Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Lamentations 1:17-22
“Zion stretches our her hands, but there is no one to comfort her...”
I recently overheard some university students having a passionate conversation about suffering in the world. “Everything happens for a reason,” one student insisted. While the other students had differing perspectives, they all agreed with this basic premise: whatever happens, no matter how tragic or evil, must have a rational explanation.
We see that ancient belief strongly represented in today’s reading. The Israelites had been conquered by the invading Assyrian empire and had been re-settled in the land of Babylon. Lamentations is the grief-stricken work of a downtrodden people trying to understand how they ended up under the heel of the world’s shoe and why they felt so abandoned by God. In fact, the most important question in Lamentations is not “Why are we suffering?” but “Where is God?” The author ultimately finds God as the one who metes out well-deserved punishment.
For many, even now, imagining God like that provides necessary comfort. On the one hand, you get a rational explanation for your suffering: “I have messed up and I’m being punished.” And on the other hand, you are assured that you haven’t been abandoned by God: “God is right here correcting and disciplining me.”
The belief that all tragedies can be explained, and including God in the explanation, is a seductive idea. The logic does work at a basic level. “You reap what you sow,” is true in many cases. A life of self-destructive behaviors leads naturally to self-destruction.
What is more difficult to rationalize is the harvest one reaps that one did not sow. Does an abused child deserve the abuse? Does a rape victim deserve the attack? We may find ourselves asking: “What did I possibly do to deserve this?” Maybe there isn’t anything you did do. Maybe there is no reason. Our minds and our hearts shudder in the face of this truth.
But where is God? If there is no logical reason for some of the suffering in our world, where is God in it all?
As we enter Holy Week we are asked to contemplate Jesus’ own suffering. Our mind craves answers for the absurdity of these events. The most common way to explain this tragedy is to assume that Jesus willingly undertook the punishment of cosmic justice for us: “Jesus paid a debt he did not owe to satisfy a debt we could not pay,” is one pithy saying prevalent in some forms of Christian piety. And yet, the idea of a vengeful God channeling cosmic punishment on Jesus for us is an idea that does not work and is not necessary.
More helpful to me and more faithful to the best of the Christian tradition is to affirm that God’s mission through Christ is to take the Spirit of love into every place where there is no love, including places of tragedy and violent resistance. Human societies are good at excluding many of its members. Jesus showed love by pulling the marginalized into the center. We are good at holding the suffering amongst us at arm’s length: close enough to offer charity but too far for genuine relationship. Jesus showed love by befriending the friendless. We are especially good at marginalizing our own pain, refusing to accept our inherent vulnerability and fragility. Jesus took the Spirit of love into the very place of his own suffering and death.
-David Shumaker
Thank you for this, David. It was timely reading this, as today I received word that a friend and former co-worker of mine was killed in a car accident. I, too, am critical of the 'everything happens for a reason' rationalization. I hope, though, that those of us who knew her can do what we can to offer our support to her loved ones.
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