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Where is God when we face suffering?

 

I suppose I am asked to face this question once again - prompted in recent weeks by the eighth anniversary of the inhumanity of September 11th and the onset of global terrorism; the seventieth anniversary of the start of World War 2; and my own family's experience (like many other families) in watching a loved one die early of an incurable illness.

This is probably the hardest and most challenging question asked of Christians and the greatest obstacle for people believing in God. If God is love how do we explain the belief in God in face of so much suffering?

 

Well there are certainly no quick-fix answers to a subject that has been debated by people over the centuries and certainly not in the brief space allotted to this pastoral letter. But I can offer one or two thoughts which I hope will be of some comfort.

In one sense suffering is a mystery and not helped by the image that some have of a God as some kind of absentee landlord at worse or a divine being sitting on a throne somewhere deciding on who should suffer and when. I do not believe - and would not invite you to believe - in a God who wills our suffering. Quite the contrary, the prevailing image in the Bible is of God as a shepherd that cares for his sheep (Psalm 23); of God that is a rock, a shield and a fortress (Psalm 18). God is the father of the prodigal son who welcomes him home unconditionally - full of love, gentleness and compassion despite the youngest son's reckless and wasteful behaviour.

 

Finally and powerfully God on earth was revealed in the image of his Son, Jesus, who at the end of his short life knew and experienced the humiliation, torture and evil of crucifixion. The Cross of Jesus is a symbol of that suffering experienced by God himself sharing therefore the suffering of humankind; absorbing that suffering and relieving that suffering through the resurrection.

God does not stand at arms length. Through his Son, he has experienced real pain, real death but uses both experiences to change everything. In paying for 'the price of sin', in absorbing the darkness of evil and triumphing over death, Jesus doesn't take all the pain away but bears it with us and for us. We meet God, not in spite of the suffering but within it.

 

I can relate to that when my son died at the age of twelve. Eventually - and it took the best part of two years - I came to understand that far from abandoning me at the very lowest moment of my life, God had been and was with me sharing that grief and pain and holding me together.

 

The writer and mother, Margaret Spufford wrote of her experiences when her child faced an early death.

 

' If we are able to act as a blotting paper for pain, without handing it on in the form of bitterness or hurt to others - then  somehow in some incomprehensible miracle of grace, some at least of the darkness may be turned to light.'

 

May God comfort you and bring you his peace.

 

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