Cogges Parish newsletter March/April 2005

From the newsletter ...

Where is God when it hurts?

Over the past few months we have all witnessed suffering on a scale that is almost too difficult to imagine. It began on Boxing Day with overwhelming images of destruction, chaos and tragedy as the Tsunami struck shores along the peninsulas of Asia.

Within what seems like days, those terrible images of suffering were replaced by heart rending coverage of the 60th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and other death camps. The carnage and brutality in Iraq are played out so regularly on our television screens that it is difficult not to become a little anaesthetized by them.

Clever articles have been written and words of wisdom sought from the great and the good about why such disasters occur. Neither are Ministers, like myself, exempt from the pressure to produce rational explanations and neat little packaged responses. If truth be told though, there is no easy answer to the problem of suffering -- maybe no answer at all to the question of why natural disasters occur. Theologians and philosophers have wrestled for centuries with the problem of suffering and no one has ever come up with a simple and complete solution.

One of the questions I'm asked most frequently is "Why does God allow suffering?" and without ducking the issue, I would prefer to turn this question on its head and ask "Where is God when we suffer?" -- not because I believe the former question is unimportant, but rather that history has proved suffering is inevitable and, at times, we are powerless to change it.

Personal experience in the past five years has proved to me that when suffering becomes personal there is little to be gained by asking why and much to be gained by seeking God in one's pain. As one Christian novelist said, "The only thing more difficult than having a relationship with an invisible God is having no such relationship".

For Christians, the invisible God is to be reached in the story of Easter and this provides the answer to where God is to be found in our suffering. We believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and when we say that he has died, we express the fact that all human suffering in time and space has been suffered by God himself. There can be no human beings who are left alone in their suffering because God, through Jesus, has come to us.

Henri Nouwen says, "Every time we hear more about the way human beings are in pain, we come to know more about the immensity of God's love, who did not want to exclude anything human from his experience of being God".

We would like to invite you on Good Friday to attend some part of our Easter meditation which begins at noon in St Mary's. It will include an interactive look at the whole area of human suffering and time for reflection. You can come and go just as you please throughout the afternoon.

Have a good Easter.

Andrew Sweeney

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