God Of Our Silent Tears explores the question of why there is suffering, and offers some insights, but no final answer. Maybe we don't want a final answer. A final answer might pretend to justify things God and we are actually against! The book then turns to the question of how God responds to our suffering. The Trinitarian God offers a short run hope through immanent grace and a long run hope through the very nature of eternity. Then there are three more specific responses. First there is the existence of a Serene Center represented by the Father. We can touch that serenity, draw on it, breathe it into our anxious hearts. Second, is a paradoxical compassion. But what difference does God's compassion make when we are hurting. Chapter 10 of God Of Our Silent Tears offers these thoughts. (God of Our Silent Tears is available for order on line. http://www.godofoursilenttears.com)
When we think of God the Creator,
then we naturally see the rich
and
powerful of the earth as his closest image. But when we hold steady before
us
the sight of God the Redeemer redeeming . . . by suffering, then perhaps
we
must look . . . at the face of that woman with the soup tin in hand and bloated
child
at side.
– Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament For A Son
Professor
Bart Ehrman tells the story of attending a Christmas Eve Service in which the
Intercessor prayed, “You came into our darkness and made a difference. Come
into our darkness again.” Ehrman says the failure of this prayer is why he
cannot be a Christian.
“If God came into our
darkness with the advent of the Christ child,
bringing
salvation to the world, then why is the world in such a state?
Why doesn’t he enter the darkness again? . . . Why is the darkness so overwhelming? . . .
If he came into the darkness and made a difference,
why is there still no
difference? Why are the sick still wracked with unspeakable pain? Why are babies still born with
birth defects? Why are young
children, kidnapped, raped, and murdered?”[i]
Theologian
David Kelsey struggles with the same issue in his book Imagining Redemption.[ii]
He builds his thought on a case study of a little boy who suffers Guillain-Barre
Syndrome, which leaves him with severe physical, psychological, and behavioral
disabilities. Under the strain of parenting him, his mother falls into despair
and commits suicide. This leaves the father struggling to raise the disabled
child while working to support the family. Kelsey puts the question pointedly,
“What earthly good does Jesus do in this situation?” But Kelsey has a very
different understanding of the difference Jesus can make for us. He comes to a
position of faith. Can we? Can we find a way in which God the Son does in fact
make a difference?
A. WHAT DO WE MEAN BY “THE SON?”
When we say
“the Son,” many people think we simply mean Jesus of Nazareth. They are mostly
right. Jesus of Nazareth was the Son in human form. However, John’s Gospel, the
Epistles to the Philippians and the Hebrews, and the Creeds are clear that the
Son has existed from all eternity. The Son was part of the godhead long before
Jesus was born. The Nicene Creed says the Son is “eternally begotten of the
Father.” The Son has always been part of
the Family Trinity. In the Job Description Trinity, the Son always has always been
and always will be a way God connects with creation. Jesus is the fullest
occasion of that connection, but God the Son and his involvement with humanity
did not begin or end with the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth.
We
encounter the Father and the Son in different ways. The Father appears to us as
a vastness, a great distance. The Son is close at hand (immanent), “with us
always unto the end of the age.” We glimpse the Father aspect of God when
something – the desert sky, the mighty river, the mountain, the ocean – evokes
the perspective of eternity. There is a spiritual truth in the large view, the
panoramic scope of infinity, the “God’s eye” view in which we and all around us
become small. But there is also a truth in the direct experience of this moment
– now, now, and now.
The Son
appears to us as the present moment. Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak
said, “. . . [T]he instant (far more
than hours and ages) is eternity’s rival.”[iii] The 17th Century Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Causade wrote of
“the sacrament of the Present Moment.” Buddhist writers like Tich Nhat Hahn
construct an entire spirituality out of attention to this instant. “Be here
now,” Ram Das said. It is appropriate and no coincidence that Alfred North
Whitehead, who gave us the God image of the “fellow sufferer who understands,”
described reality as consisting of discrete present moments. We find the Father
in the big picture; we find the Son close at hand right now. This may be St. Mark’s
point in beginning so many sentences about Jesus with the word, “immediately.”
