Apr
1
Suffering and the God Who Got Involved
“3 Praise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort. 4 He comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction, through the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” — II Corinthians 2:3-4 (HCSB)
Allow me to begin by assuring my readers that, despite the date of publication, this post is not an April Fools joke. I promise.
To the contrary, this is a very serious subject. There is a lot of suffering in this world we live in. Painful injuries and diseases, loss of friends and loved ones for any variety of reasons, economic/financial hardships, broken relationships, identity crises, bullying, etc. On the news, we see terrorist attacks, mass shootings, victims of “regular” crimes, natural disasters, people living in extreme poverty, and many more causes of suffering. We can count ourselves “lucky” or “blessed” when nothing too serious affects us personally, but it goes on around us, even when not immediately apparent.
So, what are we to do? Perhaps more to the point, what does this have to do with Easter — i.e., celebrating Jesus’s victory over death, when he voluntarily died and physically rose from the grave? (Luke 24:6-7) I present to you the following citation from the book Unbelievable?: Why After Ten Years of Talking With Atheists, I’m Still a Christian, by Justin Brierley, host of “Unvelievable?” on Premier Christian Radio.
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“Sometimes people need to weep, scream and lament. We are told that even Jesus wept when presented with the death of his friend Lazarus. People who are in the where-are-you-God Psalm 22 moment — the loss of a child, the fracturing of a relationship, the delivery of terrible news — don’t need a rationale. What people need in such a time is someone to sit with them, weep with them, pray with them, love them. And if there is time for words, it is to let them know that God himself understands how they feel, for he himself has chosen to enter into our suffering: God himself suffers when we suffer.
This is the shocking truth about the God that Christians worship. He chose to get involved. When he came to earth in the person of Jesus, he shared our joys and he shared our sorrow too. He suffered rejection, betrayal, beating, humiliation and death.
That’s why it is so significant that we find the words of Psalm 22 on the lips of Jesus as he hangs on the cross. The psalm, written hundreds of years before the invention of Roman crucifixion, prophetically describes Christ’s isolation, humiliation and even the manner of his death.
A pack of villains encircles me;
they pierce my hands and my feet.
All my bones are on display;
people stare and gloat over me.
They divide my clothes among them
and cast lots for my garment.
(Psalm 22:16-18)And when Jesus cries out, ‘My God, my god, why have you forsaken me?’, we are meant to understand that Jesus himself suffers the worst fate of all — alienation from God as he bore the weight of our sin.
[Note: There is some dispute about what that “alienation” entailed, but the point here is that Jesus was suffering on many levels.]
This is the paradox of the Incarnation. Deity itself is on the cross. God comes in person and he suffers for us and with us. We often hear about Emmanuel, ‘God with us’, at Christmas, but the cross of Easter is where we see it in the most radical way. The cross means many things, but one of them is that God knows what we go through in pain, suffering, humiliation and fear, because he’s been through them too. That’s at the heart of the Christian story. Life is messy, ugly, and hurts at times, but we have a God who comes alongside and says, ‘I know what it feels like.’ That alone, while it doesn’t take away the hurt, can be enough to enable someone to hang on.
Equally paradoxically, the Christian faith, far from causing people to resign themselves to a broken world, has been the prime motivation for millions to go out and change it. Wherever you find the worst deprivation, poverty and sadness, you will consistently find Christians building hospitals, offering food programmes, bringing education and working for human dignity, often at great expense to their own comfort. In the words of Jesus, quoting Isaiah 61, Christians are people who claim to be filled with Christ’s own Spirit in order ‘to proclaim good news to the poor… to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free’ (Luke 4.18). Which is why, when people ask ‘Where is God when tragedy strikes?’, the Christian can answer honestly, ‘He’s right there, in the midst of it.’
Being a Christian offers no magical exemption from the trials of life. In fact, being a Christian may bring with it more suffering than we’d otherwise experience, as those who live under threat of persecution and death for their faith know only too well. The fact that God suffered with us on the cross is not a theodicy in the typical sense. It does not seek to explain away suffering, but it does give countless people the resources to bear it, and perhaps eventually to find a purpose through the pain….
After relating an anecdote about Stephen Frye and Oscar Wilde, Brierley concludes the chapter:
I even dare to believe that a world in which Christ stepped in — freely giving his life on the cross for his broken creation in order to demonstrate the supreme love of the Father — may be the best possible kind of world we could hope for. For in that world, pain and suffering are not unremitting brute facts of existence, but things that the God of both the cross and the resurrection can turn into his greatest victory.”
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Nicely put, Mr. Brierley.
Here is a bit of what Isaiah prophesied about the Messiah, which should sound familiar…
“3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering who knew what sickness was. He was like someone people turned away from; He was despised, and we didn’t value Him. 4 Yet He Himself bore our sicknesses, and He carried our pains; but we in turn regarded Him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. 5 But He was pierced because of our transgressions, crushed because of our iniquities; punishment for our peace was on Him, and we are healed by His wounds. 6 We all went astray like sheep; we all have turned to our own way; and the Lord has punished Him for the iniquity of us all.” — Isaiah 53:3-6 (HCSB)
The Son of God experienced what it meant to be human, including great suffering. He chose to get involved. But, for those of us who know and serve Him, that’s not the end of the story. Our Comforter will also set us free from all pain and suffering. As the Apostle Paul related about his own hardships (including beatings, imprisonment, etc.):
“16 Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. 17 For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. 18 So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” — II Cor. 4:16-18 (HCSB)
Amen.
