A sermon on the meaning of suffering
Sermon for Joshua U.’s funeral
People respond to the suffering of others in different ways.
Some choose to avoid it. They vanish from the lives of those who suffer, seemingly afraid that suffering will brush off on them. And they’re not necessarily mistaken about this. But what they are running away from is the universal human condition.
There are others who are faithful to their friends, who sit with them, find ways of helping them, talk to them, be silent with them, try to share the burden.
There’s a third thing we are inclined to do, when we or others experience suffering. We try to make sense of it, to find out why it happened, what it means. The friends of Job, in the biblical tale, came and sat with him in silence for days when they heard of his misfortune. But then they started trying to explain it. God is just, they correctly observed, and bad things don’t happen to good people. Job must have done something to deserve what he got.
But Job didn’t deserve to have all those things happen to him. His suffering had no relation whatever to the way he conducted his life. It was random, senseless, unnecessary.
And there are many, like Job, who suffer in ways we cannot make sense of.
“Any attempt to make sense of the world’s pain and evil will be judged a success or failure based on whether it offers an acceptable explanation of why he and we had to undergo what we did,” wrote Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. A New York Times bestseller, it emerged from the experience of a father who lost his son Aaron to an incurable disease at age 14. A story similar, in some respects, to that of our friend and brother Josh.
Reflecting on this painful ordeal, Rabbi Kushner makes short work of some common false explanations for suffering: such as, that we had it coming, or are being punished for our sins, or are being tested by God, or that God has a bigger plan in which our sufferings play a role. Sometimes we hear of those who die, “it was their time.” Well, was it their time, really? How can we pretend to know such things? On what basis can we judge the supposed “value” of tragedy?
Now perhaps you have experienced blessing in the midst of loss; consolation in the face of bereavement. As Christians, we have a hope of eternal life that is greater than suffering and reaches beyond death, of which, more anon. But there is little relationship between these blessings and our pain, other than that of contrast, the dark and the light. The dark may accent the light, but it does not make it any brighter. The light will lose none of its shine once the darkness is no more.
Whatever the mechanics of this world by which hardships and death are parceled out, they do not allow for the kind of explanations that satisfy us.
Human-caused calamities like war, terrorism, or homicide are more “explainable” at least in the sense that they are caused by the willful choices of human beings. But many evils—accident, disease, and death—strike at random. No rational principle distributes these things to us. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Sometimes the rain doesn’t fall. Sometimes what falls on the just and the unjust alike is famine, pestilence, and death. We call these ‘acts of God,’ but all this really means is that nobody is to blame; nobody can be held responsible for them.
The book of Job opens with a bet between God and Satan by which the enemy is permitted to inflict a series of hardships on Job, a righteous man, to see if he will prove unworthy of God’s favor. After incredible loss and serious pain, Job proves God right, but he never learns about the divine wager, nor would this idea reassure him. It would not be comforting to imagine ourselves as human racehorses, caught up in the dirt and danger and chaos of our earthly contest, while heavenly spectators place bets over ambrosia martinis. And just to be clear, I don’t think the opening of Job reflects the reality of where suffering comes from. It’s a setup, a challenge to the reader to ask hard questions, as Job does. What Job gains through his experience is not a better life, nor any kind of reward, nor an explanation. He gets a face-to-face conversation with God.
Job accepts his hardships from the beginning as coming from God, but this is less of an explanation for him than a mystery that he will never be able understand. He never even thinks to blame the devil. If anything, what this strange story shows is that the enemy of mankind is not free to roam the world working havoc at will. If he is capable of hurting us, it is not directly, but through his faculty of temptation. He pursues his evil ends through the work of his human accomplices—all of us, at one time or another, deceived or persuaded to do wrong.
The devil tempts us at our weak points. But he didn’t cause them. He didn’t make anyone sick, or mentally ill, or susceptible to addiction. He didn’t cause anyone to be born in a dysfunctional family, or to lose a parent, or to be incapable of mathematics. He didn’t create viruses or disease. These are all things that emerge in a wounded world. Misfortunes, great and small, come to us in the normal course of our lives. They are not the devil’s doing, and they’re not our fault either.
