Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
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The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.
-Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Job was such a man.
He lost his possessions. He lost
his children. He lost his pride. And he was about to lose his life. Everything was taken away from him…and his wife who
remained was encouraging him to just curse God and die. Yet there was something inside Job that
wouldn’t let him succumb to despair: “Yahweh gave and Yahweh has taken
away. Blessed be the name of Yahweh.” Instead of throwing in the towel, he chooses
to fight. But the fight wasn’t just
against his so called “friends” who tried to convince him that his suffering
was his fault, it was really against God from whom he demanded an answer for
his unjust suffering. And it was
precisely through this contending with God that this thing inside Job matured
and was perfected. What was this “thing?” We call it faith.
But what is faith?
Job, I believe, gives us a striking expression of what faith looks
like. For him, faith is the conviction
that though he can’t
rationally understand something, like the reason for his suffering, and even
when others are giving him pat answers and bad, uncaring, unsolicited advice,
he knows on the most profound level where the truth lies. He knows and he risks his life on this
knowing, this conviction, this faith.
So, even at death’s door after a lifetime of unjust suffering he can
say, “…I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon
the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall
see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not
another.” Even when he doesn’t
understand why God has allowed life to deal him such a despicable hand, he
chooses not to feel sorry for himself or to focus on his impending demise;
instead, he lifts his head high obstinately in the face of this onslaught of
inexplicable pain and sees what no one around him sees: the living Redeemer,
Vindicator, Defender who he believes will, in the end, right every wrong and
bring him to peace.
Job, of course, is a Christ-figure. Jesus, himself, will undergo a similar
existential crisis after spending years of unjust persecution and
suffering. Imagine knowing you are the
Beloved of God yet being told again and again that you are a devil. Imagine having your closest friends and even
your family misunderstand you and turn their backs on you. And imagine that after exhausting all your
energy—your heart and soul—on doing
everything you possibly can to please the One who called you “Beloved” only to
have the feeling of total, utter abandonment at the time you needed this One
the most. What then? What would your response be? To curse God and die? To throw in the towel? Or would that flickering spark of faith, of
conviction, of knowing arise in you and say, “Nevertheless, into your hands I
commend my spirit.”
And we may naively think that following a crucified Messiah
means that we will be saved from a similar fate—that because he suffered unjustly we won’t. But we would be sorely mistaken. “I have not come to bring peace but a sword,”
so one saying of Jesus goes. Of course,
Jesus is also the Prince of Peace and has, in fact, come to bring peace…but a
peace that will last. And this kind of
peace does not come, he teaches, before the sword pierces straight through our
hearts revealing what is in our depths and testing that seed of faith, that
inner conviction, that deep knowing.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to see that the early
Christians, immediately after experiencing the joy of knowing that their Lord
was found to be alive after his crucifixion, that they, too, began to undergo
the same trials of unjust persecution and suffering as did their Lord. This, the community at Thessalonica, was
enduring…and their response to their existential crisis…and Paul’s advice to
them…is very revealing.
One thing about suffering is that we want it to end as soon
as possible. We’d prefer a deus ex
machina to suddenly appear out of the sky and bring all of this unjust
suffering, this cruel chaos, to an end…today, rather than have to endure,
persevere, and wait. Patient endurance
amidst the testing of faith sometimes feels like God is playing a cruel joke on
us. No wonder so many characters in the
Bible preferred to speak of God’s wrath rather than God’s love. The Thessalonians, in their despondency,
envisioned such a deus ex machina.
They held out hope that Jesus would return “soon and very soon” to save
them from their suffering and persecution.
But Paul’s advice to them is to not become fixated on deliverance but to
remind them that God has indeed called them to obtain the glory of the Lord
Jesus Christ. But they must stand firm
and hold fast to the faith they were taught.
And what were they taught: that through the bearing of the cross, just
as Jesus bore his cross, they will know redemption and resurrection, just as
Jesus knew redemption and resurrection.
Another thing about suffering, besides wanting to be
delivered of it as soon as possible, is that it has a tendency to command all
of our attention. It is very difficult
to think of anything else when our lives begin to fall apart. And it’s our tendency to create societies to protect
us from just such moments of crises. So
we accumulate wealth, power, control, prestige, and anything and everything
that shields us from the possibility of living a life that might have to
undergo the fearful, anxious, threatening moment of contending with our
demise. But one wrong turn, one
unfortunate choice, one inexplicable moment can send us reeling and expose just
how thin is the veneer that we sought to live behind.
So, maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Sometimes we are not called to deliverance,
to salvation…we are called to suffering and persecution. Not because God is cruel but because within
it an invitation is extended to us that we wouldn’t hear or notice in any other
way. But, often, we don’t hear it, and
we don’t notice it. Instead, we become
so fixed on our life’s situation that we get stuck in the perpetuating chaos
from which we want to be delivered and saved.
We fail to see beyond the surface and that spark of faith which rose up
in Job and rose up in Jesus remains covered under the cloak of our
despair.
I’ve
been alive for over a half century now, and never in my lifetime have I sensed
such global despair as I do now. The
fear of many has reached its peak, and one global crisis has piled up upon
another. And those of us who really care
about this gross proliferation of suffering, often at the hands of those who
hold power and are desperately afraid of losing it, are all the more angered at
the justification of this abuse by those in charge and the utter negligence of
so many who would prefer to look the other way.
And it remains up to us, those of us whose moral core remains intact and
whose conscience hasn’t been rationalized away, to persevere in the work of
building God’s kingdom of justice and peace.
But here’s my greatest concern about this current moment. The sense that I often get from those of us
Christians working for peace is not peace but something much more frenetic,
anxious, and dark. I sense anger,
pessimism, and not a little bit of hopelessness. But how can we create a world of peace when
we ourselves are not at peace? Have we
succumbed to the tendency to get stuck on the level of circumstance, and has
the suffering of the world caused us to lose sight of the One walking on the
chaotic waves of our despair? Are we
failing in faith? This is my greatest
concern: that by going out to the periphery we lose touch with the center. But this need not be the case. The only way to the realization of the
kingdom of God in this world is for the people of God to remain centered on the
periphery and to still the chaos of fear through the stability of faith.
This is not a denial of the seriousness of our current
crises or a dulling of the urgency to make a difference. It is, rather, a call to remain centered upon
the One who enters with us into our existential crises. Are we confident that he who is in us is
greater than he who is in the world? Do
we see the providential hand of God at work in this mess in which we now find
ourselves? Do we feel that spark of
faith, of conviction, of knowing arising from within? Be not afraid! And be not anxious. Instead, see what others cannot see and have
confidence that God is creating something beautiful through this slow process
of painful becoming.
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.” With God our suffering will not end in death, because with God all things live.
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