Agony Divine

St Denis, by Awanqi

Propers: The Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 29), AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Why do we suffer?

This is a question with which all religions wrestle; indeed, all of humankind. We don’t wonder so much about happiness or gratitude or joy. These seem to us natural, healthy, life in its fullness. Yet when we suffer, we want to know why. We have to know why. There must be a meaning to it, a purpose, a value, a lesson. Wonder of wonders, the world presents itself to us as intelligible, as something that humans can explore and understand. What then is the purpose of our pain, the meaning of our misery?

It can be useful information, certainly: don’t touch a hot stove, don’t poke an open wound. But suffering is more than mere survival, is it not? It’s a state of being, an existential crisis. For the old pagans it was simple enough: you suffer because you are soft. In this world, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Too bad, so sad.

For the Upanishads, suffering could be explained by karma, the universal law of cause and effect. If you suffer, it’s because you deserve it. Or you did, once upon a time. For the Buddha, suffering arises from desire; specifically, our desire for things to be permanent in a world where they are not. We must learn to let go, not to form attachments. These are gross oversimplifications, you understand. But not entirely inaccurate.

The Bible wrestles with suffering a lot. Nor is it univocal on the topic. The wisdom books especially offer us varying points of view. Proverbs claims that it’s all just a matter of living rightly: do good, get good; do bad, get bad. And that’s all well and good, for a bit; when you’re young, and life is but roses and sweet-cream in the gardens. Ecclesiastes is more prickly on the subject. Do what you will, the teacher growls, it all comes to naught in the end. Good life, bad life, everybody dies. All is vanity.

Wisdom literature peaks with Job, a parable about the world’s most moral man suffering oceans of agony and loss. What had Job done to deserve all of this? Surely some suffering comes from our own actions, yet there is so much more we neither kindle nor deserve. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do the wicked ever seem to prosper? This is theodicy, the technical term for the problem of evil: if God is good, why do we suffer?

Job never seems to get a satisfactory answer, satisfactory to us at any rate. He is granted an audience with God, by which Job learns two things. He finds firsthand that the vastness of the universe is beyond all mortal ken, and that our role within it is but one strand in the tapestry of the grand design, the end of which only God can see. But the other thing he learns is that God knows him, sees him, loves him. He has never been alone. And that’s all Job wanted to know. He wanted to have God with him.

Oft-forgotten by the reader is the stated purpose of the story: for God to show the Satan that there’s good without reward; that Job remains Job, when all he loves is stripped away. People often argue that the reality of evil disproves a loving God. But just the opposite is so. If there were not a loving God at the heart of all there is, then we would not know evil as evil. Evil would just be the way that things were meant to be. Evil, in effect, would be our good. But no-one believes that, nobody sane. Recognizing evil proves the primacy of Good.

Judaism as we know it was born in the crucible of Exile. For centuries the Israelites lived within a kingdom—two, in fact, as the result of civil war. They had a Temple, and a royal line, and a land that had been promised to their ancestors. And then one day all of that went away. Empires vast and cruel ground them up and spit them out. Anyone with two shekels to rub together, all the movers and shakers, were forcibly deported into Babylon, strangers in a strange land. Everything they knew of God was gone. No Temple, no king, no land.

Had God abandoned them? Why had they lost all they loved? And how could they now live without the world that they had known? First of all, they rallied ‘round their stories, writing down the tales of their God and of His people; preserving both their memory and language; compiling and editing the Law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible. Our Scriptures were born in Exile, of people east of Eden.

Second came the Prophets, who told the uprooted Israelites in no uncertain terms that God had not abandoned them, that He in fact came with them into Exile; promising to them a fantastic new future, with a new and cosmic ruler, the coming of the Christ, who would inaugurate God’s Kingdom and resurrect the dead! This was a new and true beginning, not the end. Judaism gathered in the synagogues, around learned rabbis, studying the Prophets and the Law. Their suffering, they saw now, had a purpose: the redemptive plan of God, to save the world through Israel His servant.

This theological thread comes to a head with the Second Prophet Isaiah, in a passage known ever after as the Suffering Servant of God. You heard it read this morning. An innocent man, chosen by God, yet unrecognized by the world, suffers undeservedly, dies unjustly, for the sake of others, for the sake of humankind. He is led like a lamb to the slaughter, staying silent, doing no violence at all, never lying once, to be buried with the rich and resurrected in his glory. And all of this happens in order to save the many, to save transgressors, to save those selfsame sinners by whom he is slain!

It is an astonishing, arresting, and frankly quite baffling passage. Centuries of interpretation tried to suss it out. Who is the Suffering Servant of Isaiah? At one point he’s called Israel; at another, Israel’s savior. People wondered if the Servant might be Moses, Jeremiah, Josiah, the Messiah, the whole of the Jewish nation, or a remnant of the same. Modern scholarship tends to side with Israel, with the notion that the Suffering Servant represents the chosen people of God, broken and scattered to bring all of humanity home. They suffer, yes, but God has given it meaning, given them purpose: they suffer now for others.

As Christians read this passage, we can only think of Christ. He is, we believe, the promised Messiah; and more than that, the Man in whom God dwells, the Man who is our God. In Him, God responds to our suffering by joining us in it, by taking it upon Himself. It is not the will of God that we suffer, nor does He stand aloft and aloof as we do. Rather, God is with us. God is for us. He will not abandon His children; He will not leave us orphaned.

He opens Himself entirely to all of our sinfulness, all of our wickedness, all of our violence, and then drowns it in the ocean of His love, so that even death is undone in His infinite life. That is the miracle of the Incarnation: God-With-Us, as one of us, from Christmas through Crucifixion and beyond. Everything we suffer He has nailed to His Cross.

There’s this ancient pagan notion, very popular today, that humankind suffers because we sin, and that God is so implacably just that someone has to burn for it. And so He offers Jesus, the one sinless human being, as a substitute for all that we deserve—which is nonsensical. How would God’s justice be served by executing an innocent? If your mother were murdered and the police said, “Sorry, we couldn’t catch the guy, but we shot a random bystander instead,” would you feel better? Would justice have been served? Of course not.

God is not some volcanic deity demanding virgin sacrifice, singing, “If I’m gonna eat somebody, it might as well be you.” What an awful, hateful thought. Jesus Christ is not some separate second god of mercy sent to placate His angry, wrathful Father. No: Jesus is the Image of the Father, the revelation of His heart. Christ is who God is. He has come to save us, to forgive us, and to bring us home in Him—which is exactly what He was doing before we killed Him for it. But even deicide could never sever us from His love.

We killed God. We made Him suffer. And He made His death the salvation of us all.

Bottom line: we don’t suffer because we deserve it, even if we do. We don’t suffer because God wills it, as though evil were part of the plan. We suffer because this is a broken, fallen world, period; a world that does not function as it ought to, as it was meant to. And we affirm this every time that we recognize evil as wrong. God’s response to our suffering is not to abandon us, not to shrug His shoulders, and not to snap His almighty fingers in order to force the world to be good. No, God’s response to our suffering is to join us in it.

He shoulders our Cross, forgives us our sins, and leads us up from death to life. Alleluia.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.






Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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