It’s happened again. Not even two years after the shooting of Congresswoman Cathy Gifford and others in Arizona we are heartbroken with news of a senseless massacre in Aurora, Colorado.
When tragedy such as this strikes it is only natural to ask: Where is God in all this? How could a loving God allow this to fall on innocent mothers and children and moviegoers?
Across the centuries Bible-believing Christians have sought to make sense out of senseless tragedy. Four or five positions have evolved. The first is perhaps the most damaging. This is what Pam Scalise of Fuller Seminary labels (critically) “the Retribution Doctrine.” This is the animating principle behind such Old Testament passages as Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26. God says to ancient Israel, You do this and I’ll do that. Keep my laws and you are blessed, break them and you will be cursed.
Now even parts of the New Testament seem to buy into this idea somewhat. There is the apostle Paul’s dogmatic, “people reap what they sow” (Galatians 6:7) statement for example. So some will no doubt see this latest mass killing as the vengeance of God on a sinful nation or the denizens of Hollywood movie production, especially.
Now this Rewards and Punishments theme is often a part of household dynamics – admonishing young children about hot stoves, or crossing busy streets and leaving the medicine cabinet alone. Yes, of course. But the more we think about it this is an elementary proposition. It offers little comfort to victims and rarely eases grief.
We remember that some in the conservative Christian community saw the terror attacks of 9/11 as God’s punishment for abortionists, gay rights advocates, and a generally lawless society. As a survivor of the Northridge Earthquake of 1994 I remember well the same argument being leveled against us here in California – our state is a center of the porn industry so “God is mad at us.” Some of the same charges were hurled at New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Curiously they were not heard after the Haitian earthquake. Why would God want to punish “even more” the poor people of Haiti? Christianity’s Quick-Draw McGraws were silent on that one. Thank God.
Another “quickie” explanation takes us into the world of Satan and his demons. The book of Job offers this dramatic picture of a being named “the Satan” or adversary who was allowed to deliver devastating attacks on the righteous man Job and his family (Job 1, 2). Demonic forces seemed to be harassing Jesus in his ministry but mainly through poor pitiful human agents rather than overt attacks (Mark 5:1-13). Bible students know Satan is a defeated being who can exercise mostly harassing attacks on people who allow him to get too close to their minds and spirits – Judas, for example (John 13:27). But this is rare considering the Bible’s overall witness that there is something indeed mysterious and inexplicable about evil.
For example, Ecclesiastes states pointedly that: “There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve” (Ecclesiastes 8:14). Rabbinical Judaism opined that the Book of Proverbs – with its neat balancing of “tit for tat” – gave us the rules and Ecclesiastes the exceptions! This is not a bad insight. Whole Psalms in the Book of Psalms seek to answer the seeker’s complaint as to why the wicked seem to escape scot-free so often (Psalm 73). But Psalm 34:19 is a brisk challenge to any who make the too neat equation that evil is somehow “our fault” – “Many are the afflictions of the righteous.”
Let’s remember that even the First Century, when Jesus walked and talked, even then there were senseless tragedies and atrocities. Before his own unjust death Jesus, too, heard reports of towers falling and other natural and political atrocities . To those who too quickly made the Sin/Tragedy equation it is worth studying his answer in Luke 13:1-6. He used such setbacks as an opportunity to teach about the uncertainty of physical existence and the need to take effective action, but he did not label victims of tragedy as excessive sinners. If so, how explain the Cross of Christ, the perils of Paul or the experience of Christian martyrs down through time?
When Jesus encountered a blind man his disciples were quick to ask: “Who sinned? This man or his parents?” Jesus answered in a way that surprised his questioners (John 9:1-7). Jesus’ words in John 9 show that victims of seemingly senseless evil do not have to feel they are the special targets of God’s express anger or negelct. Over-simplified applications of selected Scriptures to our messy human experience may fall short of the full truth.
A second approach to unjust suffering was advanced by a Jewish rabbi on a Los Angeles TV show the morning after the Haiti disaster. As he put it, calling out to a God of justice and even complaining openly to God about our tragedies is actually allowed and encouraged in Scripture. Many of the Psalms are straight-out complaints, laments, grievance documents – pain-filled expressions pouring out of the depths of a broken heart (Psalm 130:1). These emotional outbursts survive, he said, to remind us that we can “be real” with God. At times the only sensible response to grief is to lament. Even some of our television commentators made the same argument after Fukushima: “Analysis must yield right now to prayerful support for the people of Japan.”
God is not deaf to our grief. We see this in books such as Job, Jonah, Habakkuk – and especially Lamentations. The good news is that we have a Partner in our grief and bereavement, a silent One who suffers along with us and is not far from each one of us (Acts 17:27). Before God sent Moses to lead Israel out of slavery he stated “I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I a concerned about their suffering.” This compassionate One’s heart is revealed more fully in Isaiah 63:7-9 which lays God’s feelings bare and saying “in all their affliction he was afflicted, in his love and mercy he redeemed them…according to his compassion and many kindnesses.”
The New Testament moves on to promise in the words of the martyred St. Peter: “And the God of all grace…after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast (1 Peter 5:10). This was written by a man who had drunken deeply of his own cup of suffering but who knew the real heart of the Suffering God Jesus Christ.
A possible third answer to the question of suffering takes Christians down a more philosophical path. It could be called the Unfinished Creation principle. Saint Paul wrote in Romans 8:22 that the whole creation is groaning in the pangs of childbirth. This is often the way it seems, isn’t it? As early as Genesis 2 and 3 the Bible describes a new world gone dangerously out of whack. Eden grew thorns and thistles as well as every fruit pleasing to the eye. Cain killed his brother in a spirit of anger. Early Genesis has been read by many across the centuries as containing piercing instruction on the origin of our human predicament. Nature can be a Beast as well as the Best. Even bringing new life into the world involves pain.
