COLLEGE CHAPLAIN

How Could a Loving God Allow Suffering?

There’s a key episode from the political drama, The West Wing, called ‘Two Cathedrals’ where President Bartlet wrestles confronts God about the suffering he’s experienced in recent times. His long-time personal assistant had just been killed in a car accident, another of his staff had been shot during an attempted assassination, a freak storm had sunk a US tender ship at sea, drowning 68 crew, and now another storm was brewing.

How could a loving God allow this suffering? This is a critical moment in the show because Bartlet curses God in Latin (the language of the Catholic Mass he had been raised on), he lights a cigarette, stomps it into the cathedral floor and walks away from his faith in God. He can’t find a reason for why a loving God could stand by while those tragedies unfolded, so Bartlet won’t stand by his belief in God anymore.

You might think I’d be a little embarrassed to raise this example. Why would I want to entertain the idea of someone walking away from God? Both as Chaplain, and in a time of heightened suffering for us all, why raise this embarrassing example?

Nevertheless, I’m not embarrassed. We all need to face up to the fact that this is the question that regularly obliterates faith in God. Death, chronic pain, mental illness, abuse, family breakdown—whatever it is that might make us despair—at some point we will ask ‘Why?’, and we’ll probably direct that question in anger at God. ‘You could have done something God, but you didn’t, so I’m walking away’. Or we will just become increasingly hostile at the idea of God, a God that we’ve decided long ago doesn’t exist.

So it’s such an obvious question that it’s not as if Christians should be caught off guard by it in embarrassment. I’m also not embarrassed about talking about suffering and a loving God, because it’s the biggest challenge to my faith too. Christians are not immune to suffering and the consistent pattern in the Bible is that faithful followers of Jesus were forever followed by suffering. I’ll be the first to admit that when road bumps, conflicts or tragedies come into my life I will ask God ‘Why?’, and I often ask from a place of desperation and confusion.

I’m not embarrassed by that because that’s exactly what God calls me to do when I suffer—come to him, call him to action, plead with him. For he is the only one who can do something about it. He’s the only one who could find a reason in the grand scheme of time, space and matter for my moments of suffering, so I should ask him.

If there is a God who is loving and powerful enough to be angry at for allowing suffering that I cannot understand, then that God must also be loving and powerful enough to understand why he is allowing me to suffer. However, that does not really bring us any comfort, does it?

I’m sure that’s how Martha felt in John 11, when her brother, Lazarus, died without Jesus coming to do anything about it. John 11 begins with: ‘Now Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed two more days in the place where he was’ (John 11:4-5). This is hard to take in, isn’t it? Jesus hears that some of his dear friends whom he loves need his help but he seems to ignore them. He has another couple of days off before finally heading to see Martha, Mary and the dying Lazarus. How can Jesus be like that? 

C.S. Lewis reflected on his own suffering in A Grief Observed and concluded: “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like’”.

I imagine Martha felt the same: ‘So this is what Jesus is really like? I thought he loved me. I thought he loved Lazarus. Why hasn’t he come?’, she might have asked herself.

There’s not a lot of comfort in that, and yet the alternative—that there is no God—that doesn’t offer anymore hope or comfort either. If this is just a closed universe with no higher power to even cry out to, we’ll still suffer, there’s just no one out there to care and no one to do anything about it. 

Further, on what basis could we conclude that suffering is unfair or unjust? If we are certain that unjust and evil suffering exists then we are assuming that some sort of universal standard of justice and good exists, and then we must find an answer to where that comes from, as well as the suffering we’re experiencing. Deleting God from the picture doesn’t make suffering any easier to live with or to explain, in fact it probably makes it harder.

Jesus does eventually step back into the picture in John 11. He does come to Martha, Mary and Lazarus. But by then, 4 days has passed and so has Lazarus. It is too late. Martha challenges Jesus: ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died’ (v21). She sounds understandably angry, yet Jesus reminds her that Lazarus will rise again. Martha responds that she knows ‘that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day’ (v24). Like most Jewish people in Jesus’ day they thought that there was a day coming when God would restore Israel to power and somehow everyone would rise. She knows that, but you can almost hear in Martha’s statement a pleading tone: ‘I know that God has some plan for the future, Jesus, but what about now? Right here, right now, why didn’t you come? Why did you let this happen now? Right now I care about Lazarus, not the future and the resurrection.’

Jesus simply replies: ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ (v25).

Martha is in the pit of despair, and she thinks that having Lazarus back is what she really needs. She needs to be out of this suffering right here, right now. But Jesus’ bold words to her are: ‘I am the resurrection and the life’. What you really need right here, right now, is me. You hurt right here, right now, but you need me, you need life, more than you need that pain to go away.’

