"WHERE WAS GOD LAST NIGHT?"

This summer, two buses filled with disadvantaged children on their way to camp, collided on a road in France killing 44. Many at their bodies were burned to ashes and buried in a common grave. A grandmother, when told the next morning of the tragedy, cried' "where was God last night?" That haunting, desperate cry has been heard in different forms since the beginning of time. In every generation various solutions have been put forward, such as: "Suffering is the result of an evil principle, or the work of the devil", "there is no God - we are victims of fate" - and the most repeated of all, in various expressions: "God is punishing me."

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Recently, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner has written a beat-selling hook entitled "When bad Things Happen To Good People".(l) Rabbi Kushner very courageously faces the terrible dilemma of suffering, speaking from the anguish he endured as he witnessed his son suffer from a rare disease, progeria, which ended the boy's life at age 14. Through his own experience he has been reaching out to others, trying to remove from them the burdens of imposed guilt or a sense of being punished by God, and offering advice on what one can do with suffering, in order to give meaning to it.

Same of his thoughts are as follows: Misfortunes are the result of bad luck, bad people, and inflexible natural laws. Cod cannot be blamed. There are limitations in God; there are accidents and tragedies which stand independent of God's action, and anger God in the same way as they anger us. As for meaning in sufferings he holds that they have no meaning except by what one gives them. Using the example of his son, he says that he, Aaron, served God's purposes not by being sick or strange-looking but by being so courageous in his illness with all its consequences.

What Christians Believe

The questions which Rabbi Kushner raises are indeed most important ones and they challenge any religious person to articulate his or her own theology of suffering. It is for that reason, and not in a sense or controversy, that this article attempts to add reflections on the mystery of suffering from a Christian viewpoint. Rabbi Kushner offers an easy transition to these reflections by stating: "Christianity introduced the world to the idea of a God who suffers alongside the image of a God who creates and commands....l don't know, what it means for God to suffer.. I don't believe that God is a person like me, with real eyes and real tear ducts to cry and rear nerve endings to reel pain.'' That is the heart of the matter for Christians. They Do BELIEVE that God, in the person of Jesus, is a person like us, with real eyes and real tear ducts to cry, and real nerve endings to feel pain. He is not indifferent to suffering; much less does he inflict it as punishment. He is a God who has embraced suffering out of love and made the sufferings of every human being part of His own.

Limitation And Freedom

Christian attempts to explain from reason God's relationship to suffering parallel the ideas of Rabbi Kushner in these respects: a)all creation by its very nature is limited and in that limitation bad things can happen to good people; b)in the case of human beings, they enjoy the God-given gift of freedom and with that they can do bad things to themselves, to others, to nature, and to the whole course of history. However, the Christian perspective differs from Rabbi Kushner, holding that God's role In ''allowing'' suffering cannot be dismissed, as difficult as is to explain. God cannot be a hostage to chance. Were that the case He would not be God, He would be a creature Himself subject to outside forces. It seems a contradiction to believe that a God who created this wondrous universe and sustains it, who made men and women in His own image and likeness, would have to stand aside helpless as if He were Himself a victim of randomness. As a result of God being involved with each person's suffering, there IS meaning to it, even if a person is totally unable to do something with it to give it meaning, as is the case with severely brain-damaged persons. Having said all this, it remains for the Christian, as with anyone else that suffering and evil are a mystery which remains impenetrable. He or she must cope with it, discover how to give meaning to it in all aspects of life, but the ultimate and most rewarding answer lies in the believe that God himself gives it meaning by His embracing it.

The New Creation

God, who always manifested His presence to His people, entered their human condition in an extraordinary way in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus, the new Adam, begins a new creation. God becomes a human being, a part of creation with all its limitations and the human capacity to suffer -- portrayed most graphically at the outset of St. John's gospel: "The Word became flesh." As "flesh" he identified with every person, particularly the "lowliest", humanly speaking: those most vulnerable to the erratic forces of nature or human evil. He became flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. By that very fact, he gave a touch of divinity to every human condition, no matter how sorry that condition may seem.

The Kingdom of God - Now

When Jesus began his public ministry he came "preaching the gospel of the Kingdom of God and saying the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand." (Mk. 1,14) What this means is that the promise of the Hebrew scriptures is fulfilled: God is immediate to His creation, to each person and all the circumstances of that person's life. He is a loving God, not a punishing God; He is a Saviour: One who comes to bring comfort, healing and completeness to those deprived of natural faculties, needs, goods, acceptance and love which are requisites for a full life. He opposes those persons and those systems which cause such deprivations. This Kingdom is not only an extra-terrestrial society where "every tear will be wiped away" but one which is NOW, where every tear is not wiped away. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor...to captives release..sight to the blind..liberty for the oppressed." (Lk.4,18f)

The Beatitudes

The preceding gives us an understanding of why Jesus could proclaim what must have seemed as outrageous in His time as it does in our time: "Blessed are the poor, Blessed are the sorrowing, Blessed are the lowly, Blessed are those who are persecuted, Blessed are those who mourn." He shows that they have entered into a "God-Condition". They are not only Blessed because through their sufferings they are going to receive a reward in a Kingdom to come but rather, with Christ, they have already entered the Kingdom of God.

