Why is there suffering in the world?

It’s a month since we had a Sunday Special and got people to jot down some of those big questions that can often trouble us.

Today we come to a very big question that people asked in lots of different ways.

It’s a question that I fear doesn’t have an answer.  But it is a question I believe we can respond to.

·         Why is there so much suffering in the world?

·         Why do people get ill?

·         Where is God when I need him?

I want to suggest three ways in to making a response.  The first doesn’t work.  The second is helpful.  The third is the way that for me not only makes most sense but it is also most helpful.

I don’t think it gets you anywhere if you start with a philosophical idea of God as all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-loving.  You end up angry at a supposed god who does nothing to stop bone cancer in children or little insects burrowing into the brain.  The problem is that argument starts in the wrong place, it starts with the wrong premise.

Stephen Fry had exactly that angry outburst this week in an interview with the Irish TV company, RTE, that went viral on YouTube and then on Twitter.

In an interview on the radio he made it quite clear – “I don’t think I mentioned once any certain religion, and I certainly didn’t intend, and I know I didn’t, to say anything offensive towards any particular religion,” he said. “I said quite a few things that were angry at this supposed God. I was merely saying things that Bertrand Russell and many finer heads of the mind have said for many thousands of years, going all the way back to the Greeks.”

Why is there so much suffering in the world?  I don’t want to make my starting point some theoretical idea about god that’s been worked out by philosophers.

I want to make a response as a Christian from within my Christian faith and share how I respond to this question as a Christian believing in God.

So my second way of responding I think is more helpful for me.  As a Christian I find a more helpful starting place is the Bible.  For me as a Christian this Book is the place where I find more than any other the inspiration for my faith.  What is wonderful to me about the Bible is that it is all about people who have found that very same inspiration for the faith that keeps them going … .and it’s been written and put together by people with that very same inspiration.

It begins with larger than life stories set in the beginning of time that are filled with timeless truths for every generation.   The world we live in is a wonderful world, it’s the world of God’s creation.

But people make a mess of that world.  There is something in people that prompts them to make wrong choices.  And the consequence of that is that things go dreadfully wrong.

So much of the world’s suffering is down to us human beings – and you can see it in today’s world – illnesses that result from the lifestyle we choose to lead, we are seeing it work out on a world scale that climate change is happening because of the way human beings choose to live.

The thing about the Bible story as it unfolds is that the God who is the inspiration for the people caught up in that story is the God who comes alongside people and helps them to set things right.   The story of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob on through the pages of the Bible is the story of God setting things right – it is the story of salvation.

Where people follow the kind of framework set out in the ten commandments then on the whole things go well.

However, and the word ‘however’ needs to be spelled in big capital letters.

HOWEVER, that general picture doesn’t explain everything.  There’s a big danger.  A massive danger.  That wherever there’s suffering and illness you say – people must have broken God’s framework, done something wrong.

IT doesn’t work that way.  That’s the whole point of the book of Job.  Actually really good people suffer too.  Suffering comes to everyone.  There’s no escaping it.

The inspiration for Job comes when he goes out into the wild open countryside and is challenged to think of the immensity of a world that always has more questions to be asked.   We catch only a time glimpse of the immensity of the world we are a part of – and God’s even bigger than all that.  Maybe it’s best to live with unanswered questions – in a faith that turns to the immensity of God.

I find that a more helpful response.  As I sense something of the wonder of an incredibly wondlerful world, it strikes me that the whole story of the universe is one of cataclysmic events happening that have within them the beginnings of something new, the beginnings of life itself.  I get to the point when I realise there are always more questions to ask about this wonderful world, and then sense God is greater than all.   That’s an inspiration to me.

But there’s more.  As I read this Bible it has a momentum, it’s leading up to something.  And this is where I come to my third response – as a Christian I want to start with Jesus – that’s my starting point for getting the inspiration I need for my life.

So, what do I see in Jesus.  First of all, wherever Jesus encounters suffering, illness he sees it as something to counter – his concern is to bring healing and wholeness to people who experience suffering.

So if I have to live with unanswered questions about why suffering – one thing is clear, where I see it I must seek to alleviate suffering, if I am to follow in the footsteps of Jesus I need to be engaged in bringing healing into the world.  That gives me a motivation for my life.

But what happens when suffering comes – when my faith is rocked – when I find there is no inspiration for my faith.  Stuff happens – that prompts this big question to be asked in an agonising way, the cry o God, why such suffering?