B. HOW THE SON RESPONDS TO SUFFERING
Jesus
reveals how the Son responds to our suffering. In the Gospels, we see Jesus
searching and longing just as we do – going to John for Baptism, seeking his
mission in the desert, trying unsuccessfully to explain himself in his
hometown, exhausted and retiring for prayer, weeping over the fate of
Jerusalem, seeking deliverance in Gethsemane. All the while, he lives among us
as one of us, he teaches, he heals, he suffers and dies. Then he is resurrected
and ascends to glory. In all of this, the Son participates in and responds to
our human situation. Too often theologians focus exclusively on the crucifixion
of Our Lord as his response to suffering. The crucifixion is, no doubt, at the
heart of the story, but it is not the whole story. If we are to have a
comprehensive picture of how the Son meets us in our times of trial, we must
consider the entire Jesus story from birth through the Ascension.
The
historical story of Jesus is part of the Son’s response to suffering. However,
it is more than that. The Jesus story reveals how the Eternal Son always responds.
The Son suffers with us. The Son is the Compassion of God, feeling what we feel
every bit as much as we do.[iv]
Still we must ask what difference the Son’s response makes.[v] There are two basic kinds of response to the
question of “what earthly good” does the Son do for us in our suffering?[vi]
One is substitutionary. Jesus suffers in our stead. The other is compassionate.
Jesus suffers at our side.
1. Suffering In Our Stead
The substitutionary theory holds
that Jesus suffers on our behalf so we will not have to bear that pain. The
underlying premise is that our afflictions are punishments for our sins. Jesus
helps by taking some of the punishment for us. We deserve far more affliction
than we actually suffer. We have actually gotten out of much of our
well-deserved torment, because Jesus suffered such a large share of our penalty
on the cross. However, we still have to
pay for the excess over and above what Jesus has suffered.[vii]
The theory may be extended to the eternal Son by saying he still suffers when
we sin and thereby continues to bear the brunt of our guilt.
This way of
thinking is profoundly unsatisfactory. We have already observed that suffering
falls far too randomly to be understood as punishment for sin. Jesus himself
did not accept this notion. Portraying
God as the punisher from above may instill “fear of the Lord” but not devotion
to the Lord. That is just the beginning of what’s wrong with the
substitutionary model. According to this way of thinking, Christ has proven
only somewhat effectual. As for the suffering we still endure, it is cold
comfort to be told we deserve worse. Moreover, this account utterly disregards
Jesus’ teaching and healing ministries as signs of the Son’s response to our
affliction. In fact, it sides with the Pharisees who opposed Jesus’ healing
ministry because it undermined the just retribution of God. This model has no
role for the Resurrection in addressing our affliction. Finally, this dark doctrine portrays God as
an abusive Father torturing and murdering his Son. In Naked Before God, Bill and Martha Williams offer a compelling
rebuttal to such a brutal theology.
One Sunday Martha asked
her [Sunday School] kids what they
thought about God . . . “Well,
she said . . . “Is he good or bad or what?”
One of them – we’ll call
him Timothy -- looked at her and said . . . “Well,
. . . God killed his
Son.”
Shut your ears Timothy! You’re
listening too well . . . You just hold on
to the notion that God
is good, not evil, and that loving you doesn’t mean
he wants to kill you. If
you let that filth in, you’ll spend your life trying
to scrape it off. When
they start to bleat that poison in the big room
just plug your ears and
chant with me: God is good. God is good.
God
is
good. That will be
our measuring stick, you and me. If anything
doesn’t measure up to
that, you’ll know it’s broken. . . Don’t believe
Bart Ehrman looks at the Christ-event, the Incarnation, and
sees that it has not “made a difference.” If the “difference” he is looking for
is the cessation of suffering, he is dead right. It has not made that difference, but we must look deeper
to see if it may have made another kind of difference.
2.
Suffering At Our Side
There is a
better way to understand how the Son helps us. In the Cross, God the Son
identifies with the suffering – compassionately, not manipulatively. God is so
present with the hungry that his stomach cramps. God is so present with the
lonely that his throat constricts and cannot call out for comfort. God is so
present with the grief-stricken that he cannot move. But God does not suffer at
our hands to make us feel guilty. Rather God suffers with us to make us feel
loved. God’s suffering is compassionate, not manipulative.[ix]
When we
become like this kind of God, we relate to suffering, our own and that of
others, in a different way. We acknowledge our own pain, then notice that we
aren’t the only ones who feel this way. We take off the blinders and dare to
look at the suffering of others – the suffering of abject poverty in Haiti and
Zimbabwe, the suffering of shame and remorse in the people right next to us.
