Posted by Holly Ordway in Apologetics | 8 Comments
Suffering and the Cross of Christ
Why do innocent people suffer? There is no simple answer to this question. Why should there be? Reality is complex.
One approach to the “problem of suffering” is to deny that evil and suffering exist at all. Perhaps pain is an illusion. Or perhaps it is innocent suffering that is the illusion: perhaps those who suffer did something wrong, in this life or a previous life, and so they deserve what they get. Or perhaps there is no such thing as evil: we are merely smart animals, and ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are nothing more than synonyms for ‘I like it’ and ‘I don’t like it.’
But denying the reality of suffering and evil works better in theory than in lived reality. For when it comes down to it, how do we account for our asking the question in the first place? We perceive that pain and evil are anomalous; we experience suffering as a departure from the way things ought to be. At some deep level, we know that that beauty, peace, joy, love and happiness are the template for existence, and that something has gone badly wrong.
Others take suffering as evidence that God does not exist, or at any rate that God as Christians understand Him does not exist. If God exists, and is good and loving, why doesn’t He do something about suffering?
Are we really interested in the answer to that question? Or is it just a rhetorical way of saying “If I were God, I’d handle it differently”?
Because God has, indeed, solved the problem of suffering definitively – but not the way anyone could ever have expected.
Reasoning things out can give us a pretty decent answer about why evil and suffering exist in the world. God created human beings, making them in His own image, with the ability to make choices. Having free will means that we are free to do evil as well as good – and our actions have consequences. The world is as it is – a fallen, broken place – because we have made it so. Evidently God values free will sufficiently that it is worth allowing us to make a mess with it. This is an entirely reasonable and, I think, true answer, yet it is not enough. We continue to wrestle with the question. We need not just an answer, but a solution.
Evil exists. Suffering is real. What has God done about it?
What He has not done – contrary to a lot of popular ideas about Christianity – is sit up in heaven and dole out pie in the sky rewards for those who are willing to put up with a lot of crap through life on earth. If that were the Christian creed, there’d be an excuse for dismissing Christianity as a pack of lies to pacify the masses. But it’s not.
The reality is more interesting, and quite a lot more shocking.
For God has not merely responded to our situation, but entered into it.
He has done so by acting in the world – by intervening, directly and dramatically and literally, in the messy, physical world of history. Not spiritually, not metaphorically, but in actual time and space, God sent His Son to become one of us, to be incarnate as a human being, to live and suffer and die – and to be raised from the dead, and to continue on in glorified life. He has not ameliorated our suffering, but rather redeemed it.
It is in the Incarnation of Christ and his death on the Cross we find God’s definitive answer to the problem of suffering.
In his suffering on the Cross, Jesus confirms our deepest intuitions about pain. Suffering does exist – he felt it too. Evil exists – he experienced it, an innocent man being tortured to death.
The Cross is God’s gracious response to the problem of suffering and evil – gracious beyond all imagining, so gracious that it seems hardly possible to be true, except that it happened. The Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection are events in history. They really happened.
We have to grasp the significance of God entering into time and space to deal with the problem of pain.
You see, suffering is irrelevant in the abstract. Suffering only matters when it is realized in a specific instance: a loved one dead, a dreadful loss, a wicked and cruel act.
Abstract responses to suffering are worthless in the face of actual pain: when one is starving, it does not help to understand the way the digestive system works.
When we experience the agony of grief, the dull ache of loss, the dead chill of depression, the knife of anxiety, no philosophical answer satisfies. We need action. To the hungry man or woman, we give bread, not words of comfort.
And this is what God has done. He has given His Son, who freely carried our pain – past, present, and future – to the Cross, where he takes it (and us) through death into life.
How does that work? I would not presume to know – any more than I presume to know “how it works” to fall in love. We do not need to know how something works to experience it.
Because of Christ’s death and resurrection, when we suffer we can know that we are not alone in our suffering. There is One who has gone ahead of us, and who is with us. He does not deny our pain, but enters into it with us.
Whatever our suffering is, Christ has borne it. On the Cross, he bore the weight of all our sins – the sinless one taking the burden of sin upon himself, that he might cancel our debts and set us free to come to the Father. But equally on the Cross he bore the weight of all our pain, deserved and undeserved. He knew the mental agony of pain to come; he suffered humiliation and mockery; he was cruelly tortured and left to die in agony; he saw all his dear friends abandon and deny him at the very moment he most needed consolation; he was made utterly helpless and alone.
