All this month with the world on fire—some of you have read the questions I am working on this Lenten season. And as we approach the week called Holy it seems to me that suffering is at the heart of being human. The dark side of life surely a part of our world. Wasn’t it true of Jesus:”Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows…” Just follow the Stations of the cross and you will see again and again a suffering God.
The way of sorrows begins with Jesus judged and condemned. Stripped. Beaten. Ridiculed. Spat upon. And the crowd, isn’t there always a crowd that screams: “Crucify him! Crucify him!” And bears and almost crosseyed with pain he took a splintered cross—heavy as lead. And he knew what that meant. And he fell. The cross so heavy he just collapsed. Not once, Before that winding interminable journey will end he will fall, the Stations say, he fell three times. Can’t you just hear the crowd: “Look how weak he is. Messiah? Messiah is not weak and would never get himself where he would carry the cross of a criminal. Little did they know. God what a journey.
And then they stripped him and he stood there just as naked as the day he was born. He knew the pain of vulnerability. Just as those in urine-soaked beds. Or some Doctor pushing the sheet back as the Doctors just stand there just looking. Looking. The vulnerability of not being able to make it to the bath room. And the horror of someone else who must wash you off.
And at the top of the hill there were the soldiers with their hammers and nails. And their did their terrible job as the crucified writhed in pain and delirium. We know what it is to be nailed down. By some sick bed. By some dead-end street. The terrible and nasty job. Wishing you could go back over the years and start again with the kids. They don’t even come home. We know about nails. Crippled with arthritis or Parkinson’s. Sitting in a wheel-chair with ALS and not even able to raise your head. Or cowering in that bunker in Ukraine holding your kids tight—and fear, the terrible hungry, thirsting, hungry fear.
But thank God Jesus whispered: “It is finished.” And death came as it comes to our loved ones and to one day, us too.
So we stand before the suffering of our time and our lives too. And we ask, as pilgrims have asked it since time began. “Why? Lord. Why cancer and Aids and mental illness and the kids who are so drugged they never stop. Why? Why do we have to contend with suffering. I Keep remembering Annie Dillard’s story in which Hugh—probably standing behind a pulpit or grave reads:”O death where is thy sting?” And someone was said to mutter, “Just about everywhere now that you ask.”
Job the oldest book in the Bible has Job covered in sores, grieving over everything that he loved and taken away. He asked, over and over: “Why Lord…why?” And the heavens were silent. There was no answer. And even when Jesus asked this question. Why? The book says that over and over again he had no answer. Not a mumblin’ word.
We Americans don’t know what to do with these questions that have no answers. We want it settled, tied up, finished. But the only thing that comes is the silence. The terrible silence.
To be human is to suffer. This is what the word made flesh taught us. And what our own human predicament has taught us. Suffering is epidemic and we have no answers for Ukraine or dementia or Covin or cancer or Russia or even death.
And yet you see them—Mandela. Mother Theresa. Stuttering Joe Biden. Martin Luther King. And in home and hospital and graveside there is only silence as the sick and broken and the grievers stumble away limping yet never stopping.
The only answer I get comes from the Russian, Dostoyevsky: “What keeps me going is that I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that in the world’s finale something so great will come to pass that it’s going to suffice for all our hearts, or the comforting of all our sorrows, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity. And I want to be there when suddenly everyone understands what it has all been for.”
Beyond the maddening silence, staggering up that terrible hill God’s son broken and bleeding and exhausted kept going. That’s my prayer for myself and for all of us.
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