When we take off the blinders, we see right off that all forms of suffering are
essentially the same. Life hurts. We all hurt. We all have to go to the cross.
But we do
not go to the cross without hope if we go to the cross together with Christ and
with each other. When we bleed together, that’s Communion. And Communion is the
Divine Nature. That’s what the Trinity signifies. Compassion connects us to
eternity and the soul of eternity extends beyond suffering. The soul of
eternity is the Father’s peace and wisdom and serenity. And the heart of eternity is the exuberant
joy that created the universe and fills it with life and beauty. That’s where
compassion leads us.
This part
of the divine response to suffering is often trivialized. It is apt to be
misconstrued as nothing more than saying, “Jesus understands what we are going
through.” Mere understanding is a long way from real redemption. Understanding
is a good thing to have from one’s friends and family, but one might hope for
more from God. As Kelsey says, “Redemption is something beyond giving comfort.”[x]
When one has just been diagnosed with a life-threatening cancer, the attention
of one’s friend is welcome, but one is more interested in the help of a first
rate oncologist. The redemption we read about in the New Testament is more
substantive than the promise of a fellow sufferer to “be there for us.” The New
Testament repeatedly affirms that our heartaches not only share in the
suffering of Christ and take us to the same cross, but also will lead us to the
same comfort, healing, and resurrection. 1st Corinthians 1:15;
Philippians 3: 10-11; 1st Peter 4: 12-13. Ultimately, these are promises for
eternity. But is there a way in which the Son’s joining us in the human
predicament changes the situation now? Is there resurrection for us now because
the Son is in this with us? There are four helpful ways to think of how the Son’s
compassion represented by the Cross can redeem our pain.
a, Liberating Our Identity From
Suffering
Kelsey
offers a helpful variation on the “fellow sufferer” model when he turns to the
question of what makes one’s life worth living. We are apt to justify our lives
by identifying with our role as victim or as one who has survived something
captivatingly horrific. Such identifications, however, bind us to the worst
parts of our past and cut us off from joy and from the unfolding, vital,
dynamic future. This is decidedly a common response to suffering, and it is
psychologically crippling and spiritually atrophying.[xi]
Kelsey
proposes a healthier kind of redemption: Jesus’ crucifixion reveals God’s love
for us. The Son does not have to suffer. Nothing compels him to go to the cross. Rather, the Son chooses to join us in our pain. Jesus shows us a God who values us
enough to join us in our suffering instead of sitting blissfully serene in
Paradise. If we can find our identity in being loved this much by God instead
of by attaching our identity to our defining tragedy, then we are set free from
the tragedy’s power to define us.[xii]
b. Evoking Love
Redemption
achieved by the compassionate suffering of the Son is, however, more comprehensive
than the liberation of our identities from tragedy. In the 11th Century,
Peter Abelard argued that the suffering and death of Christ saves us by
revealing God’s love, and inspiring us to love God in return. This stirring up
of our love for God sets us free from bondage to sin and self. Abelard gave us
a medieval precursor of the fellow sufferer who understands. He also gave us a
psychologically credible foundation for the notion that suffering can be
spiritually helpful.[xiii]
The
question remains what difference loving God makes when we are suffering. The
answer is neither simple nor rational in a linear sense. But experience
validates it. Suffering can make us turn inward upon ourselves. We fixate on
our pain. The result is embittering and atrophying. We not only suffer because
of what has happened to us. We compound the pain by suffering because we
suffer. So many of the books on the problem of evil are exercises in precisely
this compounding of affliction. But if we turn our attention and energy outward
– to love another person, or to serve a higher cause, -- the suffering, though
not diminished, can be borne. This is what Victor Frankl saw in the
concentration camps. Love and meaning can often get us through what otherwise
could not be endured. If we turn our energy all the way outward, to love
Eternity itself, Reality itself, to love God, that love is salvific.
