Suffering and the Will of God

       This Palm Sunday morning we are dealing with one of the oldest and most difficult problems of human life – the problem of how suffering can be connected to the  will of a loving and powerful God. 

       We all understand suffering because we all experience it.  There is not one person in this church who has not experienced pain – physical pain, emotional pain, relationship pain.

       The first year a person serves as pastor of a church, he or she often doesn’t know about the pain that lies behind the smiles in people’s lives. The second year is the year of discovery.  The third year is the year of sometimes not wanting to know about the pain.  This is not because of a lack of caring. It is because of the frustration of not being able to change things for the better. When trouble comes, Janet and I want to be there by you.  I hope you’ll let us get close. But sometimes all we’ll be able to do is cry with you.  We don’t have a magic wand to make it all go away.

       This might sound like a strange thing to say, but sometimes when I read the gospels, I feel sorry for Jesus. Look at what He knew of the true depths of pain. Look at how much He carried.  Look at how much He would bear.

        Look at Palm Sunday. 

        As Jesus enters Jerusalem on Paul Sunday, He enters in a way that is meant to trigger the mind of anyone who knows the Scriptures.  The one promised by the Prophets has arrived.  But He arrives riding on a donkey in the posture of a king who has come to bring peace.

       Crowds from the villages recognize the symbols.  They know what Jesus is proclaiming. They shout out their hosannas.  They merge with the city crowd.  Enthusiasm builds.  Some tear off their outer garments and throw them on the road.  Some strip branches from palm trees and wave them aloft.

       Jesus could have indulged himself in this moment.  There’s nothing wrong with enjoying success.  But as Jesus and the crowd begin the descent from the Mount of Olives, the city of Jerusalem suddenly comes into full view.

       Jesus stops.  He looks out over the city. He keeps gazing, absorbed by the sight.  And then He begins to weep.  Why?  He knows that in rejecting Him – as will happen five days later – the city will be left to accept the consequences.

       It’s not that God will now do something to the city in retaliation.  It’s just that rejection of God’s visitation and the way of peace He offers automatically leads to suffering.  If we jump out of an airplane without a parachute, we will suffer.  If we don’t eat, we will suffer.  If we refuse to breathe oxygen, we will suffocate.  And if we reject the Living God who comes to us, we will be left with the consequences.  It’s a natural consequence of rejection.

       But, what a God.  This is a God who weeps.

       Have you ever seen a king weep?  Have you ever seen a president shed tears?  Bill Clinton was always good at biting his lower lip but he never actually cried.  Senator Edmund Muskie disqualified himself in a presidential primary campaign years ago by crying in public.  We don’t want to see our leaders weep.  We want them to be strong.  We push them into arrogance for fear they will reflect too much of what we are ourselves.  But Jesus stops to weep over the city.  Jesus weeps because Jesus loves and He sees the pain ahead.

       But if God loves so much, and if God is so powerful, why is there pain? If our Father cares so much, why does life often feel unfair?

      Upon accepting an award, the late Jack Benny remarked, “I really don’t’ deserve this.  But I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.” Life is unjust.  Suffering raises questions of fairness – why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.

       I saw a cartoon where a father is changing a tire in the pouring rain.  He is saying to his young son inside the car: “I can’t change the channel.  This is real life!”

        This is real life. But how does the question of suffering interact with the will of a loving and powerful God?  

       Some people look for pat answers that are both reassuring and wrong.  For example, in John 9, Jesus has just left the Temple where the people have tried to stone Him for blasphemy.  He is walking with His disciples when he comes upon a man who has been blind since birth.  He must have been a familiar character. The disciples know all about him.

       The disciples use the opportunity to present Jesus with a problem with which Jewish thought had always been deeply concerned – the problem of the relationship between suffering and sin.  The Book of Job should have settled the question but it had not.  Popular belief still saw a direct causal relationship between illness and sin.  The disciples work on the assumption that wherever there is suffering, somewhere there is sin.  So they ask Jesus their question: “This man has been blind since he was born.  Is his blindness due to his own sin, or to the sin of his parents?”  The Disciples want to be assured that the apparent injustice of the man’s condition is actually a sign of divine justice.  They want to know that he has gotten what he deserved.  They also want to know that pain isn’t just random -- so that if they do the right things, they will be spared.

       “This man has been blind since he was born.  Is his blindness due to his own sin, or to the sin of his parents?”