Suffering Persons: A ‘Sacrament'

Jesus also taught: ''what you do to the least of my brothers and sisters you do to Me". He thereby designated such persons as a "Sacrament", in a sense, -- that is, a visible expression of God. We share in a truly "Holy Communion" when we feed the hungry, cloth the naked, comfort the sorrowful, shelter the homeless, provide for the handicapped and struggle for justice and peace.

Pardoning God These thoughts may give only scant comfort, or may even arouse fierce anger, in one suddenly overwhelmed with tragedy. Jesus understands that too. Georges Bernanos captured this reality: "There is somewhere a mother...next to her dead child, who offers to God the groan of an exhausted resignation, as if the Voice which has thrown the suns into space as a hand throws grain, the Voice which makes the world tremble, had just murmured gently into her ear, "pardon me. One day you will know, you will understand, you will give me thanks. But now, what I am looking for form you is your pardon. Pardon." (2)

God's is a Suffering Story

It is made dramatically clear in the horrible tortuous death of Jesus that God truly enters our suffering history. "God's story becomes a suffering story, not so as to approve of and perpetuate pain...Jesus did not will failure, passion and cross..He willed conversion...the joy of God's rule upon earth, and sought to realize this initially through love for those who suffered..The cross was the consequence of his effort and commitment against suffering." (3) As Scripture scholar Donald Senior writes: "He died because of the way he lived...His death is not be explained solely on the level of a divine plan of redemption, nor was it the climax of a single-act divine drama. His words of hope and compassion for the alienated, his energetic ministry of healing and reconciliation, his fearless challenge to arbitrary boundaries, to wrong values, and to bent perspectives set in motion the kind of opposition and hostility that would ultimately take his life...He died for the sake of the message he lived by." (4)

The Resurrection

In the light of the Resurrection of Jesus, Christian see God's approval of the life, message and death of Jesus. They also see by the Resurrection, God's conquest of all the negative aspects of evil and suffering. "God showed in Jesus, his solidarity with our history of suffering...and because of this, the disciple of Jesus entrusts the mystery of his and his neighbors' suffering to God. He does this from his heart even though he does not understand, for it is this God who not only spoke of salvation in Jesus, but made it a reality in our human condition of finitude...Thanks to Jesus, the most severe sufferings do not have to mean that God has abandoned us, and that we must give up hope...The Christian believes, on the basis of the Crucified-Resurrected One, that God identifies himself with the excluded, the poor and the mourning." (5)

God Knows and Remembers

A beautiful, almost poetic, summary is given us by Dr. Paul Brand in a talk he gave to his leper patients in India. "I am a hand surgeon. So when I meet people, I can't help looking at their hands. I can tell your past. I can tell what your trade has been by the position of the callouses and the condition of the nails. I can tell a lot about your character; I love hands."

"How I would love to have had the chance to meet Christ and study His hands! But knowing what He was like, I can almost picture them, feel them."

He describes Christ's hands as a baby, as a boy, as a carpenter...the hands of Christ the physician, the healer. Compassion and sensitivity seemed to radiate from them, so much so that when He touched people they could feel some thing of the divine spirit coming through. Christ touched the blind, the diseased, the needy.

"Then, there were His crucified hands. It hurts me to think of a nail being driven through the center of my hand, because I know what goes on there, the tremendous complex of tendons and nerves and blood vessels and muscles. It's impossible to drive a spike through its center without rippling it. The thought of those healing hands being crippled reminds me of what Christ was prepared to endure. In that act He identified Himself with all the deformed and crippled human beings in the world. Not only was He able to endure poverty with the poor, weariness with the tired, but -clawed hands with the crippled."

"And then there were His resurrected hands. One of the things I find most astounding is that, though we think of the future life as something perfected, when Christ appeared to His disciples He said, 'Come look at my hands', and be invited Thomas to put his finger into the print of the nail. Why did He want to keep the wounds of His humanity? Wasn't it because He wanted to carry back with Him an eternal reminder of the sufferings of those on earth? He carried the marks of suffering so He could continue to understand the needs of those suffering. He wanted to be forever one with us." (6)

Bibliography

1. Kushner, Harold S., "When Bad Things Happen To Good People" Schocken. Books, N.Y., 1981.
2. Evely, Louis, Suffering, Herder & Herder, N.Y. 1967, Preface
3. Gresheke, C., "Suffering And The Question Of God", Stauros Bulletin. 1977-I, p.21.
4. Senior, Donald, "Sign Magazine", March, 1978, Sign, Union City, N.J.
5. Schillebeeckx, E., "Questions Concerning Human Suffering", Stauros Bulletin, 1975-3, p.19-20.
6. Yancey, PhiLip,"Where Is God When It Hurts", Zondervan. Grand Rapids, Ml, 1978, p.163-5.

• Wolfinger, Franz, "Suffering as a Theological Problem", Stauros Bulletin, 1979-1.
• O'connell, Timothy, "Suffering and Evil", The Thomas More Press, Chicago, IL, 1972.
• Taylor, Michael J., "The Mystery of Suffering and Death", Alba House, N.Y., 1973.