When you’re preaching you want to communicate and concentrate on the message – getting it right – while seeing faces looking in your direction and you notice reactions even as you’re moving on to the next point. I still remember the first time I said ‘fair dinkum’ in a sermon and the sea of confusion washed across every non-Australian face in Ascension’s early days that I stopped the sermon – ‘time out’ – and asked what had I said to create such confusion and then gave a quick definition of ‘fair dinkum’ which is slang for something that is real or true or really true or genuine.

So last Sunday when I mentioned that probably the biggest challenge Christians get today from the world is about suffering I saw a sea of reactions and nods. I’m pretty sure we’ve all heard – and maybe even said ourselves, “Why does suffering happen and why doesn’t God do something?”.

It is not that there aren’t answers but there is a quality about suffering that defies explanations and we bring our perspective, definitions, and expectations about what God should do as well so that it is hard to communicate about suffering, as it is hard to hear about suffering, as it is hard to bear suffering. Having answers also does not take the suffering ‘away’.

Into this situation Christians often feel the need to ‘defend’ God or find something positive about suffering and so suffering becomes something from which something positive comes. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger sort of thing. However God is viewed then as more remote and inscrutable and often cruel in relation to us. Alternatively, sometimes Christians emphasise that God suffers with us and Jesus and the cross are held up as examples par excellence of God’s vulnerability and his involvement with the troubles of this world and one who can help us bear suffering, be patient, and try to find loving responses. This God is with us in the mess but is not all powerful and there often is a diminishing of God’s holiness and our sin and rebellion.

Essentially a lot of talk about suffering places God in the dock, so to speak, where he has to defend himself to us about who he is and why things are happening – particularly suffering. Luther’s approach was to place people before God, have people hear the Word of God about who they are before God, and come to see the relationship God has established with us through creation and the mess we have made of what was made ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31) and yet God still cares for us providentially. In God’s Word we hear that God is holy and we are sinners and again what God has done to stay close to us and bless us with his presence but we’re always the ones who push him away or want God on our terms – especially intellectual terms – you have to make complete sense to us, God! And in God’s Word we encounter Jesus and the depth he went (think Psalm 22) to bring us light and life in this world.

There is much suffering we can understand because we do it ourselves or it is done to us. But when we put God into the situation or when suffering is ‘inexplicable’ then suffering rips us apart and can plunge us into much darkness and despair because God doesn’t make sense to us. But when the focus is the cross, the Christian knows that whatever is happening is not punishment from God and that suffering will have an end, and that even in such a hard time we can grow in Christ, even as we can’t make sense of what is happening.

This is where the psalms of lament can come into their own for there we find in God’s Word, people suffering and crying out for relief (“How long, O Lord?”), not understanding, wondering where God is at the moment, and yet conscious of God’s wrath, his holiness, and his action (think the Exodus in the Old Testament and Jesus’ cross in the New Testament) and we remain oriented to cry out, to seek relief, to pray, to hope, to do what we can, but always in relationship God has established – we come before him not summon him before us. The cross and empty tomb declare that God has not abandoned us. And laments can give us the opportunity to be deeply honest with God and help us have hope, courage, and security even in suffering. God has done something about suffering – it’s just not what we expected or wanted!

And trying to say all that in one quip or a few sentences isn’t easy but there are answers that help us live each day – even in suffering.

GS