“Why Does God Allow Physical Suffering?”

            This past Wednesday, February 26th, was “Ash Wednesday” on the church liturgical calendar.  Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the season of “Lent,” that 40-day of preparation leading up to Easter Sunday and celebration of the Resurrection. 

As preparation during the season of Lent, Christians are encouraged to enter into a time of reflection, confession, penitence, and penance for our sins and shortcomings.  It is frequently a time of self-sacrifice, when we give up something which we enjoy as we commemorate Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice of his life on the cross.  Along with penitence and penance, Lent can also be a time to reflect upon our own mortality and eventual death. 

During Lent this year, Christ United Methodist Church, where I serve as Senior pastor, will focus on the theme of suffering.  Of course, suffering is a very appropriate Lenten theme because we know that Jesus suffered excruciating pain, as he gasped for breath, during the crucifixion.   Yet, suffering is also an integral part of the human condition.  All of us experience suffering at some points in our lives.  There are various types of suffering, as well.  Physical suffering is the most obvious.  However, we may also suffer in other ways, such as emotional suffering.

We began this series on Ash Wednesday with a reflection on “existential suffering.”  By existential suffering, we meant the human ability to contemplate our own death and the ever-present knowledge that, ultimately, some time in the future we will die.  As far as we know, we are the only sentient species capable of contemplating our own death.  As the title of this blog suggests, this Sunday, March 1st, our focus will be on physical suffering.  In subsequent Sunday’s, we will examine emotional suffering, anxiety, the temptation to go for the quick—yet, false—fix for suffering.  Finally, on Good Friday, our service will focus on the suffering of Christ.

Our scriptural passage for this week’s focus on physical suffering is comes from the Book of Job, in the Hebrew scriptures.  As the Book opens, the main character is introduced:

“There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. There were born to him seven sons and three daughters.” (Job 1:1-2)

The first chapter continues by describing how wealthy Job is, and it characterizes him as “the greatest of all people of the east.”  The chapter also describes Job as a very devout man, truly faithful to God.

            Up in heaven, God boasts about Job’s goodness and faithfulness.  However, the satan[1] (or, accuser) is not impressed.  Of course Job is good and faithful, he retorts, “Look at how well you have rewarded him!”  Then, the satan proposes a wager:  Strip Job of all that he has and see if, then, he will not curse God to God’s face.  God accepts the wager and allows the satan to take away all that Job owns, including the death of his children and most of his servants.  Despite this horrific loss, Job’s faithfulness and love for God remains unshaken.  The satan has lost the bet.

            In Job 2, when God boasts of Job’s faithfulness, the satan  proposes a second wage:

“Then Satan answered the Lord, ‘Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.’ The Lord said to Satan, ‘Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life.’

So, Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.

Then his wife said to him, ‘Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.’ But he said to her, ‘You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?’ In all this Job did not sin with his lips.

Now when Job’s three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.”  (Job 2:4-13)

This passage from Job is very rich, with many different angles and  nuances to explore.  Unfortunately, in my proclamation, time will restrict me to just the main question of theodicy—that is, “Why does God allow good people to suffer physically?”  Within the Abrahamic traditions, we have generally viewed God as omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all- knowing), and all-loving.  So, to re-state the question, “Why would an all-power, all-knowing, and all-loving God allow physical suffering?”

            In his book, On Job, Gustavo Gutierrez, the Latin American Liberation Theologian, observes:  “To put the matter quite concretely, the wager [between God and the satan] has to do with speaking of God in light of the unjust suffering that seems, in human experience, to deny love on God’s part.”[2]  In other words, why would a truly loving God enter into such a cruel wager with the devil?

            “Why would an all-power, all-knowing, and all-loving God allow physical suffering?”  Historically, Christians have proposed two different answers to this question:

1.      A small minority of Christians – most recently process theologians – have opted to redefine God’s power so that God is no longer omnipotent and therefore not responsible for everything that happens in the world.  

