Suffering and the Cross

I’ve been laboring for some time trying to write on the topic of moral evil and the existence of God. It is a book length work. Below are excerpts from the chapter on ‘The incarnation and Crucifixion of the Son of God’. It is unedited and there are huge gaps separating the thoughts shared below.

“If Jesus is the Son of God, sharing the divine nature of His Father, it means God does not remain aloof and unconcerned about our suffering. Instead, God plunges into the heart of it at the cross. When we suffer moral evil we realize it is not something we would choose. Yet, God willingly let His Son be crucified by evil men. The Son of God endured agony on such a scale that it outstrips most of our suffering. This is not divine child abuse either; Jesus didn’t have to die – He chose to.

Why?

The answer to that question is at the center of the Christian worldview. Love. God loves His Glory and He loves us, and his wounds alone can speak to our pain. Moral evil may make us question the goodness and love of God. A proper understanding of the cross restores it. The crucifixion might make us question the power of God. A proper understanding of the resurrection revives it….

…I once spent several days living on the downtown Eastside of Vancouver. The amount of human suffering, abuse, hardship and brokenness was overwhelming. It weighed heavily on me as we walked the garbage strewn streets and explored the neglected neighborhood. How do I, a believer in a perfectly loving and powerful God, cling to that belief in light of the wretchedness that is so pervasive on the downtown eastside?

I didn’t have an answer. I struggled to find one until I remembered the cross. In that moment I realized that only a crucified God makes sense in the slum…

…My friend works on the Downtown Eastside in one of the buildings that houses many of the addicts. One man my friend knew struggled mightily with chronic pain combined with an addiction to heroin. The addict was also an artist. One day he drew the building’s chaplain a poignant picture; a sketch of Jesus Christ on the cross with a heroin needle sticking out of his arm. Jesus offended the religious – that picture birthed out of one addict’s pain still does. But Jesus bore our burdens. Jesus became sin for us and suffered with us on the cross. Only a crucified God makes sense on the Down town Eastside of Vancouver, in the slums of Calcutta, or on the killing fields of Cambodia.

The incarnation doesn’t explain suffering but it gives us a profound reason to believe in a good God in spite of it. The incarnation of God in Christ and his willingness to suffer crucifixion goes a long way to addressing the emotional problem of evil and suffering. The emotional resources provided by solidarity in the face of suffering cannot be under estimated. Facing tragedy with another at your side is a gift of grace that can get us through the most grievous of circumstances. God gives us that gift in the Gospel…

The author Dorothy Day once wrote,

“For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is – limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death – God had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money, to the worst horrors of pain and humiliations, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”

Suffering and evil may make us want to spit in the face of God. The crucifixion reminds us that we already did. ‘God had the courage to take his own medicine’ – to swallow the bitter pill of sorrow, to traverse the trials of life. As a result God knows our pain, he knows our sorrows and there is nothing I will endure that he hasn’t undergone first.

Someone once said, in reference to Christ on the cross, ‘It is hard to stay mad at a God who is in worse shape than you’. Clearly there is therapeutic benefit to taking your anger out on God – I assume God can handle it. The scripture gives you permission and if the options are between repressing anger leading to depression, expressing anger causing relational breakdown, or releasing anger to God; the third option is the best. There is still, however, some truth to the above quote. It is difficult to stay angry with a God who endured more suffering on our behalf than most of us will ever undergo.

I may not be able to understand why some evil occurs but I can trust a crucified God in the midst of it. In fact, this is the only God I can trust.

In addition, God has also modeled for us the way forward in our own response to evil. It has often been said that things ‘either get better or bitter’. This is especially true when it comes to addressing evil deeds committed against us. Forgiveness is the antidote to bitter and the path to better. Forgiveness may seem like a neglected trail choked with weeds, thorns and thickets making it difficult for any forward progress to occur. God, however, has been our great trailblazer. In Christ, God has opened up the path to forgiveness and reconciliation…..