"Pastor's Musings......"

November 2025

God’s Response to Suffering

One of the hardest questions in the world for a Christian to answer is: How can we love and trust in a God who allows such horrendous suffering in his world? Suffering brings into question God’s goodness, and to question God’s goodness is not just an intellectual exercise. It is a little child with tears in its eyes looking up at Daddy and weeping, “Why?” The hurt child needs not so much explanations as reassurances. And that is what we get: the reassurance of the Father in the person of Jesus, “whoever who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9).

God’s response to suffering is not just a word but the Word; not an idea but a Person. In coming into our world, Jesus comes also into our suffering. He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives. Are we broken? He is broken with us. Do people despise us? He was “despised and rejected by others” (Is. 53:3) Do we ever weep and say, “Oh, no, not again! I can’t take any more!”? He was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Is.53:3). Do people misunderstand us, turn away from us? They hid their faces from him as from an outcast. Is our love betrayed? He too loved and was betrayed by the ones he loved. “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.” (Jn.1:11). Does it seem sometimes as if life has passed us by, as if we are sinking into uselessness? He sinks with us. He too is passed over by the world.

Because of his death and resurrection, he has changed the meaning of death for us all. It is not merely that he rose from the dead, but that he changed death, and therefore all of our deaths, along with all the sufferings that anticipate death. We lose little bits of life daily – our health, our strength, our youth, our hopes, our dreams, our friends, our children, our lives. Nothing we can do, not our best efforts, holds our lives together. But he came into life and death, and he still comes. “As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.” (Mt 25:40). He is here, with us and in us, and we are united with him; we are his mystical body. He is gassed in the ovens of Auschwitz. He is massacred in Nigeria. He is the most forgotten soul in the world. He is the one people love to hate. He practices what he preaches: he turns his other cheek, even to the slaps of his own children. That is what love is, what love does, and what love receives.

When we feel the blows of life beating us down, we can know that Jesus is also here with us. Every tear we shed becomes his tear. He may not yet wipe them away, but he makes them his own. If he does not heal all our broken bones and loves and lives now, he comes into them and is broken, like bread, and we are nourished. And he shows us that we can use our very brokenness as nourishment for those we love. Since we are his body, we become the bread that is broken for others. That’s God’s answer to the problem of suffering. The solution to our suffering is our suffering! All our suffering becomes part of his work, the greatest work ever done, the work of salvation, of helping to win for those we love eternal joy.

This can be done only on one condition: that we believe; that we open ourselves up to him. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” (Rev. 3:20). To believe is to receive what God has already done for us. His part is finished; our part is to receive that work and let it work itself out in and through our lives, including our tears. That is our Christian hope.

Blessings, Pastor Mark