Defeater Ethics: Evil & Suffering (Part 2)
"How could a good God allow so much suffering to me?"
This is the second part of my answer to the notoriously difficult problem of evil and suffering. Part one provided a philosophical response, but in it, I admitted that our struggle with evil and suffering is more personal than philosophical. Therefore, let's turn our attention to the much more important pastoral response.
As previously discussed, evil and suffering are as much, if not more, a problem for the worldview of secular unbelief. However, there most certainly is a problem for the religious as well. We do not believe it disproves the existence of God, but it most certainly calls into question the goodness of God, which is the dilemma this defeater ethics series seeks to address. How can a God who permits evil and suffering be good?
I am going to suggest the Christian faith is able to answer that question in a way no other religion can because only Christianity has the audacity to believe in a God who is "familiar with suffering and acquainted with grief." We claim God has personally entered into the problem of evil and suffering, and his entrance is our answer. Therefore, the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus will form my pastoral response to evil and suffering.
First, consider the birth of Jesus. We believe this is the arrival of God incarnate, the Author of the story entering his own story. And this alone speaks to our suffering. Specifically, whatever reason he has for permitting it, God is willing to submit to his own reasoning.
Dorothy Sayers says this: "For whatever reason, God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—but He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man."
From the perspective of conventional religion, her words are crass, even blasphemous. But the Christian receives them as glorious, and in them, we find the beginnings of the Christian answer to evil and suffering. Not a complete answer, but Christ's incarnation does afford us a process of elimination of sorts. And that elimination process dispels many of the doubts, fears, and accusations that commonly arise when suffering draws near.
For example, we may be tempted to think God is indifferent and unmoved by our suffering. But the birth of Jesus won't allow this. So concerned is our God that He was moved to join us in our suffering. We might be tempted to say God is cruel and playing a maniacal game with creation. But the birth of Jesus won't allow this. As Sayers says, "Whatever game He is playing, He has kept his own rules and played fair." We might be tempted to believe God has given up on this world and handed us over to the evil and suffering of our making. But the birth of Jesus won't allow this, for why would he join a world he has given up on?
Do you see? The mere fact that Jesus is Emmanuel (God with us) says so much about our suffering. It may not be the ultimate answer we seek, but it eliminates the common pain-induced questions that tend to arise. But Jesus did not come to merely eliminate our questions; in his death and resurrection, we venture into God's fuller answer to evil and suffering.
What does the death of Jesus say to evil and suffering? More than we can comprehend. But in my pastoral experience, the cross offers two unique consolations to the hurting: God can relate and redeem.
Nothing is more insulting to the hurting than well-meaning people who can't relate attempting to relate with naïve consolation. This is why Job's supposed comforters were not comforting at all. Assuming they could grasp Job's profound loss, they offered simplistic advice, which was more insulting than helpful. And if you have experienced this unrelatable counsel yourself, you know how uncomforting it can be. Perhaps you force a polite "Thank you," but inside, the thought rages: you have no idea what it's like. But the opposite is also true. For example, those who have walked the path of depression are uniquely equipped to help the depressed. I call it the comfort of relatability.
But this comfort is often inaccessible to the hurting, particularly in the most tragic instances of evil and suffering. I experienced this recently with my Nashville friends walking through the horrors of a school shooting. Who can possibly relate to such a tragedy? Jesus can. There has never been a greater suffering endured than the cross when the hell we deserve consumed our Savior. This is suffering we cannot comprehend, and none, but Jesus, has endured.
This means that while it is true we undergo particular sufferings that Jesus cannot relate to, such as cancer, the cross tells us there is no degree of suffering Jesus is unfamiliar with. When it comes to depths of suffering, Christ suffers alone. Nobody can say to him, "I know what it's like," but this is precisely why he can say to every single one of us, no matter the pain, "I know what it's like." Simply put, Jesus suffered alone so that nobody would ever have to. I understand the temptation to abandon God in our pain, but this is only abandoning the unique consolation of a Savior who knows what it's like.
But more than relating to our suffering, the cross also tells us that Jesus can redeem our suffering. And the redemption is found in God's ability to use your pain to accomplish a greater good. The most horrific evil and suffering the world will ever know is the crucifixion of Jesus. And if you were there, you would have cried out, "Why? Why would God let this happen? What possible reason could God have for allowing such evil and suffering?" The answer we now know is that eternal good stems from that horrific event. In the ultimate "what you meant for evil, God meant for good," the greatest suffering the world will ever know yielded the greatest good the world will ever know. Now, if God, in his infinite wisdom, could use that pain for good, then name a pain beyond his redemption. There is no suffering that God cannot redeem, including yours.
But while we are encouraged by a God who can relate to and redeem evil and suffering, what we truly long to see is the eradication of evil and suffering. And this we find in the resurrection of Jesus. Conventional religions offer some form of celestial reward where we escape this world of evil and suffering. A solace of sorts, I suppose, but not the solace we wish for. Nobody wants to give up on the dream of what life in this world could be, indeed, should be. This life, as cruel as it can be, is still the life we were created to live. Deep down, nobody wants to abandon this world like a condemned property too infested with suffering. No! What we want is this life without the infestation.
Only Christianity promises this. And the promise is found in the resurrection of Jesus, who is the prototype, not just of our resurrection but the resurrection of all creation. After using the suffering and death of Jesus to accomplish immeasurable good, God surprises the world by making suffering and death come untrue for the first time. Easter is only the first of many. God did the impossible in raising Jesus from the dead, and in so doing, God has proven that, far more than possessing answers to evil and suffering, God possesses a cure for all of us.
And there is something uniquely glorious about his resurrection cure. Our pain becomes our glory. Jesus was raised from the dead with a glorified body, never to be harmed by evil and suffering again. But that resurrected body retained the scars of his suffering. And in this way, his pain, which God used for immeasurable good, was indelibly memorialized in His resurrected body. Do you see? The suffering of his life became the glory of his resurrection. And this will be true of all who hope in Jesus as well. Our crosses will become our crowns. Yes, the resurrection will make all things new, but the newness will be like a renovated home rather than a newly constructed home. We will be raised incorruptible, but the indelible mark of our corruptible experience will be retained as an eternal reminder that God, in his infinite wisdom, used our suffering to bring forth glory.
Undoubtedly, evil and suffering are a problem for every worldview. But at the center of the Christian worldview is a Savior who has entered the problem himself. Jesus is the answer to the problem that confounds us all. For in Jesus, we find a God who relates to our suffering, who redeems our suffering, and most of all, who will one day resurrect our suffering into glory.