Does God Care?
Paul Tillich was one of America's 20th century great theologians. He was a thinker about God and creation. His writing could be difficult to understand. For instance he described "faith" as "ultimate concern." At a lecture describing what he meant by that a man stood up and asked, “Professor Tillich, I appreciated your remarks about faith. I think I may have even understood some of it! But, what I really want to know is, do you think that God, the object of our "ultimate concern" is concerned about me?”
In light of Haiti's suffering and torment that is really the question, isn’t it? Does God care? Or, to put it slightly differently, if there is a God who cares, why do innocent people suffer so? What about those Egyptian babies who died at the first Passover or the Egyptian soldiers who drowned as Israel escaped at the Red Sea? Or, more immediately, what about the dear ones, the nameless faces we see of the victims of earthquakes or of random tragedies because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. The inevitable question is: “Why has this happened? Why has God done this, or allowed this? Does God care?” Why, if there is a good and powerful God presiding over creation, do innocent people get ravaged?
The point can be made that there are times when God seems to be not only silent but absent as well. The Bible itself wrestles with the issue of suffering and God’s relationship to it and does not dismiss it. The Psalmist asks “Has God forgotten to be gracious?” (77:9)
The Bible provides no simple solution, but deals with the hard human questions nowhere more vigorously or honestly than in the Book of Job. Righteous Job loses everything and comes to God, perplexed, confused, wounded and angry. He is a good man, a faithful, honest and just man. He laments, "Why has this happened?" Three friends try to console him, each one expressing the conventional wisdom of the day. Job must have done something wrong; there is some behavioral or character flaw which brought all this tragedy. But Job knows he’s innocent and so confronts God head on -- “I’m innocent,” he says, “why are you doing this to me?”
The conclusion of the book is magnificent. God finally responds “out of the whirlwind,” by asking Job where he was when God was creating the world? “Who is this asking these questions?” God asks. Job, acknowledges that there is mystery in life he cannot comprehend, that there are no simple, viable answers. He finally says, “I had heard of God, but now --in this mystery of not knowing-- I see God.” It’s a remarkable conclusion.
The same question comes up several times in the New Testament. One day friends of Jesus pose the question. There had been a public political protest by some Galileans. The government had tracked them down, caught up with them in the Temple at worship, and murdered them on the spot. Not long after, a construction accident at Siloam had resulted in the death of 18 workers. Why had it happened? Again, the best thinking of the day was that bad things happen to bad people. Someone must have sinned -- either the victims or their families. On another occasion, his disciples asked whether a man, blind from birth, had sinned or was it his parents?
Jesus (in Luke) warns his disciples that sometimes sin does produce suffering, but in both instances rejects the conventional wisdom that suffering is always the result of human sin. We know better than that. And the notion that somehow God punishes children for something their parents did is simply unthinkable.
Does God Care? That’s what we all want to know. To watch the anguish on the faces of those in Haiti is to ask the question, Dear God, are you there and do you care? So much conventional wisdom, as mouthed-pieced by the fool Pat Robertson (forgive my candor) is that sin causes suffering. The sufferer must "deserve it," must have done something to bring it on. And some assert that God sends suffering to test or refine humanity.
In fact, some behavior does result in suffering. It may not be sinful in terms of evil, but there surely can be a cause and effect relationship. You smoke, you drink -- you will huff, you will puff. You will curtail your days. You pollute the environment; you will one day pay the price. You engage in gluttony, you get a stomach ache.
Yes, some sin results in suffering. But not all suffering is attributable to sin. Some suffering does test, refine, and may make us stronger and better. I don’t happen to think that God causes suffering for our own good, but sometimes that’s what happens.
Presbyterian theologian Robert McAfee Brown, years ago wrote a letter to his newborn granddaughter fighting for her life against critical kidney disease:
“Dear MacKenzie, In your young life you’ve already accomplished a lot. You have widened the circle of love. Your mother’s students have donated blood. One even volunteered his kidney. There are things we do not understand, but within which we live. Here is one: what has happened to you is bad, and yet good has come of it. Instead of making us bitter, suffering can make us tender, and help us to focus on others who are going through comparable experiences.” (The Christian Century, 3/2/94)
One thing we must never say is that suffering is God’s will. Sometimes we do say it, in an effort to be comforting, or at least to come up with an answer. But it's both lame and cliché. For the God of love, who creates all things, whose breath is the spirit of life, who creates, and then looks at human life and says, “that is very good,” does not will the suffering and death of any one of God’s creatures.
In her book, For The Time Being, Annie Dillard tackled this issue in her unique and irreverent style: “The Newtonian God is dead -- that tasking and antiquated figure who haunts children, who sits on the throne of judgment frowning and forgiving, who dishes out human fates in the form of cancer or disaster…. God is no more blinding people with glaucoma or testing them with diabetes…than he is seeding tumor cells or fiddling with chromosomes…. The very least likely things for which God might be responsible are what insurers call acts of God.” (p.165) [I would add "…nor shaking the daylights out of islanders call Haitians."] Dillard asks, "So is God out of the loop?”
The best any of us can do is confess what it is we believe. And here is where I stand -- and ask you where it is you stand as you consider your life alongside Haiti's calamity? God values freedom -- human freedom and freedom operating in nature. So random events, both magnificent and horrible happen: Mozart and Hitler, calming sunsets and deadly tornadoes, world class athletes and children with special challenges. Accidents happen: jet engines fail, cells malfunction, earth's core magma shifts. There is no celestial choreographer making it all happen. Rather, there is a loving Creator who values freedom.
Parents understand this. They want their children to grow strong and autonomous and independent -- and that means freedom: freedom even when it scares you, freedom even when everything in you wants to protect and shield and not expose your precious child to risk. But to operate like that would deny them the opportunity to be: never go swimming, never cross the street, never ride a bike, never out of sight. But good parenting, loving parenting, is essentially, bridling our power to direct and decide and allow freedom. To love is to accept the risks of freedom.
I happen to know/feel/think God cares passionately. That is what Jesus Christ is all about -- God’s passionate love for creation and for each and every one in Haiti. That's what we mean when we say we believe Jesus Christ is God incarnate; that's how God came among us, and identified with us, even to the point of suffering and death. God cares deeply. God comes to be with us in ways we do not always see clearly or understand at all.
It’s like something 4-year-old Emily does. Emily, among other things, copes wonderfully with a bit of a challenge. At bed time, when she and her parents say prayers, she folds her hands and her mother or father folds their adult hands around her small ones. Emily went to church preschool one day. And the teacher told her mother that when it came time to pray she asked the children to close their eyes and fold their hands. Emily got up out of her seat and walked to her holding out her folded hands for the teacher to wrap her hands around them.
Our inability to understand doesn’t change what is a, perhaps even THE most fundamental reality -- God’s sustaining presence, God’s comforting compassion, God’s empowering love --which is with us always, in creation and on earth-- a creation and earth, that still, earthquakingly, groans with travail in all its unfinishedness. E. Taveirne