c. Transforming Suffering Into A
Place We Meet God
Healing us by evoking love in us is
decidedly part of what the Son can do. But that healing depends on our
response. It depends on our belief in God’s love. Does redemption depend entirely on our
subjective understanding and belief? Is there more going on in the Son’s
response to human affliction than a shift in our psychology, something
objective, not dependent on whether people “get it?”[xiv] The answer is “yes.” God’s joining
us in our pain is an act of love, and that makes a real difference, whether we
“get it” or not. Of course, if we acknowledge and accept grace, we experience
the blessing all the more, but the blessing is there by God’s act. It doesn’t
depend on our understanding it.
Paul wrote
that something had actually happened in the death and resurrection of Christ,
that the world had been objectively changed.
In the 4th Century, St. Athanasius, one of the most influential people
in shaping the Christian understanding of God, Jesus, and salvation, said
salvation turned on the notion that when God “assumed” something – took it on,
make it part of the divine experience, whatever had been assumed was redeemed. Kathryn
Tanner applies that idea to Jesus’ experience of human suffering. She writes:
The
humanity assumed by the Word suffers from the effects
of
sin . . . tempted, anxious before death, surrounded by
sufferings
of all kinds, in social conditions of exclusion
and
political conflict. The Word’s assuming or bearing of
all
this means a fight with it . . .[xv]
Tanner’s argument is grounded in the mystical apprehension
that when God walks a path, the path is changed. Such an argument is difficult
to articulate; but it is intuitively compelling. If Christ has suffered as we
suffer, that must make a difference. But what
difference does it make?
Marilyn
McCord Adams contends that our ultimate redemption from suffering is found in
our relationship with God whose Goodness and Beauty vastly exceed all the goods
and ills of the created order. By joining in the experience of suffering, God
makes suffering a common ground, an occasion to establish the human-divine
relationship that will ultimately redeem us and bring us to joy. Adams does not
offer this argument as a cause of or justification for suffering. Rather she is
saying this is how God turns otherwise meaningless suffering into something of
positive value.
Divine identification
with human participation in horrors
confers a positive
aspect on such experiences by integrating
them into the
participant’s relationship with God.[xvi]
Our joining with God in suffering does not, however, mean we
stay in suffering in order to stay with God. We pass through suffering together
on the way to joy. Paul prayed to share the suffering of Christ in order that
he might share the resurrection of Christ. Tanner insists that Christ did not
suffer in order to enshrine suffering, but to overcome it. Jesus assumed (took
on) affliction all the way into a disgraceful death, and then overcame that
affliction in the resurrection and ascension. That has made a basic difference
in the order of things. Suffering and death still happen, but they do not get
the final word. This divine action permeates all situations with hope. “Blessed
be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for by his great mercy we have
been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from
the dead.”[xvii]
Tanner’s
reminder that Christ suffers in order to overcome suffering, not abide in it,
is particularly important when we think of the Eternal Son always sharing our
pain. If we understand the Son’s only response to be suffering alongside us,
then we deify suffering, get stuck in it, and fail to avail ourselves of the
power to rise up and live. The Holy Spirit infuses that power, so most of this
aspect of the divine response to suffering will be in the next chapter.
However, so that we do not misunderstand the value of Christ’s compassion, we
need to clarify the meaning of the cross for our lives. If we are to think of
the cross as Christ eternally sharing our sorrow, we must match that image with
the Resurrection as Christ eternally rising up from sorrow so that we may rise
with him. Veneration of the crucifix, of Christ on the cross, must not obscure
celebration of resurrection as Christ’s power of life continuing to happen for
us now.
We may well
ask why we have to meet God in suffering. Can we not, yea do we not, encounter
God in joy? Don’t we see a beautiful day and thank God for it? When we are
deeply loved by another person, don’t we thank God for them? We do meet God in
the good times. But the good times don’t need an independent justification.
They are just plain good. What if God chose to meet us in the good times and
leave us alone in the bad ones? Then the bad ones would be meaningless. There
would be nothing to redeem them. But if God chooses to stay with us, for better
or worse, in sickness and in health, then we meet God in special way, a better
way, than if God were a fair weather friend.
