GENESIS 5 – SUFFERING AND A GOD OF LOVE
Why do bad things happen to good people?
Tonight we come to a most difficult and sensitive subject. Suffering.
You may find it distressing to talk about suffering. You may have seen or experienced great suffering. Sometimes we cover such things up, because they are too painful to think about. But suffering is one thing that can make it very hard to trust in God.
Why do people suffer?
How can a God of Love allow suffering?
Why do bad things happen to good people?
These are questions that sooner or later we will all ask.
For people in the midst of suffering they are not theoretical questions.
They are burning questions and they demand some kind of answer.
There are no easy answers to the question of suffering.
Anyone who gives an easy answer is devaluing the pain and grief of those who suffer tragic loss.
And yet we have to try to find some answer, even if it’s not an easy, clear-cut answer.
Otherwise our faith is worth nothing.
What I will do this evening is to outline some of the thinking that people have done about pain and suffering.
And I hope that we will find our way towards some kind of answer that may help, even if it doesn’t explain everything.
Slide – the Dance of Death
Here is a picture of death dancing with people – it shows that no one escapes.
Not even babies escape – as you can see on the far left of the picture.
Almost every year there seems to be a catastrophic disaster somewhere in the world that claims thousands of lives.
Slide – Japan Tsunami
In 2011 Japan suffered that terrible earthquake and tsunami.
Slide – Sichuan earthquake
Many of the victims of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 were schoolchildren.
All of us have seen the pictures. Yet we are often protected from really feeling the suffering because most of the time we only see it at a distance.
The death of one person close to us moves us more than the death of thousands far away.
Slide – Emily Joyce
This is Emily. Emily was a lovely, lively 5 year-old, living in Hong Kong with her family. On New Year’s Eve 2007 she somehow got up onto the roof of their apartment. She fell off the roof from three stories up. Her father found her body lying by the front door. She looked very peaceful, but the back of her skull was shattered and she was dead.
The pain and guilt her parents went through is almost beyond our imagination. Taking her funeral was one of the hardest things I have ever done. Her father wept and raged. He tried to snatch her coffin away from being taken into the fire. He simply couldn’t accept that she was dead. He was almost suicidal.
As a Christian, Emily’s father demanded an explanation. How could God do this to him? Was he being punished? He tried to comfort himself with the idea that God loved Emily so much that he wanted her in heaven. He imagined her as an angel. But it didn’t really ease his pain and loss.
In the end, two things helped Emily’s father. One was walking. I insisted that he came with me for long walks with our dogs in Tai Tam Country Park. A walk is a kind of journey, and he needed to make a journey away from his grief. He needed to accept that Emily was dead. He needed to leave her and move on. Not to forget, for he will never forget. But to move forward.
The second thing that helped was about 15 months later when to their great surprise, Emily’s parents had quadruplets!
Slide – Joyce quadruplets
Some stories have a happy ending! At least for a while. Emily’s parents have now split up.
But we come back to the question, why do people suffer and die?
As I said, there are no easy answers.
Actually, there are some easy answers, and we’ll spend a few minutes looking at some of them. But I find that these easy answers are worse than useless.
Suffering as a punishment from God
I mentioned that Emily’s father asked why was God punishing him?
The idea that suffering is a punishment from God is very old. We can find this idea in the bible. There are many examples, but I will give just one.
The story of Uzzah is in the Old Testament, 2 Samuel chapter 6.
Uzzah’s job was to help look after and carry the Ark of the Covenant.
The Ark was the people of Israel’s holiest object.
It contained the tablets of the 10 commandments.
Slide – The Ark and text
One time Uzzah thinks the Ark is going to fall over.
He reaches out a hand to steady the Ark.
But touching the Ark is strictly against God’s rules.
The story goes on,
‘The anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God struck him there because he reached out his hand to the ark; and he died there beside the ark of God.’
It seems to us incredible that God should punish someone who in our eyes was doing nothing wrong.
But this story shows that people did believe that God punishes people who disobey the rules. And many people still think the same way today.
Slide – Indian Ocean Tsunami
We all remember the Asian Tsunami in 2004, which killed around quarter of a million people in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and other countries.
Some Christians around the world claimed that the Tsunami was God’s punishment for Moslem and non- Christian countries.
I think that explanation is not only deeply offensive but also deeply un-Christian.
