Where is God in suffering?

The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, Pentecost 21, Year B, Track 1, 10/13/24

Lessons: Job 23:1-9, 16-17 (Job’s Complaint); Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

Last Sunday Reverend Shearon preached an excellent sermon on the faithful Christian response to suffering, and today I’d like to continue that thread by exploring the question of what, then, is God’s response to suffering?

Or to put it quite frankly, where is God when we need him? It’s the question we have all surely asked at some point in life. Perhaps when turning on the news and seeing play by play coverage of the tragedy du jour. Hurricanes, the Holy Land, Ukraine. Or perhaps it arises when we encounter the depths of despair in our own life. Job loss, illness, anxiety and depression. In those moments, where is God? How could a God who is both perfectly loving and all-powerful not intervene to alleviate suffering? This question is perhaps the biggest obstacle to faith that humankind has encountered and it’s a question as old as time. In the book of Job, written some twenty-five hundred years ago, Job expresses this sentiment of divine abandonment with bitter clarity:

Oh, that I knew where I might find him,
that I might come even to his dwelling! (Job 23:3)

"If I go forward, he is not there;
or backward, I cannot perceive him;

on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;
I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. (Job 23:8-10).

Where is God? We could spend far more time than any of us have this morning, or in this lifetime, pondering the myriad responses to this question that have been offered throughout human history. But in the few minutes we have I’ll try to tell you what I have found in my own searching to be the most hopeful and assuring answer to the question of where is God. And that answer, I believe is Jesus.

Now before you tune out and say of course if I come to church the preacher is going to tell me that Jesus is the answer. In seminary we had a running joke that if you were ever stumped by a question on a test, the answer is always Jesus. It sounds trite, I know, but let me tell you why I believe that Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, really is God’s response to the problem of suffering.

You know, one of the unique claims of Christianity that distinguishes it from other world religions is the incarnation. The belief that God, through Jesus Christ, actually became human. And not only did God become human in Jesus Christ, God therefore experienced the fullness of what it means to be human. The joy, the struggle, and through the cross, the depths of abandonment and suffering. St. Paul stakes this claim when he writes:

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are (Heb. 4:15).

Theologian Jurgen Moltmann describes the incarnation and suffering of Christ as God’s act of divine solidarity with human need. Now let me tell you, this is a radical and controversial idea. For years, Western theology had taken for granted the notion of God’s impassibility – that God, being God, is immune to suffering. Yet Moltmann, in the wake of the Holocaust and WWII, was one of the first to challenge this idea by proposing that God could only be the good and loving God we believe him to be if he shared in the anguish and estrangement that we, God’s children, experience.

Through Jesus, we can imagine that God, rather than being some kind of divine manager, is crossing the picket lines to stand in solidarity with oppressed workers. God, rather than being just the physician of sick bodies and souls, is also the suffering cancer patient, lying in the hospital, hoping that the next infusion will save them.

God’s full and unconditional identification with human suffering is also laid bare in the parable of the rich young man, when Jesus scandalously declares that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” And then, in the very next sentence, Jesus replies to his disciples’ astonished cry of “who then, can be saved” by saying that “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.’ Even God can drag that stubborn, self-serving, billionaire camel through that needle’s eye, and perhaps in the process liberating it of its gilded shackles. (Mk 10:25-27).

In the same breath, Jesus expresses solidarity with the poor while extending the possibility of salvation to the oppressor.

So if the answer to the question of ‘where is God in suffering?’ is indeed that God, through the incarnation of Christ Jesus, fully shares our suffering, where does that leave us? Because it only partially satisfies the problem. Even if God is in solidarity with us, we’re still suffering.

The answer here, I believe, is that through suffering itself, God liberates us. Moltmann puts the Cross of Christ at the center of human history, and as we know, there are two parts to the cross of Jesus. The first part is Jesus’s full sharing in the pain and abandonment that we as humans experience. That bitter cry of dereliction “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Ps 22:1) is Jesus’s divine solidarity with every moment of anguish this life brings us. But the second part – the remarkable and impossible part of this story – is the resurrection.

In the resurrection Jesus gathers up all of the soreness, anxiety, depression, heartache, and physical pain that we carry, and transforms it into glory. In the resurrection Jesus points us to a reality where suffering, and even death, is shared by God and overcome. The death and glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ our Savior is the response to suffering God offers us. In this sense, suffering is merely a prelude to hope in God’s triumph through divine solidarity. And, therefore, the Christian response to suffering, is not despair, but hope in God’s ultimate victory won for us.

So, the next time you find yourself crying out like Job “Oh, that I knew where I might find [God], oh that I might come even to his dwelling,” I want you to remember this. God has come to dwell with you. Jesus is crying out with you, and Jesus will turn those cries into shouts of glory, glory, glory. And if you don’t have it in you to believe that right now, then I and others who love you will believe it for you. Amen.