       We have a hard time seeing how a person could sin before birth.  But many Jews had borrowed the Greek idea from Plato of the pre-existence of the soul.  They believe that all souls dwelt in the seventh heaven waiting to enter a body. The Greeks believed that all souls were good but were corrupted by contact with the body.  But some Jews believed that souls were by nature either good or bad and that they could sin in their pre-existent state.  The writer of the Apocryphal “Book of Wisdom” wrote: “Now I was a good child by nature, and a good soul fell to my lot.”  The disciples believe that sin before birth is a real possibility.

      Another possible explanation for the man’s condition is in the sin of the parents.  The Rabbis have sayings which speak of children being born epileptic or leprous due to the sins of the parents.  The untimely death of a righteous man was ascribed to his mother’s dalliance with idolatry while pregnant with him.  This idea is, of course, flatly rejected in our Old Testament passage from Ezekiel; “No more will you use this expression in Israel ; ‘the fathers have eaten sour grapes so the children’s teeth are set on edge.’”  But they believed it anyway.

       The disciples assume that the man’s blindness is the result of sin – someone’s sin.  As Rabbi Ammi had written, “There is no death without sin, and there is no suffering without iniquity.”  All the disciples want to do is fix the blame.  They want to know that they will be in the clear if both they and their parent’s are sin free. 

       Some Christians also make the same assumption about a causal relationship between suffering and sin in their own lives and in the lives of others.  A person’s whole world comes crashing down and they say, “I must have done something to deserve all this.”  A person is hurting and friends say, “You need to find out what you did wrong and repent” – thus pouring guilt over the pain.

       Author Phillip Yancey tells of a woman named Claudia, a deacon in her church, who contracted Hodgkin’s Disease – cancer of the lymph glands.

       Another deacon from her church solemnly told her to reflect on what God was trying to teach her.  “Surely there’s something in your life which is displeasing to God,” he said.  “You must have stepped out of His will somewhere. These things don’t just happen. What is God telling you?”

       Another lady dropped in and told Claudia that healing was the only escape. “Sickness is never God’s will,” she insisted.  The Bible says as much.  The Devil is at work, and God will wait until you can muster up enough faith to believe that you will be healed.  Remember Claudia, faith can move mountains and that includes Hodgkin’s disease.  Truly believe that you will be healed, and God will answer your prayers.”

       So for the next few days Claudia tried to muster faith and convince God that her faith was real.  But she felt ever guiltier because she obviously didn’t have the faith that would cause God to act.  Faith wasn’t like a muscle that could be enlarged through exercise.  It was slippery, theoretical, and hard to deal with.  Claudia soon felt trapped into feeling that either her cancer was her own fault or the fact that she hadn’t been healed was her own fault.  That’s a terrible trap.

       And yet it is true that we can contribute very strongly to our own suffering and the suffering of others.  A child is born a dope addict because of the addition of his mother or deformed because of the greed of industrialists who pump poisons into the eater supply.  We say that Johnny can’t read because he is deprived, hungry and discriminated against.  But as Jesse Jackson points out, “one of the reasons Johnny can’t read well is that Johnny doesn’t practice reading.”

       Much suffering is brought onto the world by itself.  But in John 9 we find a case of apparently innocent suffering – a man who was born blind.

       He doesn’t approach Jesus.  Nobody brings him to Jesus.  He doesn’t ask to be healed.  All of his life he has lived in darkness.  He has no idea what it means to see.  He is a beggar.  He is supported by the generosity of other people.

       As you read the entire story, it is evident that the man is intelligent.  He is able.  He is a logical thinker.  He is a skilled communicator.  But he really has no hope in his society.

       Two things happen to him in this chapter.  He is healed physically, and then, after going through an incredible gauntlet of challenges, he is healed spiritually as well.

       People who don’t understand disabilities sometimes treat the blind or the deaf as though they were somehow mentally different.  I can picture Jesus’ disciples standing in front of this blind man and talking about him as if he wasn’t there – a convenient object lesson but not really a person.

       And yet no person is more interested in Jesus answer than that blind man.  Perhaps he has accepted his blindness as his own fault.  If that is true, it is presumptuous before God to fight against it.  But if it is not true that his blindness is the result of sin, then he can be free from his own unconscious guilt – or his possible very conscious resentment against his parents for his condition.  If his illness stands by itself – free from association with his own or his parents’ sin – then the blind man is set free to challenge its grip on his life.  It is not the will of God in the sense of being his perfect intention.  It is not blasphemy to want to do something about it.

       But to the disciples the man is an example – an opportunity to ask: “If God is a good god, and all powerful, why on earth would god allow a person to be struck down with such a problem?”

