Suffering Community
1992 (Year C) 6 September / Pentecost 13
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
No-one seeing television pictures of the evil insanity happening at this moment in the former Yugoslavia can help but be moved, almost to tears of frustration and despair. Suffering there, seems to be pilled upon suffering. Most of it is being endured by those who have done nothing at all to deserve it. And of course suffering isn’t restricted to people miles away from us. Most of you will already know that early last Sunday morning a woman was viciously attacked in the church garden here and severely sexually assaulted. An elderly brother and sister were murdered in Bethnal Green this week. Evil and suffering surround us so much so that at times they threaten to overwhelm us.
Now it may well be that you’ve come to church for an hour or so to escape the awfulness of such things. In that case you’re out of luck, I’m talking about them. It may be that you’ve come to church to find answers to all this. Well, you’re out of luck again, I can’t supply them, I’m just as baffled as you as to why these things happen.
You’re out of luck, because closing our minds to the awfulness and pretending that it doesn’t happen isn’t an option for Christians. Suffering is at the very heart of our faith. We simply can’t escape it. It’s there in the pain of those whom Jesus called his friends and it’s there in his own death. It’s been present in Christian lives since the beginning, at times it’s been an integral part of the religious life. It’s almost as if just as we become aware of our calling to be Christians we are also asked to take our place alongside Jesus in his passion. After all the hymn says, ‘Take up thy cross’, the saviour said, ‘If thou wouldst my disciple be.’
And we as a Christian community are perhaps more affected by suffering than other people, not because we have to endure any more – of course that’s not true, although for some Christians their faith is the direct cause of their suffering. But the fact is that we can see clearly that suffering is not God’s will for his creation. It pains the very heart of God that his creation should suffer.
Yet in the face of suffering our immediate reaction is to often to deny it’s severity. When someone dies we tell the bereaved, ‘Y ou wouldn’t have wanted her back in the state she was in’ As if the aching emptiness of bereavement, is as nothing compared to the pain of another. I think that many people who are told ‘You wouldn’t have wanted her back’ - if they were honest, would say, ‘Oh yes I would!’.
Often we seek to bring solace by pointing to a time when suffering will all be no more, ‘Never mind’, we say, ‘It’ll turn out alright in the end, you’ll soon be feeling better’. And when we do that, what we are doing, is diminishing the awfulness of it all in an attempt to make ourselves and others feel better. Our arrogance amazes me, we try to tell people that what their experiencing is not what they actually feel it to be.
I think that all these reactions are entirely understandable, they’re even honourable in that they seek to do the best for those who are undergoing suffering, and after all, they make us feel better because they convince us that we’re doing something positive. Yet the reality is that they get nowhere near truth of the experience.
This is how those who suffer feel. It’s from the book of Job, and it’s how we feel from time to time, ‘God has made me a byword to everyone, a man in whose face people spit. My eyes have grown dim with grief; my whole frame is but a shadow. Upright men are appalled at this; the innocent are aroused against the ungodly.’ In the face of this there are no words, ‘But,’ says Job, ‘But come on, all of you, try again! I will not find a wise man among you. My days have passed, my plans are shattered, and so are the desires of my heart. These men turn night into day; in the face of darkness they say, ‘Light is near’. If the only home I hope for is the grave, if I spread out my bed in darkness ... where then is my hope?’
There is no hope for some of the people who have flashed passed our eyes on the television screens this week. They’re beyond that. If the fighting stopped tomorrow their lives can never be rebuilt. They are far too damaged for that. And that is the truth. The result of some suffering simply never goes away.
What are we to make of all this? After all our church has taught for centuries that Jesus has overcame pain and death, once and for all. Suffering, even at it’s worst, is merely a passing evil on the way to a permanent bliss.
There are some things we can say. We must never accept suffering as inevitable. The suffering of anyone in creation is contrary to the will of the Creator. We must work to overcome it and transform it. But the most amazing truth, and we come to this only very, very slowly, is that our God is as fully present in the suffering and the groaning of his creation as he is in it’s glory. Just recall a story you already know. In a German concentration camp, a young boy was hung publicly for some trifling offence. All the inmates were made to walk passed the boy as he hung there. As two men passed one turned to the other and said, ‘Where is your God now?’. A voice from behind murmured, ‘He’s hanging there.’ AMEN