A Suffering God

This is a topic we cannot escape but often ignore. It is the topic of suffering. This morning I spent an hour and a half with a chaplain at Duke Hospital and went on rounds with him during that time. In our visits we talked to one patient for fifteen to twenty minutes. This person was not only physically ill, but they had also gone through a lot of pain and loss in their immediate family. That being said, this person demonstrated an unrelenting faith in the goodness of God and that all things would eventually work out for their good. It was like watching Romans 8:28 take form before me. In facing suffering, especially in the suffering of the faithful, how does the Church continue to dialog with a hurting world and attempt to remind them of God’s goodness? What can be said when storms destroy cities, tsunamis wash away coastlines and homes, earthquakes swallow up neighborhoods where children play and live, illnesses take young and old alike, and suffering continues to plague all of our existence, regardless of religious affiliation? There is no answer to this question; a rationale can be constructed and proposed to explain away the problem of a sovereign God and a crippled world, but this rationale can not offer solace to a mother who has lost a child to cancer or a husband whose wife has been lost in a car accident. For the suffering there is no immediate answer. But there is one ultimate truth which continues to offer hope.

Immanuel, God With Us. “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me” (Matt 25:35-36). What does it mean to love God in the form of other humans? What does the Incarnation mean for God and mean for us as Christians? Do we believe the Holy Spirit is with us? Do we believe Christ is Incarnate God? When I visited that patient this morning and they told me their story, when I held their hand while the Chaplain prayed over the three of us, did I believe I was visiting Jesus Christ in the hospital, in the form of a sick, elderly individual? Do we dare to believe in such a thing?

If anything can offer solace to a world such as ours, it is the suffering of our God. A God who loves us so much that the greatest expression of that love was in the Self-Sacrifice of God’s own Son and God’s self in the crucifixion; the Gospel is God sacrificing Himself to Himself in the likeness of human flesh, all for the love of the world and the glory of God’s name. So when we suffer, we cannot forget that God suffers with us. God does not possess a distant knowledge of suffering nor did God the Father require God the Son to somehow explain to Him what suffering was. The Father knows all things, including the suffering of Creation. The Holy Spirit binds the Father and Son into the reality of humanity, allowing for the Incarnation to be perpetually present in and throughout our actions.

“Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit….God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him”
(I John 4:11-16).