The Christian apologist C.S. Lewis wrote of this two-fold aspect of living in a world and a universe streaked by both beauty and chaos. “Because God created the Natural – invented it out of its love and artistry – it demands our reverence,” wrote Lewis, but at the same time “because Nature is fallen it must be corrected and the evil within it must be [put to death].” That seems to be the sense behind such passages as Romans 8:22. Genesis 1-4 shows how a beautiful creation and a God-ordained human family can yet be a disturbing place, a physical realm not yet fully perfected on its way to eventual harmony.
Just as some scientists have speculated about a “dark noise” left over from the original Big Bang so some Christian thinkers wonder if there isn’t a dissonant force at loose in the cosmos, a Black Noise that haunts a universe headed towards perfection but not yet there. (See Robert Cook’s The Unseen World). This Black Noise is even personalized by many as Satan the Devil. As mentioned above, this explains some aspects of bitter reality even if there are problems with ascribing too much power to Satan, a notion which subtly undermines God's office as Creator and Sustainer.
With Saint Augustine (354-430) Christian thinking on the problem of evil took on a much more mature cast. Senseless tragedy does not have the last word. If we remember the overwhelming and spontaneous outpouring of aid to Haiti then we see that Saint Augustine was on to something. He taught that evil has no existence apart from good. Augustine argued instead that evil is a parasite, it can only feed off the good, that it is “a deformity from good, a falling off from true health” much like a mold or spore which needs a host body to exist.
Going to a movie with family and friends can be a wonderful recreational event. My wife and I do it almost every week. But even though Evil can strike anywhere in a fallen world, the stark fact is that most Americans pull together and act like a community in times of senseless tragedy. We saw it after the Arizona shootings and we see it today. This introduces a fifth point, that it is often God’s great delight to bring good out of evil – an idea that has solid Scriptural support (Romans 8:28). The Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 – eventually the crucified Christ – became a strong answer to the powerful “mystery of iniquity” (2 Thessalonians 2:7 AV).
The Good God who allows the awe-inspiring cosmos its freedom to change and develop and surprise us – this Compassionate Creator took our suffering upon himself as the Man Jesus Christ. In the words of the Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance, Jesus, as God in the flesh, destroyed evil at its command center by drawing undeserved suffering upon himself and breaking its irresistible grip. Evil was decisively defeated at the cross by the One who “brought life and immortality to light.” But it still has power to lash back at us and will do until Jesus returns to set everything right. It is through much tribulation we enter God’s Kingdom which was St Paul’s blood-bathed message to his people after being stoned and left for dead (Acts 14:22 AV).
Paul also taught that here on this human plane, the Great God’s judgments were unsearchable and his ways ultimately past finding out (Romans 11:33). Martin Luther added that for God to be really and truly God means that there are always vast areas of unknowing even in our search for him. He is not a God we can manage. As Otto Weber asks: “What good is a God we can control?” Even though he has revealed himself most fully through Christ the compassionate Son of God, the total fullness of God’s purposes is ultimately unknowable to our human minds. At least in this present existence.
Victims of earthquakes know that the ground below our feet is not as stable as we sometimes assume amid the busy back-and-forth of our lives. Our cosmic neighbors, the moon, Mercury, Mars are shattered evidences either of former catastrophes or else an unfinished creation. Thomas Torrance showed how senseless suffering reminds us of our predicament, our dependence, our creatureliness, as part of our place in the Grand Scheme of things. But take heart – it is precisely where evil is at its most intense that we often find God working, says Torrance:
“What vexes and distresses God in Christ is not simply the sickness and pain of humanity but the fact that it is engulfed in an abyss of fearful darkness, too deep for men and women themselves to understand and certainly too deep for them ever to get out of it – a pit of bottomless evil power. Mankind is entangled in sin not wholly of its own making, enmeshed in the toils of a vast evil will quite beyond it…It is evil at its ultimate source, evil at its deepest root, in its stronghold, that God has come to attack and destroy” (The Incarnation, page 241).
Torrance ends with the true good news: “God in Christ acts towards mankind in its helplessness and distress in sheer grace…Nowhere does Jesus accuse the sick of their sins before he stoops to shoulder their weakness…God does not put the responsibility upon them but upon himself…God comes among sinners and makes himself responsible for their condition and even takes their sin and culpability upon himself vicariously [revealing] the ultimate helplessness and hopelessness of man, apart from such stupendous acts of grace.”
Christians know this: God’s ways are not only beyond ours, they are far better than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9). Creation is not finished. The last chapter in the human saga is not yet written. One day we will learn more about this human experience through which we pass. At the final accounting at the end of history, we will indeed know as we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12). A fish does not know it is swimming in water and we humans can only see things from a very limited perspective, as humbling as that is to our notions of independence. But we do see enough even here, even through a glass darkly, to trust that there is a purpose in suffering. God can and will bring good out of evil.
The victims in Aurora did not live in vain and did not die in vain. God has promised to ultimately set it all right. His promise is that of new life in a restored and grander New Creation where he will wipe away the tears from every eye (Revelation 21:4). There is thus much wisdom and comfort in leaving things to God’s final sorting out. “The just shall live by faith.”
Grace is often found in the aftermath of tragedy. As we saw last week, the events in Aurora brought President Obama and Governor Romney to an abrupt halt in their attacks on each other, reminding us that Americans are decent people at bottom. Great tragedies summon forth great compassion and heroic self-sacrifice and in all this God gets the glory for...we are made in his image. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan was a call to be about our Father’s business here below while we trust to God that our lives here can make sense in spite of all that unfolds. A New Creation is coming (2 Peter 3:11-13). What was said of old remains true today – “surely there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off” (Proverbs 23:18, RSV).