Suffering

 

The coronavirus pandemic has been a repressing force like a brake or imprisoning ball and chain. Barred from leaving home without necessity we felt like caged hamsters on the wheel of a routine going round and round looking forward to release from both cage and wheel. The pain of our isolation was amplified by the suffering and deaths of family and friends we kept distance from following unassailable yet heartbreaking logic. In a pandemic we cannot do what we want to do for our sake and for the sake of others. Societies that accept, or have to accept, heavy regulation from government have accommodated better to this than open societies where restricting freedom to do as you like seems alien. Stepping away from people on the pavement is now ingrained and lack of intimacy with others is having widespread effect on mental health. It is a painful scenario at the time of writing although vaccinations bring hope of reducing the pain of coronavirus to something like the annual onslaught of influenza. Living through a pandemic puts pay to entertainments we take for granted like going to the theatre or a football match. For others the pandemic has impacted far beyond that, taking the lives of hospital staff, bus drivers and many who work on the front line of public services. The Christian response to coronavirus has been to offer prayer for its removal, care for its victims and wisdom on the creative bearing of suffering. 

It is something of a paradox to pray against something whilst accepting the suffering it brings. The coronavirus pandemic as a natural disaster raises questions about divine love and power as does the suffering after the recent bombings in Afghanistan depicted here. Accepting God’s love, Christians pray to him to exercise his power to eradicate the virus. At the same time we encourage believers who suffer to trust the love of God and believe ‘that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose’ (Romans 8:28). The link between the two responses is conviction that God has a long term plan into which we have to weave our aspirations including making the most of suffering. I recall little Brandon from my last parish, only five, who died of a brain tumour. I both baptised and buried him and still share the grief of his family. To believe in a good God in the face of Brandon’s passing seemed alien to some. To others, including his mother, who put faith in God’s working, such belief was a lifeline. Her testimony presented tangible evidence of how faith brings blessing through suffering, as Jesus showed on the Cross. Dorothy Sayers, besides being famous as a crime writer, was a child of the Vicarage and fervent Christian. She was well aware, writing shortly after the Second World War, of the challenge to God people saw in suffering. In this passage from her book ‘Creed or Chaos?’ she speaks powerfully of the significance of Jesus: ‘For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is - limited and suffering and subject to sorrow and death - he 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 humiliation, 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’.

There is no knock-down argument that can make sense of suffering but through faith in Jesus we find ground to stand on as we do our best to live in a world where suffering is so real. If I rejected the existence of a loving God in favour of cruel fate I would have other problems explaining the existence of all the love that flows in the world. Timothy Keller makes a succinct observation: ‘If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world… you have… a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know... you can’t have it both ways’. If we condemn people overall on account of the way some misuse their freedom we ignore the good deeds of others balancing their bad deeds. God made both Maximilian Kolbe and Adolf Hitler. It was Hitler who sanctioned the wickedness of Auschwitz. The Polish priest Fr Kolbe was sent there because he sheltered Jews. When a prisoner escaped, the camp commandant ordered ten men to be chosen for execution. Kolbe offered himself in exchange for a married man and died instead of him. The love that flowed from Maximilian Kolbe brightened the darkness of Hitler’s death camp so that his statue is over the west door at Westminster Abbey. The good use of freedom in one cannot be weighed directly against the evil consequences of the other’s misdoing yet the light it sheds on suffering is undeniable. 

Ministering in the interior of Guyana, often a long way from medical care, I sometimes saw malaria lift in an instant through the sacrament of anointing. Other times it has been the occasion for a dying person to make their surrender and pass speedily to God. Healing is a cure but more than that, just as suffering is more than physical pain. Christian ministry to those who are hurting builds from the instinctive laying on of hands everyone does themselves or to one to another after an injury. The voice of prayer and pouring of oil calls upon the healing embrace of God so well represented in the earthly life of Jesus. That God, when asked in the name of Jesus, acts to heal is central to the Christian good news, be that action a cure, a building of faith to bear suffering or granting grace to submit to death. The Christian response to suffering has many facets, spiritual, medical, practical and political, linked to hurt in body, mind, spirit and relationships in humans, animals as well as the environment. The global coronavirus pandemic has seen people of all nations and creeds brought together in the task of alleviating suffering across the world. That work for Christians flows from conviction that God in Christ reduces despair to sadness through the Cross, a sadness caused by empathy with so many in pain yoked to the hope of redemption. ‘The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ - if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God’ (Romans 8:16-19).