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“Light from the Shadowlands”
I think I would have made a good first disciple of Jesus. I say this because the first disciples of Jesus constantly miss the point. All four gospels illustrate this, and here’s another story in the ninth chapter of John that underlines this disturbing characteristic of the original apostles -- or comforting characteristic, as the case may be. Anyway, they were under way, going somewhere when they passed a blind man by the side of the path. That reminds them of a philosophical problem they’ve batted around ever since they were boys before Bar Mitzvah. Jesus is a real bright guy, so now maybe they can get the answer. Jesus, who has been giving folks a lot of evidence that he’s God in flesh, will surely know how to resolve this deepest of religious riddles, this greatest chink in the armor of any theological system that proclaims a good and all knowing God: why do bad things happen to good people? There’s a problem here that we don’t notice at first. The disciples assume the truth of a cliché. “Who sinned that this man was born blind? Was it he or his parents?” They assume that if something bad happens to someone, they’re being punished. This wasn’t in question. They just wanted to identify who was to blame. I suppose that they thought that if they could figure out who was to blame, then they could determine who deserved compassion and who didn’t. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need to figure out who was to blame. Well, Jesus evidently remembered Job. You know the Job I’m talking about? This is the guy to whom we refer when we say of someone, “She has the patience of Job!” When we say that, we mean that the person so praised can take more than we ever could and still have a good attitude about things. The problem is, if you read Job you discover that Job was anything but patient with the bad things that happen to him. For about 37 chapters, Job argues with three friends and rails and yells and shakes his fist at God, hurling complaints heavenward demanding explanation. Nothing, he’s convinced, justifies the suffering he’s experienced. His friends take the same course as the 12 disciples in the 9 th chapter of John. They assume that Job’s done something. He’s violated some law, committed some transgression, because God absolutely just and only sends this kind of punishment when it’s deserved. Finally, God answers and spends a couple of chapters NOT giving Job an explanation, but in essence tells Job to appreciate who God is, what kind of blessing and gift the awesome creation is, and get on with life. THEN God rebukes the friends and tells them that they’ve really displeased him with all their attempted explanations. You’d think that Jesus’ disciples would’ve learned that for their Bar Mitzvahs. But if they had learned it, they’d forgotten Job 42:7 and following where the Lord says, “My wrath is kindled against you. . . for you have not spoken what is right, AS MY SERVANT JOB HAS.” That’s fascinating. God was displeased with all the intellectual attempts to justify God in terms of the suffering in the world. God was VERY pleased with Job’s way of dealing with it. God was pleased with Job’s honest, virulent anger directed openly and guilelessly at God. Jesus, on the other hand, remembers what he learned at his Bar Mitzvah. When you see suffering, you don’t heal it by doing intellectual gymnastics in a grand attempt to explain philosophically or theologically why it happened. That doesn’t do anybody any good. In the text, in verse 3, there’s a little Greek word here which Jesus uses that makes what he says almost playful. That word is the little word ίνα. In most translations of the Bible it says something like this: “This happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” That little Greek word has three letters, but in English you have to use two words: “so that.” When you study A. T. Robertson’s huge Greek Grammar of the NT, you learn that this little conjunction declares that what follows results from what went before. The man isn’t blind because his parents sinned. No, the wonderfulness of God will result from the blindness. Tragedy doesn’t come from sin. God’s magnificence can come from tragedy, if we work in the Light. It’s a word of huge hope. Most people see tragedy and immediately despair. They want to assign blame. Jesus declares the blame-game to be totally useless and unprofitable. Rather, when bad things happen, let them be opportunities to do God’s work. That way, you’ll always have opportunities because in this world there are a lot of bad things happening. Most of them occur because of human neglect and none of them are solved by simply assigning blame. In Luke 13, much the same thing evidently happened, except the people asking the question about tragedy aren’t among the twelve. You can tell by how Jesus answers the question that they wanted to know what the victims had done wrong to deserve being slaughtered by Pilate’s soldiers. “They weren’t any worse than any of you, believe me,” Jesus says, “But listen – use this as an opportunity to rethink your life. Unless you determine to act more wisely, you’ll perish, too.” According to Jesus, the right question in the face of tragedy isn’t, “Why has this happened,” but “What kind of compassionate response does this situation call for?” Interestingly, this kind of question is always appropriate, no matter what the tragedy. How can I express the compassion of Christ in the context of this:
Even if you could come up with a satisfying intellectual explanation as to why these events transpired, the victims still need something more than, “Oh! I know why this happened to you!” All this makes me think of the insensitive comments many people make at funeral home visitations when there has been an untimely death. “Cheer up. God needed a new flower in his garden and that’s why He took your little daughter.” Most of these kinds of comments are designed more to comfort the person making the remark than they are the person suffering the loss. None of us is comfortable with the deaths of the innocents, so we try to explain it away so we can return to our own psychological equilibrium. Like Ernest Campbell used to say, most people are afraid of riding the hump of a question mark and when the issue arises regarding the suffering of the innocent, there is no rougher question mark to ride. Indeed, most of the questions dealing away or trying to explain the suffering of the innocents is an endeavor to make ourselves feel better. We want our innate sense of fair play to be validated. Interestingly, Jesus never played this game. His focus was always on seizing every opportunity to restore the reality of the Kingdom of God. In his way of viewing the world, tragedies were opportunities, not philosophical conundrums. Asking these questions, though, is fundamentally human. As illustrated by our own Bible, the issue figured prominently in the thinking of people thousands of years ago. Each of us wonders why bad things happen to good people. At this point, all the evidence we have points to the conclusion that animals don’t have these same concerns. No dog has ever asked, “Why do bad things happen to good retrievers?” We ask that question for them. They just wag their tails and go on being faithful. Hundreds of Christian writers have struggled with this issue. My own systematic theology professor in seminary struggled with it. In fact, he had a great system of theology worked out and told us about scores of other theologians who had worked out systems of theological truths and all of them had elaborate means of explaining why bad things happen to good people – and why good things seem to happen to bad people. My head would spin toward profound sleep when I tried to read those tomes. Then my professor lost his wife to a virulent cancer right in the middle of the semester. His reflections of theodicy changed profoundly. After he experienced the loss, he was at a loss. When the injury came to him, he had a much harder time explaining it in a neat and tidy way. Neat and tidy explanations don’t soothe a wounded soul. You can see the difference between academic explanations and personal experiences starkly in the writings of one of the most famous Christian writers to wrestle with this subject, C. S. Lewis. Lewis wrote a book entitled The Problem with Pain relatively early in his writing career. Then he met and fell in love with Joy Davidman and married her in his late 50’s. She contracted cancer and died after a brief but joyous marriage. Then Lewis wrote the book A Grief Observed. Read TheProblem with Pain then read A Grief Observed and it’s like you’re reading two different authors. TheProblem with Pain presents very well-reasoned arguments in a cool, dispassionate style. A Grief Observed gushes with emotion. When it happens to you, your intellectual world gets shattered and you have to rethink everything. The play and the movie “Shadowlands” beautifully dramatizes Lewis’ struggle with his wife’s cancer. In one scene in the movie, Anthony Hopkins in a roll I like a lot more than when he played Hannibal in “Silence of the Lambs,” portrays Lewis talking with his brother while waiting out Joy’s initial surgery for bone cancer. Says Lewis, “When you love someone, you don’t want them to suffer. You want to take that suffering on yourself.” What’s the intellectual reasoning behind this? It isn’t rational to want to take on someone else’s suffering. When love is involved, you know that explanations will never measure up. Only the connection of relationship can do anything and you desire more deeply than anything that the connection will not be broken. Later in the movie, there’s an interchange between the chaplain of Oxford and Lewis. The chaplain says, “I know how hard you’ve been praying, Jack. Now God is answering your prayer.” Lewis answers the chaplain: “That’s not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.” I think this is the Light Jesus referred to as he moved through the Shadowlands of the religious world surrounding the man born blind. Intellectual attempts to explain the suffering of innocents in our fallen world will change nothing. The question remains: how do these tragedies change us? Do we do the same old jaw boning, or do we find a way to respond with Christ-like compassion? Perhaps the greatest loss a person can face is the loss of a child. One of the most moving moments in the movie “The Lord of the Rings” happens when King Theoden stands at the grave of his son Theodred. As he begins to weep uncontrollably, the words gush out: “No parent should have to bury their child.” Unfortunately, many have. Two of those persons are Anne McCracken and Mary Semel who put together a series of essays in a book entitled A Broken Heart Still Beats: After Your Child Dies. Both McCracken and Semel lost children to tragic accidents and as a process of healing, researched the literature and assembled the writings of literary luminaries who also lost children and who reflected on it. Nothing confirms the fact that the world simply does not function on the basis of quid-pro-quo like losing a child. The ladies who wrote AWHSB found that in the act of declaring their pain and their love, and that they are in solidarity with anyone who has suffered the loss of a child, they felt a process of healing. Healing always begins with the act of compassion. It also brings strength and wisdom. Listen to how Anne McCracken tells it:
Literally, compassion means “with-suffering,” that is, com-passion. As Anne McCracken points out, when we face tragedy, we should spend only so long in the intellectual conundrum. Eventually, we need to “look up.” We need to summon up the courage to ride the hump of a question mark, and ride that hump even when we get sore. Are we fluxomed by the reality of innocent children dying of hunger? Get in contact with Bread for the World and support them. Are you mystified by tsunamis? Then get in touch with the VBMB and contribute to disaster relief; or the Red Cross, which currently is running on empty. Are you angry about child sexual abuse and exploitation? Then contact any number of the organizations that attack this problem – and if you use internet pornography, quit. We’ll never fully understand all the dynamics of why innocents suffer. We can, though, examine ourselves to see if our response to the knowledge of such injustice is mere intellectual gymnastics or compassionate, practical action. Whenever we learn of innocent suffering, the response for the follower of Jesus must simply be the mentality he evinced: “Whether he or his parents sinned is beside the point – this, rather, is an opportunity to live out the love of God.”
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