Leslie D. Weatherhead, in his must read book: The Will of God, tells this story:
I was standing on the veranda of an Indian home darkened by bereavement. My Indian friend had lost his little son, the light of his eyes, in a cholera epidemic. At the end of the veranda his little daughter, the only remaining child, slept in a cot covered over with a mosquito net. We paced up and down, and I tried in my clumsy way to comfort and console him. But he said, “Well, padre, it is the will of God. That’s all there is to it. It is the will of God.” (pp. 11-12)
In the last post we looked at two main ways we try to come to terms with suffering:
The first is to ascribe it, as the father does above, to God’s will. For many people, this explanation for suffering gives hope. It holds out the promise that the senselessness of it all is not all that senseless; that there is sacred meaning and purpose behind it. At the very least is offers the assurance that God is in control. Because life would be intolerable if it is random and beyond the control of God.
But while ascribing suffering to God’s will offers hope to some, for others it makes God the actor in our suffering. And it makes God ultimately into a monster.
Weatherhead tried to make that point with his friend:
Fortunately I knew him well enough to be able to reply without being misunderstood, and I said something like this: “Supposing someone crept up the steps onto the veranda tonight, while you all slept, and deliberately put a wad of cotton soaked in cholera germ culture over your little girl’s mouth as she lay in that cot there on the veranda, what would you think about that?”
“My God,” he said, “what would I think about that? Nobody would do such a damnable thing. If he attempted it and I caught him, I would kill him with as little compunction as I would a snake, and throw him over the veranda. What do you mean by suggesting such a thing?”
“But, John,” I said quietly, “Isn’t that just what you have accused God of doing when you said it was his will? Call your little boy’s death the result of mass ignorance, call it mass folly, call it mass sin, if you like, call it bad drains or communal carelessness, but don’t call it the will of God.”
Surely we cannot identify as the will of God something for which a man would be locked up in jail, or put in a criminal lunatic asylum.
If God is the source of suffering, then the question is valid: How can anyone believe in such a God?
The second way people tend to handle suffering is to deny the existence of God or to call into question God’s character.
But, as we saw in the last post, you can take God out of the story but suffering remains. So then what?
Either God allows suffering which calls into question God’s character and love, or we live in a world of pitiless indifference (in the words of Richard Dawkins) leaving us with lots of pain but no hope.
But what if there’s a third way?
What if it’s true that God’s love and suffering are related but not in the way we have been taught? What if a loving God speaks to suffering—to this seemingly pitiless indifference—not in the way we think God should but in the way we need God to?
Does suffering automatically prove that God isn’t loving or powerful; that God doesn’t exist? Or is it possible to see the true character of God in the midst of suffering?
Christianity offers a radically different answer to the question of suffering, and it’s found in a cross.
The story of the cross is a profound story of God’s stop-at-nothing love for the world. It’s the story of a God who in Jesus:
Enters into our solidarity with us
Enters into the human experience with us with compassion and grace
Suffers with us because life is broken
Absorbs our pain so that we don’t have to carry it alone
Transforms our points of suffering by turning death into resurrection
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr says it this way:
Christianity is a faith which takes us through tragedy to beyond tragedy, by way of the cross to victory in the cross.
Suffering is not God’s will for you. God’s will for you, seen in the cross of Jesus, is to meet you in the midst of suffering with grace and love. To meet you in the senselessness of it all with hope, kindness, and goodness. And to let you know that suffering will not have the final word. Life will. Resurrection will. Grace will.
As Paul says in his letter to the church in Rome, chapter 8:
Can anything separate us from Christ’s love? Can trouble or problems or persecution separate us from his love? If we have no food or clothes or face danger or even death, will that separate us from his love? No!
I am sure that nothing can separate you from God’s love—not death, life, angels, or ruling spirits. I am sure that nothing now, nothing in the future, no powers, nothing above you or nothing below you—nothing in the whole created world—will ever be able to separate you from the love God has shown you in Christ Jesus your Lord.