I believe that God is love, so how could I possibly believe that God would deliberately destroy people indiscriminately?
I also don’t believe that God was punishing Emily’s father.
I don’t believe God punishes people in that way.
How could I ever worship a God who killed a little girl in order to punish her father?
Hell
But the idea that God punishes people and makes them suffer refuses to go away.
Christians traditionally think of Hell as a place of punishment and suffering, fire and torment.
Slide – Bosch triptych
Hieronymus Bosch was born in the mid 15th century.
This painting is called a triptych. It’s in three sections.
Triptychs usually went behind an altar, in a central position where everyone could see them.
The third panel on the right is Hell.
Slide – Bosch triptych detail
It doesn’t look very pleasant.
People today still think Hell is a place where you get punished for bad living.
And it’s not only Christians.
Hell is also a powerful idea in Chinese and Asian thought and religion.
Slide – Asian Hell
I imagine Hell in a different way.
Religion sometimes seems to focus on fear and guilt.
In fact, Christianity should focus more on love.
Hell, if there is a Hell, is a place where we are separated from God, separated from love.
Rather than a place of punishment.
We come back to the question, why do people suffer?
Job
The Bible also includes a quite different approach to suffering.
There’s a whole book of the bible on the subject.
It’s one of my favourite books, the Book of Job.
Job is a man who is blameless and has led a good life.
But at the start of the story Job suffers terribly.
His children all die, his animals which are his wealth are lost, and he is afflicted with terrible sores all over his body. Everything has gone wrong. He has lost his family, his wealth and even his health.
Slide – Blake’s Job
Job is visited by three friends who all tell him in different ways that for God to punish him in this way, he must have committed some great sin. But Job knows that he hasn’t.
You can see Job’s friends in the cave at the bottom, underneath God.
The Book of Job rejects easy answers to the problem of suffering.
In the end Job decides to question God, why he is being punished.
But God’s response is to question Job.
Slide – Blake’s Job with quote
Although the answer seems in a way unsatisfactory, since God never does explain why Job was suffering;
Yet it is clear that Job’s suffering is not a punishment from God.
This shows that the ancient Israelites at the time when the Book of Job was written were also struggling with the question of suffering, just like we are this evening.
They were also not satisfied with easy answers that were untrue.
We may like to think that if we are good, God will reward us with good things in this life.
And if we do wrong, we will be punished.
But we all know good people who have suffered.
And wrong-doers who don’t seem to get punished.
As Jesus said,
‘God sends the rain on the just and the unjust.’
Someone said
‘False religion says ‘Believe in God and nothing bad will ever happen to you.’
True religion says ‘Believe in God. Bad things may happen, but you don’t have to be afraid of them.’
Pain
One answer people sometimes give to the question of suffering, is to say that pain can be meaningful.
On a very basic level we can understand this.
A child has to learn that fire will burn. You can tell your child about this, but your child may only really understand if he or she feels pain from putting a hand into the flame. Very quickly their hand will be taken away, and through pain, the child has learnt about the danger of playing with fire.
One of the daughter churches of the cathedral, St Stephen’s Stanley, supports a Leprosy Project in Sichuan. One of the reasons why leprosy is so disfiguring is because your nerve endings die, and you lose the ability to feel pain. So you may burn your hand in a fire and feel nothing. Or you may cut your foot, and the cut becomes infected, but you feel no pain. The infection spreads, that part of your body can literally rot, but you don’t feel anything.
So at this basic level pain can be useful and meaningful.
But can pain be meaningful at a deeper level?
CS Lewis, a Christian writer who wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, also wrote a book called The Problem of Pain.
Slide – CS Lewis with quote
In this book he suggested that God speaks to us through pain.
There is some truth in this. We usually pay more attention to God when things are going badly wrong in our lives.
But I don’t think it would help Emily’s father if I said ‘This is God’s way of speaking to you.’
We may only see that later.
At the time we are in pain it probably doesn’t help us.
Real pain goes much deeper than this.
The pain of losing someone you love.
The pain of loneliness.
The pain of emptiness.
Slide – Dark Night of the Soul
St John of the Cross described this emptiness as the dark night of the soul.
When the whole world seems dark.
Without hope.
Slide – The Scream
Sometimes in our pain all we can do is scream.
Notice the pain is in the whole landscape, not just the screamer.