Suffering and death still lead into darkness, but now we know that they do not have to lead to a dead end: rather, the darkness has a door in it leading out into new life, a door that Our Lord can open for us, if we wish him to.
We can’t open that door for ourselves, and that helplessness is hard to take; but here too Christ is with us, for he too knows what it is to be helpless; he did not rise from the dead on his own power, but was raised by his Father.
What a scandal it is, that the God of the Universe would condescend to be born in human flesh and suffer in body, mind and spirit – to experience our joys and our pains, and to die like us! Who would ever have thought that this would be how God would resolve our problem of suffering – not from outside, but by entering into it?
This is not a neat, tidy philosophical answer that ties up all the loose ends.
This is a messy answer.
And it is the only answer that holds up to the weight of our pain when we are crushed and broken; it is the only answer that rings true when it is tested in both agony and joy.
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You say:
Abstract responses to suffering are worthless in the face of actual pain: when one is starving, it does not help to understand the way the digestive system works.
That understanding is certainly not sufficient for the relief of starvation, but one must know that digestion is necessary to life, and that food is necessary to digestion. It tells us that a splint, or an aspirin, or counseling will not help. One must also be clear about what is food and what is not.
When we experience the agony of grief, the dull ache of loss, the dead chill of depression, the knife of anxiety, no philosophical answer satisfies. We need action. To the hungry man or woman, we give bread, not words of comfort.
Yes. The apostle James agrees (though perhaps he is being a bit more literal).
And this is what God has done. He has given His Son, who freely carried our pain – past, present, and future – to the Cross, where he takes it (and us) through death into life.
A moment, please. I think I am missing something.
Staying with your “bread to the hungry” analogy, where is the “bread” in this? Is it not as though someone had said “Sir, can you help me? My children have no food, nor do I. If you will not help me, help my children!” and received the reply “The poor dears! I shall fast for you, and take away my own childrens’ dinner to relieve yours!”
You can’t mean that, and I don’t say that you do. But again, where is the “bread”?
How does that work? I would not presume to know – any more than I presume to know “how it works” to fall in love. We do not need to know how something works to experience it.
Fair enough. Penal subsitution versus Christus Victor (and there are other theories of atonement) can be a difficult discussion, to be sure. But we … you, actually, and James … are talking about bread to the hungry. That is far less abstract than something like love.
Whatever our suffering is, Christ has borne it.
What does this mean? Not how does it work, but simply what does it mean that it does “work”?
I am not trying to force the literal interpretation of a metaphor. Nevertheless, it is very clear what “hunger” and “bread” mean. Likewise, most of us are clear about what suffering (“hunger”) is. But what you seem to be saying is that Christ has been “hungry” too. Indeed, He chose to be “hungry”. But where or what is the “bread” that relieves the “hunger” of others?
Does the suffering of Christ relieve the suffering of anyone else? This seems to be a fact not in evidence. Does not Christ Himself say that we are to take up our own crosses? How is that consistent with Him having borne our suffering (as opposed to, say, our sin)?
This is not a neat, tidy philosophical answer that ties up all the loose ends.
This is a messy answer.
I mean no discourtesy, but I cannot see an answer at all. Perhaps you could clarify?
regards,
JPB
JPB, thanks for your comment. I know that my response is unlikely to satisfy, so I will keep it brief. Christ is the bread – he is the living bread. And his death on the cross does something because he is both man and God; he bridges, as it were, the gap between human and divine nature. His suffering helps us partly because any true sympathy is a comfort, but more so because if we commit ourselves to following him through pain and death, he will bring us through into new life – which he alone can do because he is both God and man.
Well, all that’s just words, right? Theology. Talk. The only reason that I can say these things is that they are experientially true. That is, suffering does become redeemed and transformed when one turns to Christ and asks for his help (not necessarily all at once; sometimes in a slow process). And Christ’s presence in the darkness is real, not imagined, and there he really does stay alongside the sufferer. I know, because it is in pain that I came to feel his presence most fully.
