Will Of God 13 – When bad things happen
Weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15).
Why do bad things happen? And not just to good people? I hope I never become the sort of person who beams with pleasure when bad things happen to bad people. Why did God arrange the world where there would be disasters? Why did God make you and me with the shabby potential to hurt each other and ourselves? Why did God fashion a world in which mortality reigns? in which weariness bedevils us? Why Katrina? or 9-11? or the ugliness that transpired in my house just last night?
Why? Before we try to answer, we might be comforted to know that God isn’t like a tired parent, wishing the children would stop asking “Why?” God wired us in such a way that we cannot help asking. In fact, God wants us to ask more, never turning off the searchlight probing the mystery of God’s will. We might ask “Why?” not only when we witness atrocities in the news or agonize over the nausea from chemotherapy, but also when our lives seem so cozily arranged and people four miles away sleep under a bridge.
Jesus, interestingly enough, never gathered his disciples to say “Okay, God inflicted evil for this reason…” In the teeth of evil and suffering, Jesus bore suffering and evil: he wept, he grieved, he took evil onto his own body unjustly and was crucified. And, he resisted suffering and evil: he chided profiteers who oppressed, he fed the hungry, he engaged in combat against the devil.
When we hear about a tragedy, or encounter someone’s awful plight, we leap too quickly to declare “Oh, it was God’s will” – which has a way of shutting up the cry, the raging grief, the unanswerable question of the one who suffers. Instead of concocting some divine placebo of an answer that probably feels cruel to someone who’s just lost their child or been slammed by life, we weep, we shudder. We do not rush anyone to “feel better.” We sit together in the dark and just listen to the quiet. Otherwise, with our tidy answers that are too trivial to be true, we cut off the other person from exploring their darkness.
As Christians, can we learn to pray the way ancient Israelites knew how to pray? Read the Psalms: in the face of horror they unleashed an outcry against God, they wept in agony, they demanded harsh vengeance on enemies. Jesus did not placidly die muttering platitudes about God’s will; instead he yelled “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Our simplistic explanations of evil will not only be lies, but we also squander energy we might expend in resisting evil and allaying suffering. More on that, and why evil happens, later… For now, and every time we encounter pain, we let the “Why?” begin, and linger there as a sign that we understand, and that we love.