Suffering and a God of love

A new piece in The Age faith column this morning. Here it is:

It’s a question that gets lobbed at Christians constantly. One that’s probably on the minds of many Australians in the wake of bushfires, floods, cyclones and earthquakes. How can anyone believe in a loving God in a world where there is so much suffering?

Any easy answers render God arbitrary and capricious at worst, at best, aloof and uncaring. Neither of which inspire my devotion.

Part of what I can say as a Christian is that I don’t get it either.  But there are at least some things I can assert about the problem of suffering and a God of love.

There has always been appalling suffering. The only reason we are more aware of it this summer is because it is happening to people like us.

Much of the current crop of natural disasters are arguably the doing of humankind, who (and every one of us has contributed to this) have been mindless consumers for too long.

Awful things happen in this world and it does not for one moment mean that the victims deserve it or are being punished. In the gospel of Luke Jesus is asked, when a tower fell killing several random people, what they had done to make God so angry. God had nothing to do with it, he says. Stuff happens. Suffering is not God’s judgement on people.

Perhaps the most important thing a Christian can say is to respond to the question, where is God when humans are wounded, dying, grieving, afraid?

In his book on the Holocaust, Night, Elie Wiesel writes of an experience in Auschwitz where he and his fellow inmates were forced to watch the slow death by hanging of a young boy. As the man in line behind him asked, ‘Where is God?’ Wiesel answered, ‘God is here, God is hanging on this gallows’.

One reading is that in this brutal, senseless death, belief in a God of love also died. For Christians, that terrible story has another resonance because our central narrative places God literally on the gallows, when Jesus of Nazareth who was somehow, mysteriously, God, was misunderstood, betrayed and abandoned by his friends and tortured to death by corrupt political and religious authorities.

But the evidence for God’s solidarity with suffering people is there long before the life of Jesus. In the Hebrew scriptures God is often portrayed as being the liberator of the oppressed, lover of justice and mercy.

If Jesus was showing us how God feels about us, the message was clear – God cares about human suffering. God, Jesus said, is aware of every sparrow that falls dead. He described God as our loving father. The word he used was the equivalent of ‘Daddy’.

I don’t believe that God causes terrible ‘acts of nature’. The world is the way it is. But when bad things happen, it is clear where God is. God is there. In the pain and chaos, the confusion and the long clean up, God is there.

Comments

[Anon.]

Brilliant article