Praying Together 19th February 2023

“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” I wonder how many times that cry has been our response to tragedy, now or in the past, at a personal level – ‘Why me?’ or a global level ‘42000 killed in Turkey and Syria – ‘Why them?’

One of the most difficult questions every Christian must be able to answer is ‘How can a loving God allow this to happen?’

Unfortunately, the only answer that make sense seems at first to be ridiculous. God has to allow such pain because He does love His creation. He loves enough to give us free will. If we chose to use that free will for evil purposes, He cannot stop us. If He did, He would deny that free will. In the end, we would be puppets with no freedom at all. There would be little if any point in creating us in the first place.

There are really three different aspects to this issue.

Pain. At one level, physical pain is necessary – it warns us of a problem we have to deal with, perhaps as an indicator of something needing attention. Sometimes it’s trivial – I stubbed my toe getting our of bed this morning. Sometimes, though, it becomes unbearable. Should He prevent pain completely – if not, at what point should He intervene? The bruise? The broken toe? The need for surgery? The amputation? The gangrene? The fatal infection? Should He prevent death altogether? It’s all or nothing.

Perhaps, though, it is emotional pain that is worse – the pain of loss, of fear, of rejection, of loneliness. Again, in real life, that suffering is necessary. If it did not exist, we could never know joy. Rather than living a monochrome life, with a complete absence of emotion, He gives us the ability to appreciate the contrast, the highs and the lows – and is with us in both of those states.

Sin. If there was no such thing as ‘evil’, we wouldn’t be able to recognise ‘good’. Strangely, if God is all powerful, He actually has to allow sin, with all its consequences. Once we’ve been given the gift of free will, He can’t rescind it just because we make bad choices. Instead, He deals with sin’s aftermath on a cross.

How about ‘natural’ disaster? This is more difficult, but I suggest that God, having created the world according to the universal laws of Physics, cannot then bend them to wrap that creation in cotton wool. Our world is created and made liveable according to those laws – we need weather, rain, heat, storm and flood. They don’t always suit our lifestyle. But messing with them without concern for consequence is at best irresponsible. We look at cultures we term ‘primitive’ or ‘pagan’ and in our arrogance dismiss their closeness to the earth as naivete – but they don’t harm it. The root cause of many ‘natural’ disasters in recent times is human negligence or intentional long-term destruction for short-term profit.

We can only discuss suffering and loss from a distance – when it directly affects us, or someone close to us, talking theology is no help. In that situation, what people need is simply to know that God is alongside sharing our pain, that our suffering is His suffering. We know that He has defeated sin through Jesus’ victory on the Cross. We know that our created world, with all its beauty, is also a place of danger – most of it of our own making or our stupidity – and we are supposed to be its guardians, not its exploiters.

The answer is simply to obey Jesus’ commandment to love, and trust that in turn, whatever may befall, nothing can separate us from God’s love.