Deep midwinter

Lutheran, The, Jan 2004 by Matthews, William R

If God is omnipotent, loving and merciful, why the cruel reality of suffering and evil on our planet?

'Who will rescue me from this body of death?' (Romans 7:24)

January 1969, Super Bowl Sunday afternoon, I received a tense phone call. Saturday night a small white airplane, carrying home six college debaters and two faculty from a tournament in Colorado, had disappeared over northern Nebraska.

Jorgen, our dean of students, had delayed telling us members of the Augustana College administration until he had talked to the parents. It was my family's first winter in Sioux Falls, S.D.: 100 inches of snow, day after bleak day of below-zero weather. The plane, virtually invisible on the white-clogged prairie, wasn't found until March.

Students drove as far as they could on ice-slick roads into the sand-hill area of Nebraska, floundered through drifts along the banks of the Missouri, insistent on doing a hopeless something. Memorial services, chapel talks and informal prayer sessions helped the campus bear up. At a funeral luncheon, we were forged into a oneness of fellowship during that bitter time-a hint of the way that even in our direst moments, the loving God's created universe seems to work.

The enduring human query in the face of suffering is the question that theodicy asks: Why? The term comes from two Greek words: theo (God) and dik (right judgment). Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines it: "Vindication of the justice of God, especially in causing or permitting natural and moral evil."

When David Miller, editor of The Lutheran, approached me about this series, my first reaction was that I could spend my 84th year of life on easier things. But what is more important to any of us, young or old, than facing head-on the suffering that must come into all lives? What could be more critical than learning to say daily, "Yes, I don't understand this, but you, God, are there regardless"? I join with Martin Luther in the tooth-clenching hope that, in spite of everything, yes, God loves us and shares our pain.

We struggle with this: If God is omnipotent, loving and merciful, why the cruel reality of suffering and evil on our planet? January is perhaps not the time for even a tentative answer. But it is a time for Christians to turn from fleeting, outward things that blind them to the truth-like the child, fists to eyes, trying to make the monster under the bed disappear.

The biblical Job has long been my model. In essence, God responded to his afflicted cry of theodicy, saying, "Keep asking, but don't expect answers to things you can never understand."

Lifelong we are challenged to travel onward, graced with occasional sustaining hints of reassurance. Theologian Keith Ward furnishes the itinerary for our journey this year: "What one can offer, often all one can offer, is shared experience, silent companionship and preparedness to listen and care."

Two precious insights from my experience sustain me: Something beneficent lies behind all that happens, and the highest possible earthly joy arises from sacrificial service to a beloved other.

A mature Christian doesn't deny the moral and physical evil embedded in the fabric of creation. Pleasant though it is, we can't remain Christmas Christians forever. Christ went willingly to Jerusalem to suffer and die, although as a man he had second thoughts: his agony in the Garden, his cries of abandonment from the cross. Then he accepted: "Today, you will be with me in paradise."

We aren't eager to join Jesus in torture and death. "Lift high the cross," we sing-that means to lift it in our lives. The New Year arrives, but in a few months comes the darkness of Good Friday.

In 2004, let's resolve to face together the existence of suffering and evil with open eyes and hopeful hearts. Our resolution is to prepare to join Christ on his Good Friday cross with faith that Easter Sunday is forever on the way. Luther says, bluntly: "Well, why should I not be willing to bear a little grief, when agonies and fears cause my Lord to sweat blood in the Garden of Gethsemane? He who lies abed when his master struggles in the throes of death is indeed a slothful and disgraceful servant."

Next: How do we use adversity?

Matthews, a longtime contributor to The Lutheran, is a retired English professor and member of Muhlenberg Lutheran Church, Harrisonburg, Va. This is the first in a 12-part series on theodicy-our experience of suffering, struggle and evil in light of God's mercy, love and omnipotence. For an outline of the series see www.thelutheran.org/04 01/matthews.html.