This
assumption theory of redemption is a narrative of hope, of “the Word becoming
flesh” to endure suffering, and eventually to triumph over death itself through
the resurrection. Jesus’ life of healing, reconciling, and teaching is a sign
of how the Son is always present, working for the good in our human situation.
His death and resurrection reveal how the eternally faithful God will make all
well in the fullness of time.[xviii]
d. Suffering To Become Our
Mediator
Hebrews
offers a further interpretation of our salvation story in which the Ascension
is as vital a part of our salvation as the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, or the
Resurrection. Hebrews says we need a bridge between mortal, frail, fallible
humanity and God – a personal bridge, an intermediary, to plead our case, to
tell the Infinite what it is like to be finite, to tell the Perfect what it is
like to be fallible, to tell the Serene Center of the Reality how it feels to
be afraid. Such a bridge must be at home both in heaven and on earth. He must
be truly God and truly human.[xix]
In Jesus, God
the Son took on flesh lived a human life and died an all too human death. Hebrews tells us that the Son is God from all eternity, before all time. He then took
human form. He had to live and suffer his way into becoming fully human so he
could serve as the bridge. We need
someone to tell the Serene Center what we are experiencing. And we need someone
to assure us that the Serene Center cares for us. Jesus forges the link between
human passion and divine serenity. A helpful metaphor might be to think of the
Father and Son as connected by the Spirit as the ocean is connected to the moon
by gravity. The movement of the Son, the suffering of the Son with us, effects
a merciful tide in the oceanic Father.[xx]
C. CONCLUSION
Our faith is that God the Son has come
into our darkness and he comes into it over and over again. He does make a
difference. It may not be the difference we want. It is not what Ehrman means
by a difference. But it is the difference between suffering without meaning in
a cold indifferent universe (such as Camus paints in The Stranger) versus suffering with God in a way that connects us
to love. It is the difference between hope and despair.
We have seen God responding two our
suffering now in two ways – with wise equanimity and with compassion. These
responses help more than words can say – but they are not enough. When we have
been laid low, we need to be raised up. That brings us to the work of the Holy
Spirit.
[i] Bart Ehrman, God’s Problem: How The Bible Fails To Answer Our Most Important
Question – Why We Suffer. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. p. 5.
[ii] David Kelsey, Imagining Redemption. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press,
2005.
[iii] Letter to Marina Tsveteyeva, July
1, 1926 in Letters, Summer 1926 (ed.
Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak, Konstantin M. Azadovsky. trans. Margaret
Wettlin, Walter Arndt, Jamey Gambrell (New York: The New York Review of Books,
2001) p. 208.
[iv] There is the Protestant emphasis
that Christ’s sacrifice was made once;
it does not have to be repeated. That teaching, derived from Hebrews, is not
meant to deny that Christ compassionately shares our pain. It is meant to
reject a medieval understanding of the Mass. The underlying assumption of that
medieval idea, derived from St. Anselm’s doctrine of the atonement, was that
Christ’s suffering was a substitution, Christ suffering to pay the penalty for
our sins. Baptism served to accept the benefit of that sacrifice. But what
about the sins we commit after being baptized? Some medieval Christians
believed Christ had to be sacrificed anew in each mass to propitiate God to
forgive our more recent transgressions. The idea that there was only one
sacrifice of substitution was meant to correct that distortion of what the
celebration of Holy Communion truly is, an encounter with God in love. The
whole notion of a sacrifice of substitution is questionable anyway, but the
idea that it has to be carried out over and over is even worse. The “one
sacrifice” doctrine addresses that point. It has nothing to do with
understanding the cross as a sign of Christ’s constant compassion, of his being
with us to the ends of the age, including in our suffering.
[v]There is a huge part of this
question I will not attempt to address here. Theologians customarily treat it
separately, and it is a book unto itself. That is the question of how the Son’s
response to our human situation redeems the evil we ourselves commit. Answers
to that question are called Doctrines of Atonement. I will limit this book to
the question of how the Son’s response may be helpful for the evil we suffer at
the hands of others or at the hands of nature.
