Year B
Mark 10:2-16
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
Love Made Perfect In Suffering
No issue has been more difficult for Judaism and Christianity than the problem of good and evil. In our Christian understanding, evil is any experience of misfortune or harm to the natural order or to human beings and can be experienced as suffering. Evil and suffering certainly have been a part of our experience of the world, a reality that is present at birth and something we experience throughout our lives in our daily confrontation with illness, limitations, corruption, and death. In the history of Christian thought, it has been one of our most persistent problems. How do we explain the mystery of the presence of evil and suffering in the world? Or as Rabbi Harold Kushner posed it in the title of his best seller some years ago: “When bad things happen to good people.”
The Hebrew people and their Jewish descendants sought to make sense of suffering, and the OT supports a number of different understandings of it. None of them have been successful in answering questions as why God allows suffering and what purpose there is in suffering. However, the NT does narrow the focus of the question to the justice of God and claims that suffering can bring positive results, such as trust, endurance and compassion. Still, we continue to wrestle with the issue and with the many popular ideas about suffering that are out there today offering unhealthy and theologically unsound conclusions.
The lessons for today may not be able to answer all our questions on this issue but we may find some help in that the first two lessons speak directly to the problem of evil and suffering, and the Gospel text hints at something essential to our Christian understanding on this issue. All the lessons will remind us how the love of God or the love God creates makes life better, makes it easier to cope in the tough times. Implicit in the message today, is that bad things should not happen to “righteous” people. Job was a righteous man and his story has been the source of many of the issues revolving around human suffering and why bad things happen to good people. It’s a story of the suffering of an innocent and righteous person that resonates with many of us.
Today and for the next two Sunday’s we will be reading from the book of Job. The date of the writing is unknown but most agree that it was written in the sixth or fifth centuries BCE. The book of Job describes a test for one person, but this magnificent story is also a typical test for the rest of us. Will we remain faithful to what is true and good up until the end? The Lord was so confident in Job’s virtue that the Lord accepted Satan’s challenge to Job’s faith. The author implies that Satan is lurking everywhere, “wandering throughout the earth.” So in the parts of this story that are skipped by today’s passage, we hear of a series of calamities that wipe out Job’s livestock, possessions, and family.
In minutes, Job hears that he has lost everything. Even so he says, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job remains faithful even as the drama escalates and he is afflicted physically. Job refuses to speak against the Lord, implying that faith means accepting both the good and the bad. Even so, Job’s lot is hard for us to understand. The presence of evil and pain in our world has challenged us all; all we faithful people who believe in the goodness of God as we encounter any number of occurrences that may cause us pain and loss. What Job’s story tells us is that we are never abandoned by God—rather God walks with us, as God walked with Job, in every moment, providing comfort in all things.
The sufferer, in turn, is to have faith and trust in God’s goodness. God can transform evil into good as God did at the cross. This understanding will not meet all our needs when we suffer; rather, it calls us to look beyond knowledge to faith and to a renewed prayer life with God. In conversation with God, we, like Job, can discover God’s presence with us in all situations. God understands what we are enduing and gives the ultimate answer-resurrection to life beyond pain. Jesus’ triumph over sin and evil on the cross tells us that God’s work in Christ does not disregard its pain and brokenness. On the contrary, it demonstrates the depth of God’s love for us and drives us back into the world. Hebrews today suggests that we too can grow toward perfection if we travel the Way of Jesus, the Way of love, the way of the cross that gives up life in order to offer life to all.
God’s victory over death occurred not because of worldly power; it happened because of divine humility: Jesus was made “lower than the angels.” We might say he had to become Job, suffering unjustly at the hands of the powers to taste death for everyone. God made Jesus the pioneer of our salvation made perfect through suffering. Yet, in the Gospels, Jesus seeks to alleviate the suffering of human beings brought about by the physical evils of sickness, poverty, and imprisonment. Jesus’ ministry seeks to reverse the effects of physical evil, and yet Jesus notes that physical evil is not the only problem that afflicts humanity. The gospel message is that Jesus overcomes the effects of our moral evil or sin through his own willingness to suffer on our behalf.
This model is the doorway into God’s kingdom, set by the Jesus who brings the kingdom. This coming kingdom will vindicate all who are just, all who bear the mark of integrity because integrity is a quality necessary to enter the kingdom of God. In that new kingdom, all will be made new, whole, and holy. I have just stated reading a book titled “The Book of Joy-Lasting Happiness in a Changing World.” It’s about two spiritual giants, Nobel Prize laureates, His Holiness the Dalai Lama who has survived more than fifty years of exile, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu who experienced the soul-crushing violence of oppression. They met in 2015 in India, to trade intimate stories and to look back on their lives all to answer a single burning question. How do we find joy in the face of life’s in evitable suffering?
In exploring this question: Archbishop Tutu says, “Anguish and sadness in many ways are things that you cannot control. They happen. Supposing somebody hits you. The pain causes an anguish in you and an anger, and you might want to retaliate. But as you grow in the spiritual life, whether Buddhist or a Christian or any other tradition, you are able to accept anything that happens to you. You accept it not as the result of your being sinful, that you are blameworthy because of what has happened—it’s part of the warp and woof of life. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. There are going to be frustrations in life. The question is not: How do I escape? It is: how can I use this as something positive?”
He says, “If you look from one angle, you feel, oh how bad, how sad. But if you look from another angle at that same tragedy, that same event, you see that it gives new opportunities. There is no denial of pain and suffering, but a shift in perspective—from oneself and toward others, from anguish to compassion—seeing that others are suffering as well. It is the birth of empathy and compassion. So the question is not he says, ‘Well, how can I be happy’? It is: ‘How can I help spread compassion and love?”
Bad things happen but the love of God, the love God creates in us toward others makes life better—in creation, human nature, overcoming evil, in dying for us, as well as in marriage. Love, and seeking God in our lives, makes it easier to cope in the tough times. We can’t fully answer the mystery of evil and suffering on this side of eternity so the questions then are: Will we seek to use the suffering in our lives for something positive? Will we remain faithful to what is true and good up until the end? “But as for me, the psalmist says, I walk in my integrity; redeem me, and be gracious to me…I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.”