Isaiah 53:4-12 and Hebrews 5:1-10 and Mark 10:35-45
Why
does a good God allow suffering? Why, in particular, does a good God allow undeserved
suffering? Why does a good God stand by while children are buried alive, in the
rubble of a war-zone or under a terrifying mud-slide? It isn’t fair! Or, closer
to home, why stand by while people in older age are stripped from the inside by
dementia, their family forced to watch? What sort of a God is that?
There
are no easy answers to such questions. But that does not mean that there are no
answers. Suffering raises big questions, and both suffering itself and the
questions it raises deserve to be taken seriously. We are not faced with an
unhelpful referendum choice between Simplistic
Answers and Nothing to Say.
With
that in mind, let us turn to Isaiah
53:11. The context is a prophetic vision of one described as the LORD’s
servant. This servant is a personification of God’s faithful people and what
they were experiencing at the hands of corrupt rulers and surrounding nations.
It is a role Christians see as ultimately being taken-up and fully-expressed in
the person of Jesus. And the verses we heard read out are all about the bodily
experience of this servant. A body that is wounded, and crushed; covered in disfiguring
bruises, and experiencing anguish. It is a body broken; even undergoing a
violent death, due to ‘a perversion of justice’ (verse 8). If this is true of
Jesus — and it was — then it is Jesus in solidarity with many others, in every
generation. And verse 11 says, ‘The righteous one, my servant, shall make many
righteous’.
To
be righteous in the Hebrew scriptures is to embody justice. That is to say that
verse 11 can be understood in this way: ‘the one who embodies justice, my
servant, shall make many to embody justice’. Or, in other words, many who witness the undeserved suffering of
this victim of injustice will be so sickened as to turn their backs on the way
of injustice and take up the cause of embodying justice in their own lives,
their actions, their habitual practices.
We
might agree in principle that women,
and children, and less-often but nonetheless also men should not suffer
domestic violence; but we are unlikely to do
something about what goes on behind closed doors. It is none of our
business, nothing to do with us. Perhaps God allows suffering in the hope that
being confronted with it might make us compassionate? Not that suffering is a
necessary evil, to be tolerated; but that God consistently intends to redeem
suffering by allowing it to be the instrument that breaks our hearts open. Selah*
Turn
with me to Hebrews 5:8. The writer,
speaking of Jesus, boldly declares, ‘Although he was a Son, he learned
obedience through what he suffered’. Let’s unpack that. First, the word
translated ‘obedience’ means ‘submission to what is heard’. That is, a response
to(wards) someone speaking.
Second,
the word translated ‘suffering’ means ‘to be acted upon in a certain way,
either good or bad’. That is, to find ourselves in circumstances where we are dependent
on other people because, for whatever reason, we lack the agency necessary for
independent action.
(That
is why in the old translations Jesus said ‘suffer the little children to come
unto me’: do it for them, because they can’t do it for themselves. Children
either suffer the actions of neglect or suffer the actions of love; and, either
way, are shaped by what they suffer.)
In
other words, the point being made here is not that God beat his wilful son until the child learnt to do what it was told
[and I use ‘it’ intentionally, as beating anyone is dehumanising] but that through the experience of dependency on
others, through loving embrace and painful rejection, Jesus learnt how to hear
and to trust God.
We
must listen to the testimony of sisters and brothers who tell us that their
experience of suffering, their new-found, often unwanted, dependency on God and
neighbours, has, indeed, done just that. Conversely, we might observe how easy
it is to nether hear nor trust God or our neighbour when you have all the
privilege, all the resources, to be both god and neighbour-enough to yourself. Selah
Suffering,
then, has the potential to open our eyes to see and our ears to hear and our
hearts to give ourselves to both God and our neighbour. And that might very
well go some way to answering the question, why would a good God permit
suffering, in a world where our eyes and ears and hearts are so closed.
Jesus
said, ‘the Son of Man’ — that is, ‘the Mortal’, a favourite term by which he
fully-identified with his sisters and brothers and invites them to identify
with him — ‘came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a
ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45). Justice
does not work at a theoretical level, but only when it is embodied, by all. I
might like to believe that I am a good person, but who am I good for? Or, what good
am I, in the world?
For
as long as our definition of our goodness allows us to tolerate the human cost
of the global arms trade, or of our insatiable lust for energy consumption, or of
any of the injustices by which we try to keep suffering at arm’s length; for as
long as we refuse to embrace our bodily frailty and all it might have to teach
us; perhaps we ought to hold our tongue in God’s presence.
*Selah, Hebrew notation found in many of
the Psalms; of uncertain meaning, but widely understood to mean Pause (and reflect on what has just been
said before moving on).
Questions
to consider:
What
first-hand experience of suffering have you known?
What,
if anything, has suffering taught you?
How,
and for whom, might you more fully embody justice in the world?
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