I mentioned CS Lewis’s book, The Problem of Pain. But later in life he wrote another very different book on Suffering called A Grief Observed. He wrote this after seeing his own wife dying from cancer, slowly and in pain. He now saw that his idea that pain was God shouting to wake up a deaf world, that idea was completely inadequate in relation to the reality of the suffering and death of his wife.
Slide – A Grief Observed with quote
Pain and Love
Pain and loss, and the suffering they cause, are unavoidable.
They are part of life and love.
Did you ever hear the Simon and Garfunkel song: ‘I am a rock, I am an island.’ They sang ‘A rock feels no pain’.
But a human being is not a rock.
When we live, we are always vulnerable to feel pain.
When we love, we are always vulnerable to feel loss.
But the astonishing, humbling truth is that some people seem to grow through tragedy and loss.
They somehow emerge not with an easy answer
Or no answer at all
But with a profound spirituality
Almost a thankfulness for the life they have been given.
There is something of this at the end of the Book of Job.
Slide – Job again
After 42 chapters of argument and counter-argument, and after all his suffering, Job says:
‘I have spoken of things I have not understood, things too wonderful for me to know.’
There are some people who are not broken, but strengthened by suffering.
Even transformed by suffering.
The dying patient who feels for the first time that she has understood the meaning of life.
The family at the bedside who receive grace from the elderly relative who is dying.
Suffering is there – but so too is love.
Slide – Harold Kushner: When bad things happen to good people.
The American author Rabbi Harold Kushner watched his son die of a rapid ageing disease. He wrote this:
‘I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more sympathetic counselor because of Aaron’s life and death than I would ever have been without it.
And I would give up all of those gains in a second if I could have my son back.
If I could choose, I would forego all the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way because of our experience, and be what I was 15 years ago: an average rabbi, an indifferent counselor, helping some people and unable to help others, and the father of a bright, happy boy. But I cannot choose.’
Our Humanity
So far I have talked a lot about God and suffering.
But sometimes it’s not God we should be blaming.
Instead, we should be looking at ourselves.
Slide – Killing fields of Choeung Ek
Here is an image of a human made hell.
Not so far from Hong Kong.
In the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, in the Khmer Rouge years in the 1970s.
Some of you may have been there.
Much of human suffering is caused by humans.
A hundred years ago at the start of the 20th century humanity, at least in the West, felt confident about itself.
That optimism has mostly collapsed as a result of man’s terrible inhumanity to man.
- Two World Wars
- Millions dying in Russia under Stalin’s iron rule
- And in China under Chairman Mao
- Genocide in Cambodia, and in Rwanda in Africa in the 1990s
- And continuing wars and conflicts around the world
Christian thinking in particular has changed as a result of the Holocaust.
Slide – train track to Auschwitz
Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis in World War 2.
More than a million came on this railway to the extermination camp at Auschwitz.
Very few were still alive at the end of the war.
Slide: Auschwitz victims
Rabbi Hugo Gryn was one of those who survived. He says that the question ‘Where is God?’, which people often ask at times of great suffering, is the wrong question. The real question is, ‘Where is Man?’ What happened to us that we could do such terrible things to other human beings?
There is a true story from Auschwitz, where the rabbis decided to put God on trial. They accused God of breaking his promises to his chosen people, the Jews.
At the end of the trial, they found God guilty.
And then a senior rabbi said ‘Now it is time for our evening prayers’.
Even though they felt that God was guilty of abandoning them, their only option was to continue to trust and hope. The alternative was to give up all hope and abandon themselves to destruction.
Also it was an acknowledgement that it was not God who was destroying the Jewish people, but man. Hitler and the Nazis.
Where is God in Suffering?
We live in a world where pain, suffering and death exist. They are part of our world. We may not be able to explain suffering. We have to accept suffering.
This may lead some people to say that then there is no God.
Certainly no God of Love.
But for Christians, our faith helps to keep hope alive, even in times of darkness.
We believe that God is with us – even though there may be times when it doesn’t feel like it.
Slide – 9/11
Many people asked where was God on 9/11?
A few weeks after 9/11, I read an article by a senior member of the Salvation Army in the US, answering that question. He wrote:
‘God was busy that morning holding up the twin towers for as long as possible, so that as many people as possible could escape. God was busy delaying people on their journeys into work, so that they were late and didn’t go into the towers.’