Many
people rightly question how there can be a good or just God in the presence of
so much evil and suffering in the world—about which “God” appears to do
nothing. Exactly how is God loving and sustaining what God
created? That is our constant dilemma, and without some answer you can quite
reasonably become an atheist or at least an agnostic.
I
believe—if I am to believe Jesus—that God is precisely suffering
love. If Jesus is the living “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15),
and if there is this much suffering in the world, then God is in some very real
way suffering. God is not watching it, but in it! Did your
church ever tell you that? How else can we understand the revelation of the
cross and that our central Christian image is a naked, bleeding, suffering man?
Christians strangely worship a suffering God, largely without realizing it; and
Christian mystics even say that there is only one cosmic suffering, and
we all share in it, as Paul also seems to intuit (Colossians 1:24).
Many of
the happiest and most peaceful people I know love this “crucified God” who
walks with crucified people, and thus reveals and “redeems” their
plight as God’s own. For them, Jesus is not observing human suffering
from a distance; he is somehow in human suffering with
us and for us. He includes our suffering in the co-redemption of the world,
as “all creation groans in one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22). We
“make up in our own bodies all that still has to be undergone for the sake of
the Whole Body” (Colossians 1:24).
The
genius of Jesus’ ministry is his revelation that God uses tragedy, suffering,
pain, betrayal, and death itself, not to wound you but in fact to bring you to
God. There are no dead ends. Everything can be transmuted and everything can be
used.
On the
cross, in dramatic theater, God took the worst thing, the killing of God, and
made it into the best thing—the redemption of the world! If you gaze upon the
mystery of the cross long enough, your dualistic mind breaks down, and you
become slow to call things totally good or totally bad. You realize that God
uses the bad for good and that many people who call themselves good may in fact
not be so good at all. (Remember it was the governing and establishment groups
of Rome and Jerusalem that killed Jesus.) At the cross you learn humility,
patience, and compassion. You also learn to distinguish between “what is
happening” and “what is really happening.” This is called discernment and
wisdom.
Sooner
or later, life is going to lead you (as it did Jesus) into the belly of the
whale, into a place where you can’t fix, control, explain, or understand
(usually very concrete and personal; it cannot be merely theoretical). That’s
where transformation most easily and deeply happens. That’s when you’re
uniquely in the hands of God because you cannot “handle” it yourself.
Suffering
is the only thing strong enough to destabilize the imperial ego. It has to be
led to the edge of its own resources, so it learns to call upon its Deepest
Source. Some might call this the God Self, the True Self, the Christ Self, the
Buddha Self, or just the soul. Life at this point is indestructible! In short,
you must discover or “save” your own soul, and nothing else can compare with
this discovery.
“For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever
loses his life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:24). (See also Mark 8:36,
Matthew 16:26, John 12:25.) – Fr. Richard Rohr,
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