[vi] Of course, the question of what the
Son does for us is larger than the question of what good he does for us in our
suffering. The matter of atonement for sin is another question, perhaps not
unrelated, but certainly not the same. Our focus here is on suffering.
[vii] This viewpoint was not widely held
in Christianity for the first 1,000 years of our history. But, beginning with
St. Anselm (10th Century), and then even more so after John Calvin
(16th Century) the most common understanding of Jesus’ suffering is
that he is taking the beating which the Father would otherwise be compelled by
his sense of justice to administer to us. Theologians call this “penal
substitution” or “the substitutionary atonement” doctrine.
[viii] Bill Williams and Martha Williams, Naked Before God (Harrisburg: Morehouse
Publishing, 1998) pp. 240-241. See also Gray Temple, The Molten Soul (New York: Church Publishing, Inc., 2000) in which
Fr. Temple argues that this theory of the atonement is destructive to a vital
spiritual life and leads to rigidity and judgmental attitudes.
[ix] C. E. Rolt and Charles Hartshorne
portray God’s suffering love as a compassionate gesture of solidarity with
people, and thus a gesture toward personal relationship. Adams, pp. 70-71, 159
-161.
[x] David Kelsey, pp. 54-55.
[xi] See also Gerald May, at 98-201 in
which Dr. May describes our addictions to self-representations or ways of
thinking of ourselves.
[xii] David Kelsey, pp. 55-59.
[xiii]
We must be careful here not to fall into the misunderstanding arises
when people mix Christ’s compassion up with the notion that Christ continues to
suffer affliction whenever we commit sin and because we commit sin. The cross
is meant to communicate love, not instill guilt. This is not a matter of our
afflicting Christ but of Christ sharing our affliction. Love liberates. Guilt
enslaves.
[xiv] Kelsey intends his redemption model
to be objective as well as subjective.
[xv] Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and Trinity.
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. pp. 27-28.
[xvi] Adams, pp. 166-167.
[xvii] 1 Peter 3:
[xviii]
This approach should not be allowed to detract from the vital fact of
the historical event of Jesus. To say all too abstractly that the Son is always
with us is not deeply helpful unless that abstraction is enfleshed in the story
of Jesus. Only when it really happens in
the particular event, can we take it seriously as a general principle.
[xix] This model of redemption runs
contrary to Robert W. Jensen’s understanding. He insists at p. 83 that “Since
relation to us, as the Father of our Lord, is internal to God’s being, there is
no need for bridge-beings between God and us.” Part of Jensen’s objection to a
bridge concept of Christ is that it suggests another metaphor, a more
problematic one, a “ladder of divinity” in which the Trinity is made up of
successively more divine beings leading from humanity to God. p. 90. The bridge
or mediation model of Hebrews is no such ladder of divinity. The fully divine
Logos becomes fully human through living a human life in order that he may act
as our mediator.
However, Jensen’s
objection to a bridge between humanity and God goes deeper. It rests in his
repudiation of Greek notions of eternity. Jensen sees God in Hebrew terms. He
is concerned to avoid Arius’ idea that God must be entirely uninvolved with
time in order to save us from time. p. 81. Jensen notes critically, “(T)he
religion of late antiquity was a frenzied search for mediators, for beings of a
third ontological kind between time and Timelessness, to bridge the gap.” p.
61. Arius was wrong in trying to keep all of God uncontaminated by time. But
the Greek longing to transcend time is deeply entrenched in Christian
tradition. In the model of the Trinity proposed in this book, the Father
metaphor refers to the aspect of God which manifests as eternity and is untouched
by time so that he is able to offer hope to us “ . . . who are wearied by that
changes and the chances of this life that we may rest in thy eternal
changelessness.” (Book of Common Prayer). The Son, however, is God immanent in
time, fully involved and faithfully present with us through “the changes and
the chances of this life.” Christianity is a “religion (born in) late
antiquity” and Christ does in fact mediate “between time and Timelessness, to
bridge the gap.”
[xx] “In union with God, in being
brought near to God, all the trials and sorrows of life – suffering, loss,
moral failing, the oppressive stunting of opportunities and vitality, grief,
worry, tribulation, and strife – are purified, remedied, and reworked through
the gifts of God’s grace.” Kathryn Tanner, p. 2.
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