(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on October 21, 2018, Proper 24)
Two Great Teachers:
Love and Suffering
Franciscan friar Richard Rohr
shares that according to the great spiritual and mystic traditions of our
world, there are two great teachers in life: love and suffering. Both love and suffering awaken us from
our sleep. Both love and suffering
derail us from our routine. Both
love and suffering rip up our scripts and throw us unprepared into a new scene
on the stage of life.
Perhaps you can see this in your
own life. Perhaps love for a
partner or a good friend has taught you about the joy of giving or about how to
listen. Or maybe it’s taught you
the simple fact that people are different and that’s not bad but can in fact be
quite beautiful. Perhaps love for
a family member has taught you patience or forgiveness. In its many lessons, love teaches us
perhaps more than anything to be present, to
be with. That is, after all,
how we know God’s love for us. In
Christ, God comes to be with us.
But what about this other
teacher, suffering? Just to be
clear, I understand that some people believe suffering is intended or desired
by God. I don’t share that
belief. I share the biblical hope
for a time when people live peacefully and abundantly together, when there is
no longer hunger or need that deprives people of life, when there is no more
pain.[1] I don’t believe God intends
suffering. But I do believe
suffering is a teacher, and that just like love it draws us nearer to the heart
of God. Here’s why.
Life Is Not Fair
Like many of his friends, Job
believed in a fair world. He
believed in the moral equivalent of Newton’s Third Law: that every deed had an
equal and opposite consequence.
In other words, he believed that good deeds had good consequences and
bad deeds had bad consequences.
Not much had changed by the time of Jesus. You may remember how folks asked Jesus whose sins had caused
the fall of the tower in Siloam that killed 18 people, or how they asked if a
blind man suffered because of his own sin or the sin of his parents. They thought that bad things happened because
of bad deeds. Even today, we see
pockets of this belief in our own thinking, where people sometimes justify
their wealth by pointing to their hard work or explain poverty in terms of
laziness.
Because of his belief in a fair
world, Job cried out bitterly to God.
He had done everything right—the Bible says he was “blameless and
upright” (1:1)—but he still suffered unimaginable losses, including the deaths
of his seven sons and three daughters.
Job believed in a fair world, but he experienced the opposite. Something was wrong with the universal
scales of justice.
In today’s scripture, God finally
responds to Job. In traditional
interpretation, God comes off as a bully full of bluster, boasting of his power
and chastising Job for even asking questions: “How dare you challenge me!” God
seems to say. “Be quiet and learn
your place.”
But when I hold my interpretive
stethoscope to this text, I don’t hear the heart of God beating in the boasts
and behavior of a divine bully.
Even if that’s how the original author of this text intended to depict
God, I don’t accept it. I don’t
see anything that resembles Christ, who is the clearest picture of God that I
have, in the depiction of a tough guy God who says, “Tough luck!”
But! I still hear a divine heartbeat in this text. I hear a gentle thump-thump in each
image of creation, which comes one after another: the morning stars singing for
joy, the water tumbling down from above, the hunt of the lions, the cry of the
young ravens hungry for food.
God’s speech reads like the script to a National Geographic documentary,
as elsewhere in the monologue God enthuses over ox and ostrich, deer and horse,
hawk and eagle, describing tender births and violent deaths, repeatedly
depicting these wild animals as laughing in the face of fear—and it all
crescendos in the picture of the Leviathan, the great sea monster of ancient
Israelite folklore, of whom God confesses: “Who can confront it and be safe?”
(41:11). In other words, in
response to Job’s complaint that the world is not fair, God shares with him a
panoramic view of life. It is
beautiful and it is wild, it is glorious and it is chaos, it is life and it is
death—and there is not a hint of cosmic justice in it. It’s almost as if God is saying,
“You’re right, Job. The world is
not fair. It’s not under your
control.” And maybe I’m not
hearing God right, but as God describes the chance and the chaos that are
naturally a part of this world and its life, it almost sounds like God is also
saying, “And honestly, it’s not completely under my control either.”
Addressing Suffering with Love
Before you throw me out of
church, let me explain. Jesus
himself said that the disasters and diseases of this world were not the
natural, controlled result of sin.
In other words, they were senseless. They simply were what they were. Disasters and diseases. Perhaps what is most telling is how Jesus responds to them:
he accepts them. The irony is,
people who want to believe in a fair world often deny the suffering of
disasters and diseases.
Desperately trying to account for these things, they explain them away
as the natural results of a person’s behavior. The suffering becomes part of a moral equation, a bit of
math, rather than plain and miserable suffering. Only when suffering is accepted can it be addressed. And that’s what we see in Jesus. He does not deny or rationalize the
pain, as much of our world does.
He accepts it. He is
painfully aware of it and honest about it, to the point that he seeks it out in
others and touches it tenderly, to the point that he himself bears it unto
death.
Now if the Christ who suffers and
grieves over the suffering of others really is the image of God, as Paul says
he is (Col 1:15), or God in the flesh, as John says he is (John 1:14), then
what this tells me is that suffering is beyond God’s control. What this tells me is that God suffers
too. Suffering is something that
God bears with us, a part of life that God enters into and shares with us.
Suffering, if we acknowledge it
honestly like Jesus, teaches us that we are not in control and that in fact
control was never the point anyway.
Suffering teaches us to relinquish our illusions and to accept the world
as it is, in all its beauty and heartache—not so that we can wash our hands and
say, “It’s beyond me,” but so that we can look the pain of our world square in
the eye and address it with love like Jesus did. Only when we acknowledge the wounds of the world, can we
reach out and touch them with love.
Only when we accept death, will we discover resurrection. Perhaps this is why our scripture from
Hebrews says that suffering makes Jesus complete (Heb 5:8-9), or why Paul says
that Christ on the cross is what reconciles all the world (Col 1:20). Only when the suffering of the world is
truly embraced, as it was on the cross, can it be transformed into new life.
Prayer
God who bears
The pain of the world,
What is senseless,
What is sinful—
Help us to see Christ
Wherever there is suffering,
And beckon us
To bear with him
Your love and new life
In difficult places,
Where it is needed most.
In Christ, our wounded savior. Amen.
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