2.      A far greater number of Christians have taken the opposite approach and tried to redefine God’s benevolence by finding some deeper good in the physical suffering.  For these Christians, chronic pain may appear on the surface to be bad, but a deeper, more thoughtful analysis reveals that it is actually a good gift from a benevolent, omnipotent God.   As an illustration, the physician Harold Koenig reported on a patient with chronic back pain who interpreted his pain as a means to glorify God.  The patient told Dr. Koenig, “…it’s like the Lord is telling me, ‘This is a burden that you’re going to have to carry.  I carried the cross and your sin, and you’ve got to carry this.’  If there’s a reason for it, if it’s to glorify Him, then I’ll carry it until the day I die.”[3] 

More recently, some Christian theologians have proposed a third answer to the question of theodicy.  This third approach advocates for simply accepting physical pain and suffering as part of the human condition, rather than trying to find some explanation of why God allowed this suffering to occur.  For instance, pastoral theologian Peggy Way, who has struggled with polio in her own life, asserts that the theodicy problem appears to put Christians into the uncomfortable position of having to defend God.[4]  Rather than trying to defend God, she proposes that humans embrace their finitude, including their suffering, and live joyfully in the moment.

Similar to the conclusion by Peggy Way, the Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas asserts that the way to address the theodicy problem is not by trying to defend God in terms of omnipotence or omniscience or love.  Rather, he suggests, “if Christian convictions have any guidance to give…it is by helping us discover that our lives are located in God’s narrative—the God who has not abandoned us even when we or someone we care deeply about is ill.”[5] 

Actually, this newer, third answer to the question of physical suffering is closer to the way in which the Book of Job resolved the problem of theodicy.  Throughout the Book, the character Job demands, again and again, a hearing before God.  This hearing would be in the form of a court trial.  In a sense, Job seeks to sue God for “deity malfeasance.”  At the end of the Book, God appears, to answer Job and his accusations:

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man,
   I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
   Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
   Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
   or who laid its cornerstone”  (Job 38:1-6)

God’s line of questioning of Job goes on and on and on, from chapter 38-41.  Finally, it is Job’s turn to respond:

Then Job answered the Lord:
‘I know that you can do all things,
   and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
“Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?”
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
   things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
“Hear, and I will speak;
   I will question you, and you declare to me.”
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
   but now my eye sees you;
therefore I despise myself,
   and repent in dust and ashes.’  (Job 42:1-6)

Inherent within the impulse to answer the question of theodicy is the assumption that we humans are central to God and God’s plans.  We are not.  We are, however, deeply, deeply loved by God and that brings us back to Lent and our spiritual preparation, leading up to Easter Sunday and the celebration of the crucifixion.

Fundamental to Christian belief is the profound love which God has for each of us; a love which is literally beyond our comprehension.  Yet, even with our limited insight, Christians believed that the omnipotent, omniscient, transcendent God chose to empty God’s self and become incarnated (literally, enfleshed) as the human person, Jesus of Nazareth.  One of the reasons for God to become incarnated was so that God could experience the human condition.

“Why would an all-power, all-knowing, and all-loving God allow physical suffering?”  We do not know the answer to that question.  But, we do know that God has shared with us in human suffering in a most profound way, through the excruciating suffering of Jesus on the cross.  God is in solidarity with us and in our own physical suffering.

If you live in the Lincoln, Nebraska area and do not have a place of worship, then I invite you to join us at Christ United Methodist Church this Sunday, March 1, as we begin our reflections on suffering, as part of our Lenten preparation for Easter Sunday in April. 

Christ UMC is located at 4530 “A” Street.  We have three worship services on Sunday mornings at 8:30, 9:45, and 11:00.  The 8:30 and 11:00 services feature a traditional worship format and the services are held in our Sanctuary.  “The Gathering” at 9:45 is held in our Family Life Center (gym), and it is more informal and interactive.   

Come, join us.  Everyone is welcome and accepted because God loves us all.

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[1] Although the notion of Satan as an evil, fallen angel eventually develops in the Hebrew scriptures, at the time when the Book of Job was written he was conceived more as an accuser who alerted God of humans who were being sinful.  See the “Excursus:  The Role of Satan in the Old Testament,” by Carol A. Newsom in “Commentary on the Book of Job” in the New Interpreter’s Bible,  vol. 4, (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 2002), CD-ROM Edition.

[2] Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job, God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, translated by Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1987), 5.

[3] Harold Koenig, Chronic Pain:  Biomedical and Spiritual Approaches (New York:  Haworth Pastoral Press, 2003), 46.

[4] Peggy Way, Created by God, Pastoral Care for All God’s People (St. Louis:  Chalice Press, 2005).

[5] Stanley Hauerwas, God, Medicine, and Suffering (Grand Rapids, Michigan:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990), 67.