I would have dismissed all of this as foolishness before I was a Christian, and indeed in the first year or two of my life as a Christian I didn’t get it, either. Intellectual understanding doesn’t help a bit with this; it’s relational. It’s like trying to understand a parent’s love for a child through social-cultural analysis and hormonal balances. You get some information, but you just don’t get the real thing. I use that example because I don’t have children. I don’t know what it’s like to love as a mother, but I know it’s a real thing, and the only way to know what it’s like is to enter into it. It is, of course, always safer to stay on the sidelines looking on, but some knowledge is only experiential. The Cross is a scandal, foolishness, inexplicable from the sidelines. Something changes when you follow the one who died on it and rose again. Perhaps this is still not an answer, but I hope you can see a glimpse of why there isn’t a clear answer I can give you in propositional terms – I can only point to the Cross.
Neither the truly ineffable nor common internal experiences for which one is ill-equipped are captured well by even the most skillful metaphor.
Or perhaps I ask too much.
In any case, thank you for your reply, and
regards,
JPB
I hope I’m not beating a dead horse, and I apologize for taking up so much time. If you need to move on to other things, I won’t be offended. Still, if you present yourself in public as a Christian apologist, you will have to expect questions. Courteous and reasonable questions, I hope, but questions nevertheless.
You say:
I don’t know what it’s like to love as a mother, but I know it’s a real thing, …
How do you know, if you haven’t experienced it? Note, please, that I am not saying that you don’t know, but simply asking how. Some thoughts:
1. You may not be a mother, but you are certainly a daughter. This must give some insight. Even orphans had mothers in some sense, and must feel the lack of one.
2. The world is full of mothers who can be observed by those who are not. It is not difficult to compare how mothers relate to children (both their own and others’) and how strangers … some of whom are parents and some of whom are not … relate to children.
There may be other elements of common experience (orphans? “good” v. “bad” mothers?) that can be observed by anyone without recourse to anthropology or biochemistry. As a man, I will never know some things about motherhood, but I understand what it is and why I can’t know some things about it.
Rhetorical if you like: if you point to the Cross (perhaps another metaphor?), what can you reasonably expect me to see? If nothing, why point? If something, what?
regards,
JPB
Hello JPB, I think you answer your own question well enough about the mother-love example. As to what I am pointing at, when I point to the Cross: excellent question. I am pointing to a Person whose act of self-giving love enables us to be healed and reconciled with God. But pointing to the Cross in that way is really an invitation to seek to know that Person for yourself, to ask him to bear your burdens (and yes, to accept his own burden, which is both heavy and light).
I think you answer your own question well enough about the mother-love example.
It was less an actual question than an attempt to suggest that much knowlege was possible even without direct experience. Solomon was no mother, but it is written that he knew enough about mothers to discern one. Perhaps something similar may be true of Christianity. I am sorry that I was not more clear.
… pointing to the Cross in that way is really an invitation to seek to know that Person for yourself, …
And might you expect me to see that would make me accept the invitation? Do I see Him in the person pointing? In the metaphor? In poetry?
Again rhetorical if you like: one can scarcely avoid being deluged with any number of mutually-exclusive invitations of this kind. Why would one choose this one?
If I have understood your podcast of May 6th of this year, your own decision was ultimately due to 1. your trust in your friend and fencing coach, and 2. a “sense of presence” experience. Is it possible to bring another to a similar place with anything one can do on a blog? (That sounds a bit hostile, I ask you to believe that I don’t mean it that way).
This is beginning to wander rather far from your original post, and I don’t want to become tedious, so I will make this my last post. Thank you for your time and patience.
regards,
JPB
JPB, I would add to the factors in my decision 3) I found the Christian worldview to be rationally more satisfactory in explaining my experience of the world than the alternatives, and 4) I became convinced that the central claims of Christianity were objectively true.
As to your last question: no, I don’t think it’s possible to bring someone to that point of decision through a blog. Not at all.
What might happen is that something I write might give a reader something worthwhile to think about that might lead him or her to follow up on it elsewhere – in further reading, in discussion in-person with Christians who are serious about their faith, in personal reflection, in prayer.
Why follow this particular invitation? Well, there are a lot of different ways one could answer that question; I’ll say: This invitation is one whose claims can be tested, if followed up honestly; it is an invitation that, if true, leads to a wholistic, total explanation of the way the world works (as opposed to a partial and incomplete one), and which satisfies both intellectually and aesthetically, something that cannot be said for all rival worldviews; and it is one that, if it proves to be true, is also transformative.
Fantastic post, Holly!
Your opening sums it up: Reality is complex.