       How does Jesus respond?  Well Jesus could have explained that although God is perfectly good and powerful, this world in which we live has been corrupted by man’s sin.  It’s a fallen, a bent, a crooked, and a broken place in which there are many selfish and harmful people and in which there are millions of types of dangerous bacteria and viruses.  All these forces are at work to make this a dangerous environment in which all people, evil or wonderful, are equally as risk.

         Jesus could have talked about suffering as a consequence of where we live our lives –- in the midst of a spiritual battlefield.  No one is safe from danger.  Jesus himself, God’s own Son, is soon to be murdered. 

       Or Jesus could have talked about the requirements of true human freedom.  As C.S. Lewis wrote:  “The problem of pain, of war and the horror of war, of poverty and disease are always confronting us.  But a God who allows no pain, no grief, also allows no choice.  There is little unfairness in a colony of ants, but also there is little freedom.’

       Or He could have explained that all suffering is not alike.  He could have said, “Well, there are no pat answers.  Here are several different things for you to think about.”  He could have said, “Suffering has a place in God’s plan – in the lives of certain people and certain situations.”

       Jesus could have preached an unbelievably good sermon that would have gone down in history as the most penetrating analysis of the problem of pain ever given.  He is the Son of God. He knows the answers to this problem. So much of our own inner pain and philosophical bewilderment could have been once and for all settled if Jesus had just preached that sermon that his disciples begged Him to preach.

       Why did my father die as a young man?  Why did this young mother and child die so cruelly in an automobile accident?  Why that avalanche?  Why that earthquake?  Why that little boy without any arms?  Why Auschwitz ?  Why 9/11?  Why AIDS? 

       He could have explained all of that, but He didn’t. He said, “The only thing I’m going to tell you right now is that this situation is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for God to be glorified. It’s an opportunity to show what God can do.”

       Jesus said, “It was not that this man sinned or his parents.  It is so the work of God can be shown in him.”  “This has happened; don’t dwell on why.  Rather, it has happened, and having happened, we now have an opportunity to see God at work.”  The man’s blindness is a God given opportunity for Jesus to demonstrate the power or God operative within him.  Opening the eyes of the blind is one sign of the Messiah.  This man’s blindness, far from being a result of sin, is given as a sign of the coming reign of God.

       Scripture demonstrates repeatedly that God is not bound by our expectations.  We can’t always predict what He will do.  Does this mean that God is arbitrary? Of course not! James tells us in James 1:17: “the Father of the heavenly lights does not change like shifting shadows” Jesus Christ, like the Father who sent Him, is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  His character – His holiness and love and mercy – are unfailing.  We can count on that.  But like Aslan the lion in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Jesus is always showing up unexpectedly. The beaver in that story said it well.  He’s not by any means tame.  But he’s good.

       Lewis, while he was grieving the death of his wife, asked: “What do people mean when they say ‘I’m not afraid of God because I know He is good?’ Haven’t they ever been to the dentist?  God is good.  But God does not look at our pain from our point of view.  So His goodness is more complicated and more focused on our long term benefit than we might wish it to be.

       Gerald Sitzer, a professor at Whitworth College in Spokane experienced tremendous loss.  We plan to have him here for a weekend conference next January.  His wife, his mother, and two of his children were killed by a drunk driver.  His world caved in.  Out of the experience he wrote a short but powerful book called “A Grace Disguised.”  I discovered that I had the power to choose the direction my life would head even if the only choice open to me, at least initially, was either to run from the loss or to face it as best I could.  Since I knew that darkness was inevitable and unavoidable, I decided from that point on to walk into the darkness rather than try to outrun it, to let my experience of loss take me on a journey wherever it would lead, and to allow myself to be transformed by my suffering rather than to think I could somehow avoid it.  I chose to turn toward the pain, however falteringly, and to yield to the loss, though I had no idea at the time what that would mean.  It is not the experience of loss that becomes the defining moment of our lives, for that is as inevitable as death which is the last loss awaiting all of us. It is how we respond to loss that matters.  That response will largely determine the quality, the direction, and the impact of our lives.”

       We can learn faith from our own sufferings and from the sufferings of others as we see the hand of God moving in the situation.  We learn faith as we see Jesus reach down and create sight in the man who had been born blind.  In the Bible we see that the God who acted in love in the life and ministry of Jesus is still acting in love in the here and now of our lives.  We see that even when events are out of our control they are not out of God’s control. 

       Not all things that happen are good.  But Paul assures us later in Romans 8 – verse 28 – that God works in all things for ultimate good in the lives of those who love Him – who are called according to his purpose.

       Suffering does not requires special ability.  It will come whether we have a talent for it or not.  The key is to overcome – to make even sorrow and limitation an opportunity for growth in faith in our Savior Jesus Christ – to turn to him, not to the wall.