At Water's Edge: Human Suffering and the New Year

In a 1937 novel written by Zora Neale Hurston, a hurricane approaches a poor community at the water’s edge in Florida. Big winds vibrate like a giant drum, lightning brightens the sky, and thunder rolls. The main characters, hiding in their home, hear terrible crashings and screamings. They look at the door of their house questioning God. The author wrote, “They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”

Today, there are other events to occupy us—global warming, worldwide brutalities linked with religious fundamentalism, handgun violence, emotional distress, poverty and underemployment, and financial crises in so many places. How could so many people living and playing at the water’s edge not be hypnotized by the prospect of being swept away by one or another of the possible, long, terrible waves of destruction we face now?

Years ago, one of our church members told me that their son, Erik, who was five years old, came home from church, “Why does God let the bad stuff happen?” So, apart from the human grief and compassion we are all feeling, apart from our urgent desire to contribute and to support our suffering neighbors, here is our intellectual and faith crisis—our questioning, coming from the mouth of a babe. We all stand at the water’s edge, uncertain of what we see, yet fascinated, awe-struck and questioning.

Jesus asks the very same, deeply human questions about unpredictable disasters when in Luke’s gospel, for example, he asked those around him, “Do you think that the 18 killed when the tower at Siloam fell were 'worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?'"  In other words, is there something meaningful in an accident, or a disaster, or not? The question is universal; the answers unbelievably diverse and sometimes contradictory.

In 1755, a major earthquake (close to a 9 on the Richter scale) and an attendant tsunami struck Lisbon, Portugal, even then a prestigious city, on All Saints' Day. Reportedly, 70,000 people were killed there and elsewhere, as the shockwaves and tsunami struck various cities and communities in much of Europe and northern Africa. At the time, the philosopher Voltaire wondered in a letter to a friend, “What will the preachers say…” In that single speculative question, an intellectual gauntlet was laid down before all Christian churches and thinkers of his day and ours. Implicit in Voltaire’s remark was a fundamental challenge to classical Christian logic on the problem of suffering.

Theologians and preachers of the 18^th century certainly saw basically three main reasons to argue in favor of divine purpose at work even in human disaster. First, as many Christians do today, they saw God as sovereignly and mysteriously in control of all events, making them serve redemptive purposes; therefore, even disasters must lie within God’s will. Second, some saw the End-time or Apocalypse at hand, as an expression of God’s sovereignty and reaction to human sin. Today, we hear the same thing from Christian pastors and thinkers, as well as from other faiths. The trouble with this argument is that it has been applied to virtually every major earthquake, famine and natural disaster in history—with no decisive result, to date. In any case, I agree with Martin Luther, who told his friends, “Death is death.” It doesn't matter if one dies or 100,000.

Other 18^th century Christian leaders argued, and they still have their counterparts today, that there could be morally sufficient reasons for God to permit suffering. John Wesley saw the harm done to Lisbon as a call to repentance for all equally sinful human beings residing elsewhere. He opposed the appeal to scientific reason, saying, “It is not chance that governs the world…. If all these afflictive incidents entirely depend on the fortuitous concourse and agency of blind, material causes; what hope, what help, what resource is left for the poor sufferers...?”

In contrast and opposition, the philosophers of that Enlightenment period in Lisbon and Europe held that the movements of the world machine might have been created by God, but they could not be interrupted by God.

So, why does God let bad stuff happen? Here is my answer to a five-year-old named Erik and to Voltaire. First, I agree with some Christian teachers who say that God’s “power” is often misunderstood. Once God sets a free and material universe into motion, not even God can decide to block out one of the outcomes of that universe—which is suffering. In other words, Erik, you cannot have a real world without seeing it get hurt sometimes.

Second, some Christian teachers say that God’s “goodness” is also often misunderstood. God’s love is not trivial or sentimental; it works into the farthest reaches of the tens of thousands of galaxies. This goodness is so immense and so all-embracing that it can even include all suffering as an unavoidable consequence of real love. In other words, Erik, we cannot care deeply for one another without sometimes needing to be hurt by the things that occur while we are on the way to God’s “good stuff”.

Third, I think some Christian teachers have interesting things to say when they admit that God’s power may not be entirely sovereign, or that it may still be maturing as we journey toward the fulfillment of all existence. In other words, Erik, just as you grow up to be 6 or 20, and gain new abilities, so God may also be growing and changing in certain respects, as God responds to the way the things are in the universe and in our world.

The last thing I want to say is that I think that God suffers the pain of the world, its creatures and people. Christ suffers for the world. This knowledge somehow comforts and inspires me. God knows all that we are experiencing and enduring. We have been baptized into Christ’s death and into his resurrection. Therefore, we also participate in the suffering of Christ and of the world. Therefore, we also always stand at water’s edge, just as Jesus did when he came to be baptized in the Jordan by John.

Therefore, we are not afraid to stand with the suffering at the water’s edge, watching the massive tidal wave sweep in. We are not afraid to drown at the water’s edge, if that is what is required of us by duty to our neighbor or by unavoidable circumstance.

The Christian theologian, Alister McGrath, once wrote, “The sufferings of this earth are for real. They are painful. God is deeply pained by our suffering, just as we are shocked, grieved and mystified by the suffering of our family and friends. But that is only half the story. The other half must be told…. [It is] a glorious vision of a new realm of existence. It is a realm in which suffering has been defeated. It is a realm pervaded by the refreshing presence of God…. It lies ahead, and though we have yet to enter into it, we can catch a hint of its fragrance and hear its music in the distance…. Just as suffering is real, so are the promises of God…”

Because we are Christians, we know that at a place on a Galilean beach, at the water’s edge, when the full and disastrous hurricane and flood of death had overwhelmed the disciples, they suddenly found the one who had suffered and died standing alive on the beach, and they had to say,“It is the [risen] Lord” (John 21:7).