Mendham Hills Community Church

God, the Sufferer.

Sometimes when I pray, I ask God if he sees me and understands pain when it enters my life. I know that Jesus died on the cross and suffered affliction. I know that he shakes and bleeds in Gethsemane under the weight of his crushing distress. I know that he was the object of insulting Israelites, the target of the phlegm of Pharisees. His back was ripped apart at the hands of the Romans. His heart suffered the rejection of his people. And when we glance at the apex of his suffering, we find him with a gash in his side and his hairline thrashed with thorns.

This I understand.

It is the collective person of God who seems…

distant.

Seemingly altogether removed from the earth, from our lives, from our celebrations and festivities as well as our funerals and tragedies, he looks on from afar, and I can barely make out whether his face is grimacing or smiling. Or if there is any expression at all. It is why we ask questions like: God, do you even see me? Do you care? Where are you in my parents’ divorce, my abused childhood, my alienated friendships? Where are you in financial wreckage, in spousal neglect, in his son’s helpless handicap, her brother’s gasoline burns, his mother’s ravaging cancer, her dad’s fatal stroke?

And with tremendous hurt–and all we can muster to fight off the encroaching resentment or resignation–we look off into the dark, empty sky, doing our best to try and imagine that he’s there. And we cry,

How     could     you?

I confess I’ve asked, and I confess I’ve heard my words reach my bedroom walls to turn and render themselves canceled in a heartbreaking, empty echo. And I confess that for a long time, I have felt God to be deaf toward the cry of the hurting world I live in.

Sure, you hurt when you see us suffer, and so have a suffering of your own. But do you know–do you suffer–my very own suffering? Do you see it from the inside? Sure, you have compassion, but only as one who stands on the other side of the room, able only to watch and wish it wasn’t so. Sure, you empathize with the paraplegic or amputee, but only as much as can a friend who still has legs to walk.

I’ve focused so intensely on the transcendence of God that he has become largely separate from his world. He is personal and he cares, but he has stood apart. He empathizes and has pity, but only as an outsider. And I’ve found myself disappointed and dissatisfied with God.

Then, something changed.

God in our Pain

What if God feels your pain, not in some separated sense, but really and truly and fully? What if God suffers not only on a cross 2000 years ago, but suffers each and every day in the exact ways we suffer? What if God suffers our suffering as we suffer, and not somehow from the outside looking in? What if God is more personal than we could fathom? Maybe his compassion comes at a cost to him.

Indeed, Paul says of Christ in Colossians: “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” And if we look at Acts 17, we find that “in him we live and move and have our being.” Here we find a God who has woven reality itself into his own being, a God who threads himself into and throughout our world, a God in whom our very existence avoids unraveling. We cannot keep God outside, as if we could if we tried; he is unbearably immanent. I cannot, in fact, will my very own existence without him. I don’t mean to sound pantheistic, but this world is full of God–it is drowning in his presence. I cannot so much as move without experiencing some part of his involvement here. I cannot so much as breathe without his swirling about in my lungs, personally carrying vital oxygen across their capillaries. The fact that I can reach out and touch something to feel its texture and temperature speaks of his intimacy.

Indeed, it speaks. The Word is here.

See, he is more intimate, more involved, more immanent than we can see or know. There is a difference between a God who is ever-transcendent like some great, untouchable platonic Idea, and a God who also shares in our very being. He does not see and know from afar; he is here–even in our pain. It is the difference between witnessing a father abuse his son through a window, and actually feeling the knuckles meet your own jaw.

What if God is that close?

It means that he knows and understands–even experiences–our suffering in a way we could not have even hoped. It means that every bruised and beaten atom of our bodies contributes to his pain, and every hurtful word that reaches our ears rings like a siren in his own. It means that every white-knuckled father who has pounded on the face of his child has pounded on the face of God. Violation of neighbor is then, truly, violation of God. It means God feels the aching body of the chemo-treated cancer patient. It means he winces from the trembling, bloody fingertips of the 6-year-old sweatshop slave. It means he is seared as the burning flesh of the citizen and the soldier taking shrapnel and hot lead. It means he weeps over the headstone of the long-buried lover and aches in the hurt of the lonely.

But we admit we are not always the oppressed, but the oppressor.

The Suffering God

It means that for all of time, in violating and extorting and abusing and raping and murdering and molesting and neglecting our neighbor, we truly do violence to God himself and he suffers our suffering with us (Mt. 25:34-45; Acts 9:1-5). Beginning in Eden, his creation, even humanity–the very beings made and privileged to image his own self–has turned savagely in on itself and on him, like a wild, frightened animal, in our frail and fearful brokenness.

Maybe God, in awesome patience and painful suspension of justice, profoundly suffers at our hands. Maybe God–as the One who runs alone the whole course of time, as the One who alone threads himself into all the humanity and creation of all peoples and places, and as the One who in his perfection compounds his own capacity to suffer a depth and quality we ourselves could not endure–is in duration, in scope, and in caliber the greatest sufferer of all. And much, at our hands (how much, we too, suffer at each other’s hands!).

And so the prayer once perhaps an accusation, like an irreverent finger pointed at the sky, becomes pure astonishment and bewilderment in our questioning, filling us at once with what we mean by words like awe and wonder and sorrow and gratitude. We had wondered once at his absence and compassion for us. We now wonder at our absence of compassion for him. For truly, at the sight of the suffering heart of God, our own personal theodicy of suffering quickly finds itself thin: a pebble on the mountain of the suffering of God. Far from diminishing the experience of our own suffering to nothing, it has instead gained the new weight of an infinitely, eternally compassionate God who enters into our splintered world and feels every sting of its brokenness. I am shaken at the sight of this suffering God; isn’t this the gospel? I am disarmed and awed to worship this God of incredible compassion, this God who is near, who is here, who is now and has been and will be.

Again we ask,

How     could     you?

but maybe with a different, more compassionate tone: if only a tone more truly like himself.

So, dear friend, be comforted. God is not far off or senseless; he is here–in our very real pain and hurt and gaping wounds. Know that he is more than able to understand–yes, he himself experiences–the very pain that plagues your mind, your heart, your body. Know and be comforted that he has entered into your present circumstances and that he aches with you as you ache, and weeps with you as you weep. Pray eagerly for the redemption of all things, the righting of all wrongs, the healing of the human plight, and so plead with his radical, holy self-interest. Our good is at stake; but God, so is yours. Redeem us and our world, God, and come quickly. Until then, comfort us in your wild, selfless, incredible compassion. In the name of your Suffering Servant. Amen.

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