It’s like when a parent holds their toddler during their injections. In that moment when the little teary toddler is looking up at their parent, they can’t believe that the parent would allow that to happen. The parents also can’t explain that the mumps, measles, rubella needle will save their life in the future. Nor can they even explain that having that needle doesn’t just protect their child but will contribute to the healthy flourishing of many others throughout time and place as we are all inoculated against the many terrible consequences that come from those diseases. There is an inexplicable and unknowable scope of good that comes from that injection, but in the moment, all the toddler wants is the pain to go away. But all the parent can do is to hold them, assured that there is more than the pain of this moment that needs to be considered.

Just as parents are not immune to the pain that their toddlers face with a needle, neither is Jesus immune to the pain. When the other sister, Mary, comes out to see Jesus, she says the exact same thing: ‘Where were you, Jesus?’ and then she breaks down. In v33-35 we read Jesus’ reaction:

‘When Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying, he was deeply moved in his spirit and troubled. “Where have you put him?” he asked.

“Lord,” they told him, “come and see.”

Jesus wept.’

This is a confusing phrase: Jesus wept. The crowds observe him crying and effectively ask, ‘Why are you crying? Aren’t you the one who could have done something about this?’ Is this just empty sympathy from Jesus? No. In this moment and in many others in the Gospels, Jesus’ compassion comes from knowing all too well what the suffering of Mary and Martha is like. Jesus is described by the prophet Isaiah as the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. He’s not immune to suffering just because he is God. In fact, he knows suffering all too well, because he is God, and Isaiah goes on to say that Jesus was pierced for our sin. Our suffering and our sin are all rolled up together and bound onto Jesus’ back.

President Bartlet screamed at God in Latin over his own suffering and his last phrase roughly translates as either: ‘To hell with you’ or ‘To a cross with you!’ Bartlet curses God to his face, and the jeers of the crowd at Lazarus’ tomb are much the same: ‘Why don’t you do something about this?’ Yet Jesus weeps because he will do something, he has done something. He went to that cross. He went to hell.

There’s a reason why Jesus was so distraught on that cross. He didn’t just stroll up to the cross and hang there like some emotionless robot. He wasn’t golden-faced staring adoringly into heaven with a beam of light shining down on him. No, he screamed in terror in the darkness: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ 

Here is the moment of ultimate suffering, when the Son of God who has spent all of eternity in a perfectly loving, fully affirming, totally intimate relationship with God the Father he cries out to God and gets no answer. He seeks the approval of heaven but finds only hell—the absence of God; forsaken. Jesus’ cry of suffering swept through time and space eternal, calling into his body every inch of suffering and sin that everyone has felt and done and then he died.

That’s why Jesus wept at Lazarus’ tomb, because he knows full well the suffering of Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and he knows full well what he will have to do to remove it. Jesus wants Martha and Mary to know full well that his heart breaks with theirs over the suffering and evil of their lives and this world, and so he weeps.

But still Lazarus is dead. What will Jesus do? He steps forward and cries: ‘Lazarus, come out!’ and he does. Lazarus emerges from the tomb. Jesus is the resurrection and the life. What is puzzling is how little the passage focuses on Lazarus. He comes out of the tomb, has his bandages unwrapped and then quietly exits the scene. The whole passage has been geared around Martha and Mary and their questioning of Jesus and his ways. Why didn’t Jesus heal Lazarus when he was sick? Why did he let him die? Why did he let Martha and Mary mourn for days? Why not explain his whole plan to them from the beginning? These are the questions of our own suffering and in the long drawn-out space between Lazarus’ death and his rising, Martha sees Jesus for who he really is in her suffering, and who he is in our suffering: Jesus is our very life.

There is a great chasm of suffering that remains for us in our lives until Jesus returns and brings the resurrection and the life. We are experiencing that at present, and we witness it all too often in our media. In that chasm we ride an emotional rollercoaster where we may well be convinced that something or someone else is our life and all we need to be free from suffering. I am regularly tempted to believe that if God put certain people or circumstances back in my life then my suffering would evaporate, but Martha’s story reminds me otherwise. Her heart yearned for Lazarus, his restoration to her would feel like life. Without him she might, like President Bartlet and like us, want to scream at God ‘to a cross with you’, ‘to hell with you’! But Jesus calmly looked into Martha’s eyes knowing that a cross and hell awaited him, and he told her: ‘I am the resurrection and the life’.

I’m not embarrassed to say that some days I have to cling onto that truth against every fibre in my being, and other days my heart feels rich with Christ’s resurrection life. Either way, it is just because of Jesus.

This is an edited extract from TRAC Chapel

Gareth Tyndall | College Chaplain