I want to look to Jesus and what do I find.  When his close friend Lazarus died an untimely death Jesus may share wonderful words of inspiration with Martha which are an inspiration to this day – ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. But when Jesus then meets up with Mary who is so distraught she has nothing to say we read simply that ‘Jesus wept’.

Then as he approached his own death there is a moment in the Garden of Gethsemane when all he is driven to pray to God to take this cup from him.  He prays with such agony that he seats blood.

That agony is accentuated on the cross when in the agony of his dying, he cries out My God, my God why have you forsaken me?

But as the story unfolds and he utters that prayer – Father into your hands I commend my spirit’ and then through death and burial comes resurrection and a new life opens up.

Jesus opens up for me two things – a God who as one who cares with the deep, deep love of a father, and is alongside us through the darkness, and remains with us when we feel he is not there.

Jesus also points me in a direction that is in an intangible way so helpful.  Even when you feel God is not there – pray.  Not necessarily the nice prayers that say thanks.  But the desolate prayers that are angry with this Father God.

That’s part of the experience of Christian faith – and what Jesus does is to use prayers that were an inspiration to the people who first prayed them and that have been down through the ages an inspiration to many and are an inspiration to us today.  On the cross those words come from Psalm 22.

In among the Psalms are prayers of desolation – and they show me actually it’s not just OK, but it’s really important to rage not at the supposed God of the philosophers, but at the Father God opened up to us by Jesus – because when you do that it is a help.

There was one reading Joanne Moston wanted to do herself in among all the times of worship I put together for our visit to Jerusalem.  A church supposedly built on the site of the High Priest’s house where Jesus spent the night after the Garden of Gethsemane.  We went down into a deep pit, a dungeon.  And it was down there Joanne read this psalm.  She invited us to think of Jesus in his solitude drawing on this psalm.

We’ll read it together from the church Bibles.

Congregation –

LORD God, my saviour, I cry out all day,

and at night I come before you.

²Hear my prayer;

listen to my cry for help!

Leader –

³So many troubles have fallen on me

that I am close to death.

⁴I am like all others who are about to die;

all my strength is gone.

⁵I am abandoned among the dead;

I am like the slain lying in their graves,

those you have forgotten completely,

who are beyond your help.

⁶You have thrown me into the depths of the tomb,

into the darkest and deepest pit.

⁷Your anger lies heavy on me,

and I am crushed beneath its waves.

Congregation

⁸You have caused my friends to abandon me;

you have made me repulsive to them.

I am closed in and cannot escape;

⁹my eyes are weak from suffering.

LORD, every day I call to you

and lift my hands to you in prayer.

Leader

¹⁰Do you perform miracles for the dead?

Do they rise up and praise you?

¹¹Is your constant love spoken of in the grave

or your faithfulness in the place of destruction?

¹²Are your miracles seen in that place of darkness

or your goodness in the land of the forgotten?

Congregation

¹³LORD, I call to you for help;

every morning I pray to you.

¹⁴Why do you reject me, LORD?

Why do you turn away from me?

¹⁵Ever since I was young, I have suffered and been near death;

I am worn out from the burden of your punishments.

¹⁶Your furious anger crushes me;

your terrible attacks destroy me.

¹⁷All day long they surround me like a flood;

they close in on me from every side.

¹⁸You have made even my closest friends abandon me,

and darkness is my only companion.

Where is God when I need him?

The stark reality is that it feels as if he is not there.

Say so.

Say so in prayer

In prayer use a Psalm such as this.

Read it from a Bible.

For the inspiration of the Bible is that such a prayer is not the last word.

It is precisely when ‘darkness is my only companion’ that we can hear another voice.

Interestingly the title given to the Hebrew text of Psalm 88 is “A psalm by the clan of Korah; a song.  A poem by Heman the Ezrahite.”

But look on … Psalm 89 follows.  The Herbew title describes it as ‘a poem by Ethan the Ezrahite’.

It’s as if at that moment of deepest darkness there’s someone else in the family who can share something that can itself become an inspiration.

Just read those first 2 verses …

1O LORD, I will always sing of your constant love;

I will proclaim your faithfulness for ever.

2I know that your love will last for all time,

that your faithfulness is as permanent as the sky.

What’s so powerful for me is that that inspiration only comes if you have the courage to rage against God in the words of Psalm 88.

This for me is the wonderful thing about the God opened up for me by Jesus – the world is a wonderful place, but a world that prompts so many questions it is impossible to answer them all.  The God of creation is the one who is with us even when he doesn’t feel as if he is there, whose love for us will last for all time, and ultimately bring us into his glory.