It’s all right to ask God why bad things happen to us. It’s okay to challenge him, to pose the hard questions, and ask for an explanation. God is not offended; he can take it; he loves us, and he wants us to reach out to him.
But, like Job, we may have to be content with a response that does not answer our questions.
If we attribute pain and tragedy in our lives to God’s will, we are hardly better off. We risk making God the source of evil, and becoming unable to trust his love for us. This is the dark side of comforting clichés, such as “everything happens for a reason,” “God never gives us more than we can handle,” “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” or my personal favorite, “Heaven needed another angel.”
Things don’t always happen for a reason, at least no reason we’ll ever know. Life hands us more than we can handle. Sometimes it doesn’t make us stronger, it just kills us. Heaven already has precisely the number of angels it requires. Anyway we don’t become angels when we die, that’s not how it works.
God made us rational creatures, and so our minds tend to look for intelligible explanations for the things that don’t make sense. We think we know that the world is governed by principles of cause and effect, and so we look for the causes. Not because it will help to know what unforeseeable, unavoidable circumstance is the source of our pain, but because our minds yearn for understanding as much as for relief.
And, failing to understand rationally, we cast around irrationally for someone to blame. We blame others—our parents, our spouse, the devil, God. Most of all, we blame ourselves. All of this blame is misdirected—and often we know it—but the urge to assign blame is so strong. Through blame we inflict further pain on ourselves and others, becoming isolated, angry, despairing, unable to give or accept love and comfort. Yet we are no closer to understanding our pain.
I apologize for these rough-edged and unsentimental reflections. It is important to speak the truth, not to offer false comfort. Having described the experience of suffering in this world in, I hope, sufficiently bleak terms (but what could be bleaker than the experience itself?), I can now come to that which offers the prospect of true comfort, if not relief.
Rabbi Kushner believes, and he’s right about this, that by refusing to blame anyone—not ourselves, not other people, not God, not even the devil—for the mystery of suffering, but simply accepting it as a fact, we open ourselves up to the possibility of emotional and relational healing.
This is good as far as it goes. But for those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God in human flesh, there is more than just healing in this life to hope for. There is the promise of a renewed life, the promise of the resurrection of the dead which Jesus proclaims to us; of the evils of this world finally corrected, of a new heavens and a new earth in which we will live forever with God and be satisfied with his goodness in a way that is beyond our grasp here and now.
If you pay attention to the voice of Jesus, and of the apostle, in these scriptures, what they tell us to look forward to is not a floating-on-clouds experience, or translation to a non-physical plane of existence. “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God”—but what God promises the souls of the blessed dead is that they will get their body back, only this time without the burden of mortality, of life in a world full of inexplicable evils and pain. This would seem a fantasy, an impossible dream, except that in Jesus we have one who shows us that it is true.
We are so close now to Easter. But for Jesus to rise gloriously from the dead, he had to die first. In order to redeem this world, he had to enter into it. And he did this fully. In order to cure the suffering of the world, he experienced it. He entered into the lives of the sick, the disabled, the dying, the oppressed and outcast. Jesus lived with us for 33 years before he was put to death. He felt the hurt of losing friends. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He lived a fully human life, pain included.
As followers of Jesus, we can live as he lived. Our hope in future glory need not diminish our sympathy for those who suffer in the present, just as it does not explain away our own misfortunes. But it may give us something to hold on to, an anchor in the sea of troubles, a treasure which the evils of this world cannot take from us. That anchor, that treasure, is Jesus.
The mystery of suffering has no explanation that can satisfy us. But it has an answer, which is a mystery in itself; the mystery of Christ. He also is beyond our comprehension, but we know a few things: He loves us, he feels for us, and he will save us. “What is mortal will be swallowed up by life.” Not by death; by life. His life.