Suffering
I want to talk about suffering today. I want to be clear that the suffering caused by the abuse of people, domestic abuse of women, the horrific abuse of children, is totally unacceptable and the injustice of that is to be challenged in every way possible by every means possible and with every breath that we have. Suffering caused by abuse is unacceptable and we are all responsible to do everything we can to stop it. When I talk of suffering today I refer to what we do with the mysterious suffering that can’t be explained.
Many faithful Christ followers remember the day God failed.
2 Corinthians 7.14 states: If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
Except, for some, God was deaf. Earnest, humble prayers were cried. The face of God was sought. Yet God did not answer. God did not hear from heaven. There was no healing in the land. Forgiveness from sin seemed far away.
I remember the day God failed me. I was 30. In our church and school community was a stunning family with a 6-year-old child that radiated goodness. He became sick very mysteriously, very suddenly and very quickly. He was in a coma for weeks. We prayed for his healing. We fasted. We prayed and we prayed, and we prayed. And he died. If ever there was a prayer worth answering, this was certainly it. Yet God seemed silent. The day the young boy died faith died too. The day he died the idea of a safe universe died too; all were vulnerable to tragedy. Suffering, unbearable to witness, dissolved the parents, his sister, the school community, and the church. Why? Why did an innocent boy suffer and die? Why did the parents have to go through such unimaginable grief? Why did God not answer prayer? Why did God fail us?
The question put to Jesus in Luke 13.1-9 is universal and timeless: How do we make sense of the intense suffering in our world? In Luke 13 people approach Jesus about the brutality and injustice of Pilate that led to horrific deaths of Galilean Jews. Jesus adds his own example of Jerusalemite Jews who died in a random construction accident when a tower fell. Why did these people have to suffer and die?
The question about suffering in Luke 13.1 is poignant as we hear these Scriptures in the context of Russia’s death dealing invasion of Ukraine. The collapse of the tower of Siloam is not far removed from the landslides and floods that killed innocent people. Like the questioners we too want assurance. We want meaning. We want an explanation. We want the reason for suffering.
There are no easy answers to life’s tough questions. And Jesus does not explain away the suffering. Two things are made absolutely clear:
1. God does not cause suffering,
2. Suffering can be transformed.
God does not send or cause suffering. Nor is suffering a result of sin. Both the Jews and the Greek speakers held the view that suffering is the fruit of sin. Some people today still live with a cause-and-effect thinking. Jesus wants to break the equation: sin=suffering. The mindset Jesus wants to interrogate is the belief that if there is suffering there must be sin; and if there is great suffering there must be great sin. Note Jesus’ emphatic and repeated “No!” to his own questions. Jesus absolutely insists that the people who died, whether Galilean or Jerusalemite, were not more deserving of death than others. In other parts of Scripture such as John 9:2-3, Jesus rejects the idea that a man was born blind because of his or his parents’ sin.
Jesus then invites repentance. As I have explained before, repentance here does not mean asking forgiveness for sin. Instead, repentance from the Greek metanoia means
· to go beyond the mind you have;
· or to change your thinking;
· or rearrange the furniture of your mind;
· or in the words of Paul in Romans, “be transformed through the renewing of your mind”(12.2).
The metanoia Jesus invites is downright scary. If God does not cause suffering, if God does not send suffering as punishment for sin, then suffering just is. We have to give up our illusions of safety. We have to give up the idea that if I am good and do the right things suffering will pass me by. There is no insurance policy against suffering. Much suffering is unintentional and unavoidable. In some ways, some suffering is inevitable simply because we are living in an evolving world. If we can open ourselves to the mystery of suffering it is possible to use the energy of suffering to transform the world.
God does not cause suffering. God does not send suffering as punishment, but the energy of suffering can be harnessed to transform the world. Christ is our model for using the energy of suffering to transform the world. Some suffering is unavoidable. Instead of wasting that energy we can use it to make a positive difference in the world. Think of the energy of the sun or the wind. Human evolution has found ways of harnessing the power of the sun and the wind to use as fuel. Our suffering energy is potential energy. We can use it in productive ways or waste it. We can make it productive by channelling it. We direct it by our choice. How do we do this? By our loving intention. We can give it to Christ to use it for God’s project of loving union, of bringing about the kingdom of God on earth. The suffering servant songs in Isaiah taught Jesus that suffering can be redemptive for others if it is directed by love. For the pain in suffering, Moltmann writes, “is the lack of love, and the wounds in wounds are the abandonment [of love].”
This is my interpretation of the parable of the fig tree. Suffering is a reality of being human. The suffering we undergo does produce energy. If we waste the energy of suffering, we are like the fig tree that is green all over but does not bear fruit. Deep prayer or contemplation which is total surrender to God can awaken us to the hidden presence of God in the midst of suffering and our suffering can be fruitful. Deep prayer which is total surrender to God is to give up control over pain and suffering.
I said earlier that when that young boy died, faith died too. And it was the best thing that could ever happen. The faith that died was the faith in an all-powerful God. The God revealed in Jesus is an all-loving God that gives up power for love. The only power God has is the power of love, and love offers no controlling coercive power over. Bonhoeffer writes that “God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 360.) There is no God in heaven that has power or control over earth. God entered earth, God emptied Godself and took the form of a servant (Phil 2:6) and he was led to a cross. Barbara Brown Taylor in “God in Pain” writes that “Christianity is the only world religion that confesses a God who suffers. It is not all that popular an idea, even among Christians. We prefer a God who prevents suffering, only that is not the God we have got. What the cross teaches us is that God’s power is not the power to force human choices and end human pain. It is, instead, the power to pick up the shattered pieces and make something holy out of them— not from a distance but right close up.”
The transformative energy of suffering can happen when we live contemplatively, that is to really know that we are in Christ and Christ is in us in this world. We know then that love is strong as death, and that love is the future fulness of our lives.