Where is God When Good People Suffer?

February 17, 2008

Luke 10: 25-37

Allow me to paraphrase the story that Jesus told as the victim might have told it.

I was going to Jericho on a business trip. They grow a lot of fruit and vegetables down there and I was going to arrange for deliveries to my store in Jerusalem.  So I had some money with me. It happened so fast that I hardly knew what hit me. A man suddenly appeared from behind a hill and then there were three or four and then I think that I saw a club. I don’t really know but I was knocked out and when I woke up I was bleeding and I had a headache like I have never had before and my ribs were bruised and  my legs and arms were black and blue and my money was gone. I had done nothing to these people. Why did they attack me?  I guess they wanted the money. But tell me, where was God?

Another story:  Jesus is hanging on the cross and he is about to die. What in the world did he do to deserve that?  Clearly, a good and innocent man suffered when other men and women did bad things. Where in the world was God?

The parable of Jesus assumes that God does not stop people from doing bad things. The life and death of Jesus demonstrates that God does not stop bad things from happening to good people. So where in the world is God?

I am remembering Jeannie, our first foster child. When we were younger and stronger, Peggy and I served as foster parents for several children and our first was Jeannie. She was about 4 years old when she came to us. Mentally, she was just a little slow. Her facial features were just a little different. The police had found her clinging to the body of her dead mother. She was the victim of her mother’s behavior, fetal alcohol syndrome. She did not earn it nor deserve it but she will, for all of her life, pay for her mother’s sin. And I wonder, where in the world was God?

Northern Illinois University: A former student slips into a geology class room. He is armed with a shotgun and two or three handguns. Suddenly, he appears on the stage and opens fire. Five or six students die. Others are wounded. Even more are traumatized. For some, life has been suddenly snuffed out. For the survivors and for the families of all involved, life has been dramatically transformed.  The best guess so far – the gunman quit taking medication and a wonderful young man changed and acted like a monster. Where is God?

Less dramatically, a man robs a Topeka bank. To stop his escape, the police shut down the interstate highway and the one hour trip from Manhattan to Topeka becomes a four hour trek. It’s hardly more than an inconvenience but where is God? Why is it that one man’s misbehavior gets to interrupt my life?

It is clear that when one person sins that others will suffer. There is a theory, called “Chaos Theory” that suggests the possibility that a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa could start a chain reaction of events that finally results in a hurricane in the Atlantic. Everything is interconnected.

We live in a web of relationships in which each person’s behavior has an effect on all the rest.  

• When you light your cigarette, I breathe the smoke.

• We know that when children are abused in the home, the chances increase that they will become abusers.
• The children of divorce are more likely to become divorced parents.
• Poor education for children contributes to an increased crime rate among adults.
• Malnutrition leads to mental deficiencies which, in turn, create other problems.
• Pollution belched into the air in the west rains down acid in the Midwest and further east, the leaves of Appalachian trees are burned.
• The Chinese make and drive more cars and American gas prices go up.
• Refugee camps in Palestine become breeding grounds for terrorists.
• A Saudi Arabian native living in Afghanistan causes an event called 9-11.
• Women in Africa contract the HIV/AIDS virus by sleeping with their husbands whose sense of machismo demands that they sleep around and then they bring the results of their infidelity back home to their faithful wives.
• Tribal conflict, centuries old, creates genocidal murder in Africa.
• Tribal conflict, centuries old, makes political accommodation in Iraq far more difficult than any American can every fully understand.

Imagine a pool table. The balls are spotted for the break. The player lines up the Que and then, with full force, strikes it and sends it into the pack. It hits only one ball, the one at the point of the pack, but the force transfers and all of the balls scatter, every ball responding to every other ball is scattered to its final resting place. And when that Que Ball is sin, everyone is affected. And where is God?

It is clear that God created us an interconnected people. The idea that there is a personal and private sin that hurts nobody else is clearly nonsense. We are all connected and what each does affects the others. What you do affects everybody else. What you do really matters.

It is also clear that God does not prevent men and women from making decisions that cause harm to others. God allows us to make decisions that hurt other people. It is called “Free Will” and the results of “Free Will” can be either the increase of God’s love and mercy in this world or the spread of sorrow and suffering. Your decisions really matter!

But, where is God in all of this?  If God made us like this, on the one hand,  and if God is not going to stop the sin and the evil that results from the sin, on the other hand, then where in the world is God?

Let’s return to the story that Jesus told. That man on the road to Jericho might tell his story like this.

I was lying there, half conscious and wounded. I looked up to see a priest and thought, “Surely, God has sent this man to help.”  Maybe God did send him but the priest passed by on the other side of the road. And I looked up again to see a Levite and I said, “Surely, God sent this man to help me.” Maybe God sent him but he passed by on the other side of the road. And the next thing that I remember is a Samaritan putting a damp cloth to my head. There, on the side of the road, he tried to clean me up and then he put me on his own donkey and he took me to Jericho where he rented a room for my recovery. He even paid for my room.

So, if you ask me, “Where was God?” I have to answer, God was in that Samaritan.

Just as every sinful decision creates injustice, pain and suffering in this world, the Samaritan’s kindness creates mercy and love and joy and healing in this world.

Where is God?

• In my friends, the Hietts, as they emptied Paul’s sock drawer so that homeless people could enjoy warm and dry feet in the midst of a Michigan winter.
• In a neighbors, known and unknown, who drained the flood out of my basement while I was in London.
• In the friend who sits by a sick or dying neighbor.
• In Mike Mann who teaches people in Thailand to grow coffee instead of opium.
• In Laura and David Parajon as they deliver health care in Nicaragua.
• In you as you choose to love.

Imagine that rack of balls on the pool table again. This time, imagine that the Que Ball is non other than Jesus himself and that God has sent him plunging into the human race. And this time the balls, human beings are moved, not by the power of sin but by the power of God’s love. That is where God is.

Where is God? James Russell Lowell got it right in the hymn we sang earlier.

Once to every man and nation,

Comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of truth with false-hood,

For the good or evil side;

Though the cause of evil prosper,

Yet the truth alone is strong:

Though her portion be the scaffold,

And upon the throne be wrong,

Yet the scaffold sways the future,

AND, BEHIND THE DIM UNKNOWN,

STANDETH GOD WITHIN THE SHADOW,

KEEPING WATCH ABOVE HIS OWN.