Luke 7: 11-17
Part one of a three part mini series ‘Hope for a troubled world’ by Nat Charles.
This week: Where is God in a global pandemic?
Please note: this is a recording from our Sunday Zoom service. Everyone is welcome at our services and you can find out how to join online on our home page. Due to a blip at the time of recording the recording begins about a minute in.
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Transcript
As we reflect on our own experience of the past months, I suspect that all of us are asking a similar question, even if we might articulate it differently. Where is God in all of this?
It might be that as you have faced a particular experience of the Pandemic, illness, increased stress at home or at work, uncertainty over your job or just missing loved ones that you can’t see in person, you are wondering where God is. Or maybe the grim reality of life in a pandemic – 10.6 million Covid cases around the world, over 500,000 deaths – have left you feeling like it’s simply impossible to believe in God at a time like this.
The question about God and suffering is not a new one. It’s been around since ancient Greek and Roman thinkers grappled with the problem. Yet we probably know the problem as it was stated by the enlightenment philosopher David Hume in the 18thC. Hume wrote ‘Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he incapable. Is he able but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?’
To put the problem most straightforwardly, isn’t the presence of suffering in the world, like Covid-19, evidence that God just isn’t there? How could a good, powerful being, just sit back when we’re going through all of this? Where is God?
I’d like to take a few moments to explore this story in Luke chapter 7. As far as we know, the gospel writer Luke didn’t meet Jesus of Nazareth personally, but he did compile his narrative, his gospel, on the basis of eyewitness testimony. And this short episode offers at least three perspectives on the question about where God is and what he’s doing in the presence of suffering and evil.
JESUS IS OFFENDED BY SUFFERING, vs 13
First, notice how Jesus is moved by the suffering he encounters.
The scene that Luke describes is tragic in all sorts of ways. Not only has this woman in the story lost a son, and has to deal with her grief. but she’s also lost everything that a son represents. As a woman, her economic and social status in the culture of the ANE would have been entirely bound up with the male figures in her household. Her husband and her son. So she isn’t just dealing with her grief, but with huge insecurity and uncertainty about her future and status.
We’re told in Vs 13 that when Jesus encounters the woman, his heart goes out her. In fact, the phrase that Luke uses could be translated even more strongly. It literally means ‘his guts/intestines were twisted up’.
Jesus is affronted by the presence of suffering as he encounters it. It moves and grieves him.
That’s really significant. Because while we all know that suffering is wrong, many of the explanations offered for suffering can’t actually explain why it’s wrong.
Contrast Jesus with other religious and philosophical approaches to the issue of suffering. Some religions are fatalistic about suffering – it’s simply God’s will. Or suffering is thought to be an intrinsic part of the world, and the way to leave it behind is to find a way out of the world.
Likewise, although atheism might look like it solves the problem, it just creates new ones. Famously, Richard Dawkins, in a book published some years ago described our universe as pitilessly indifferent. No design, no purpose, no evil, no good, just indifference.
But if that’s true, if there is no God, why should anyone call our experience of the last three months wrong, or bad? There’s no warrant to do so, it’s simply all there is.
Contrast Jesus. No fatalism, no platitudes. Instead, outrage. And as we see him affronted by the presence of suffering in this world, we see that we’re not wrong to have a problem with suffering and evil.
Jesus validates our own sense that suffering is wrong. It’s not just how life is. Not just part of the natural order. It’s not just the way things are. You are not wrong if you feel that suffering of any kind, your own or anyone else’s is deeply wrong. It’s not the way that things are supposed to be in God’s world.
So Christianity invites us to reframe the question. John Lennox, a Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University puts it this way. We ought to ask not ‘why doesn’t God do things this way or that way, but is there a God we can trust with our lives and our selves in a world like this?’
JESUS EXPERIENCED SUFFERING, vs 14
And this story goes on to offer an answer to that question.
Because second, Jesus isn’t only affronted by suffering, and so validates our own suffering, he knows what it is to suffer.
There’s a small detail in this story that is really striking. In Vs 14, Jesus approaches the bier that the dead child is lying on. And he reaches out his hand, and touches it.
Now why is that so striking? As a vicar, when I lead a funeral service, I will often place my hand on the coffin for the final prayer in the service,. It’s known as the commendation. And that’s not so unusual. What’s different about Jesus?
The answer is that in Ancient Israel, in a devoutly religious culture, death was considered unclean. Ritually and ceremonially unclean. And to touch something that had died, whether another person or an animal was to also become unclean. Various practices that involved cleansing had to be undertaken before you could re-enter society, before you could worship at the temple.
So as Jesus touches the bier of this dead child, he enters into the suffering of this widow. And it’s also a glimpse of his own suffering. The central act of the Christian faith is the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross, and his rising to new life.
So hear this, the Christian God isn’t just offended by suffering. He knows what it is to suffer.
It might be that we’ve become a little desensitised to that idea. We all know the story of Jesus dying on a cross. But in the ancient world, it was an incendiary, scandalising notion.
I’ve recently been reading a book by the historian Tom Holland, who sets out to investigate why Christianity has so profoundly shaped the people of the West, and why we think as we do. Early on in the book he writes about the horror of crucifixion, not just it was physically, but what it said about the victim. ‘Divinity, then, was for the greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and kings… That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a God could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.’
And yet, that is precisely the God that Christians worship. The only God, as one writer puts it, with scars.
And because he is, because he knows what it is to suffer, he can draw alongside us in our own suffering.
JESUS WILL END SUFFERING, vs 15
Jesus validates our suffering, he knows our suffering. One last perspective. He will end our suffering.
This scene in the town of Nain is remarkable in one other respect.
Over the past three months, we have become very conscious of the risk of infection through touch. Do you remember the early days of March, and the constant reminders to wash your hands. To avoid touching your face. Videos appeared on the BBC news website about why we feel the need to touch our face and how to stop doing so.
That’s what you’d expect Jesus to think and feel. He wouldn’t want to be infected as it were by any contact with a dead body. Yet the touch, rather than infecting him, brings life. Vs 15, the young man gets up, and is restored to life again.
And again, in this very small action, we’re pointed towards the cross. How so?
I mentioned a moment ago that the people of Israel were taught in the OT that death was unclean. The reason that death is awful in the Bible is because it’s the evidence of God’s judgement against sin. Humanity’s defiant attempt to live as gods in God’s world. As far as the Bible is concerned, we have all turned away from the source of life looking for life everywhere and anywhere else, but finding only death and darkness.
But in his death, Jesus himself, the giver of life, is touched by death. Jesus faces the judgement of God at Calvary, so that those who are under a sentence of death might know and share in his life. Jesus suffers to bring his healing to us all.
And the joy of the widow of Nain, as her son is restored to her, is a small picture of what our joy will be when the risen Jesus restores all things. When everything and everyone that we have lost will be restored. Tolkien famously has one of his characters say at the end of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ that everything sad is coming untrue. The promise of Christianity is that all things will be restored to us in and through Jesus.
Jesus gladly enters our suffering so that he might bring it to an end. So that he might be our hope that will sustain us through even the worst that a global pandemic can do.