Jesus can no longer hold the hand of the sufferer, wrap His arms around them, and give the comfort of a physical embrace. He can no longer move His legs to where they are, so that He can physically address them face to face, grasping hold of the needs, voicing through sound waves the needed words of comfort or challenge, using hands to bring physical healing. That role is to be done by the Body of Christ in the physical world -- that is, by the believers, as a whole and as individual people.

If you want to see a key part of God's answer to suffering, look into a mirror. If the answer you're looking at isn't much of an answer to anyone's suffering, then pray that the Spirit's signals start directing you.

 

 

QUOTES

"In seeking God's power, I discovered his person. He is not just omnipotent; he is also the God of all comfort. And taking us through suffering, not out of it, is one of the primary means that the Spirit uses today in bringing us to God."
------ Daniel Wallace, in *Christianity Today*, September 12 1994

"Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know  you're dead."
------ Tennessee Williams, in the London *Observer*, 1958.

"Despair is suffering without meaning."
------ Viktor Frankl

"Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible of poverty."
------ Mother Theresa

"Some of us will not see pain as a gift; some will always accuse God of being unfair for allowing it. But, the fact is, pain and suffering are here among us, and we need to respond in some way. The response Jesus gave was to bear the burdens of those he touched. To live in the world as his body, his emotional incarnation, we must follow his example."
------ Philip Yancey, *Where Is God When It Hurts?*, p.325 (Zondervan; Walker revised Large-print edit., 1996)

"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it."
------ Helen Keller, *Optimism*

"You need not cry very loud; God is nearer to us than we think."
------ Brother Lawrence

"I do not ask You to take away my suffering;
I do not even want to know why I suffer;
but only this, my God --
do I suffer for Your sake?"
------ Levi Yitzhak of Beditchev

 

Some Questions

• Think back on some time when you have suffered in the past. What did you learn from it, if anything? How do you live life differently now because of it?
• Think of a time when someone suffered with you, even if it wasn't something they would otherwise have suffered? How did you feel about that? What difference did that make for you?

taken from Spirithome.com

 

Copyright © 1997-2003 Robert Longman Jr. You can use any Spirithome.com material freely anytime for non-profit, non-commercial personal, church or educational use, if credited.