Of First Importance

I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.

(1 Corinthians 15:3-4)

Isaiah 25:6-9, 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, John 20:1-18

In a post during Holy Week, I reflected on Jesus’ words from the cross, “My God,my God, why have you forsaken me?” in light of the horrific story of Christian Choate who was kept in a dog cage and eventually beaten to death by his father. Such stories are the test of anything we say about God and faith.

The Christian story of Incarnation and cross claims the promise of God’s solidarity with his creatures caught in the web of sin, brokenness, and death. The credal affirmation that the Son of God has descended into hell is hopeful. God has poured the potent, relentless mercy of Jesus’ presence into every hell, on earth or beyond. There is no one, no place, and no situation that is god-forsaken. Hopeful as that is, is it enough? What more can we say about the good news of Jesus Christ in light of the tragic story of Christian Choate and those of so many others?

In his first letter to the young church in Corinth, Paul reminds them of what he considered of first importance, what he in turn had received – that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.

Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures

I suspect few of us have done anything as egregious as Christian Choate’s father. But each of us has failed to love as we are meant to love. Each of us has been negligent of God and neighbor. Each of us has contributed in ways large or small to the mess of the world.

And yet, in spite of that, God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). William Temple wrote,

In the most true sense [God] loves me even while I sin; but it cannot be said too strongly that there is a wrath in God against my sinning; God's Will is set one way and mine is set against it. There is a collision of wills; and God's Will is not passive in that collision.

At the cross is the collision of those wills in which God’s love overcomes all our unlove – all of our envy and enmity, all of our indifference. God poured out his love on the hard wood of the cross and thereby entered into the worst humans can do and made a way for us to enter into his forgiveness. There is no one – including Christian Choate's dad – that is beyond the reach of his saving embrace where there is forgiveness.

I suppose, in ways we do not know or comprehend, we have to accept that Christian Choate, as part of the human web of sin, needed that forgiveness as well. But that is where I think an exclusive focus on the cross and our need for forgiveness starts to fall short. Is it really satisfactory if all we can say about Christian Choate is we hope he had an opportunity to say the ‘Jesus Prayer’ and receive God’s forgiveness before his dad beat him to death? Especially given that we have no evidence that he had ever even heard anything about Jesus? And if he didn’t? Were those horrific thirteen years just a brief prelude to an eternity of torture in hell? Is it satisfactory to say, as some might, that, if he didn’t repent, it was due to his being predestined not to do so? That his brief life of suffering was just a small part of the larger story of human sin and he only received in this life a foretaste of the penalty of sin to be exacted by God on all the reprobate? That hardly seems worthy of the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

But, neither is it satisfactory to say, as an any honest atheist must, that what happened to Christian Choate is just one example of the kinds of things that are coded into the world into which we have been born. It is what it is. Any moral outrage about it is just a matter of inherited taste.

The Christian hope is more than that. In Christ, God has addressed more than our guilt. In Christ, God has addressed the deep wound of humanity, and of human history and, indeed, all of creation.

Few of us have suffered anything as terrible as Christian Choate – though my wife, who is a therapist, told me recently that as many as one in three girls and one in six boys are sexually molested. Physical and emotional abuse are also more common than we like to think. So, maybe more of us have such stories of suffering and sorrow than we usually let on. But even if we have avoided abuse of that nature, each of us bears the wounds and brokenness endemic to humanity. We don’t just need forgiveness. We need healing.

It is important to note that healing was as significant a part Jesus’ ministry as was his call to repent and offer of forgiveness. His mercy included both. So did his dying and rising.

He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures

Handing on to the Corinthians that which he considered of first importance, Paul referred to the resurrection using the exact language he used for the death of Christ suggesting that the two go together as two aspects of one salvific intervention. The Cross and Easter the Resurrection are two sides of the one coin of the world’s redemption.

In some theologies and popular pieties Jesus’ resurrection is treated as an addendum to what is considered the really important thing which is Jesus’ death on the cross for our sins. The resurrection is sometimes reduced to little more than proof of Jesus’ divinity or the assurance that there might be life after death. At most it is God’s vindication of Jesus’ life and message. Though I emphatically affirm all of these, the resurrection is also much more.

The crucifixion and resurrection include the promise of healing, transformation, restoration, and new creation. I am persuaded that that is true for the past as well as the present or the future. As Wolfhart Pannenberg has written,

The kingdom of God embraces the earlier generations of mankind as well as the coming ones, and hope for the coming of the rule of God does not only expect salvation for the last generation; it is directed towards the transfiguration of all epochs of human history through the fire of divine judgment, which is one with the light of the glory of God.  

– The Apostles Creed In Light of Today's Questions

Similarly, Michael Ramsey wrote of Jesus’ Transfiguration as a foreshadowing of the Transfiguration of all things in the General Resurrection that is the world’s destiny in Christ,

Confronted with a universe more terrible than ever in the blindness and the destructiveness of its potentialities, men and women must be led to Christian faith, not as a panacea of progress or as an otherworldly solution unrelated to history, but as a gospel of Transfiguration. Such a gospel transcends the world and yet speaks directly to the immediate here-and-now. He who is transfigured is the Son of Man; and as he discloses on the holy mountain another world, he reveals that no part of created things, and no moment of created time lies outside the power of the Spirit, who is Lord, to change it from glory to glory.

– The Gory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ

Our hope of the resurrection of the body is not just a hope for individual escape from death. It is that. But, it is also the expectation that the body of humanity, stretched out and tortured on the rack of history will be restored. In the final resurrection and restoration of all things (Acts 3:21), it is not just the memory of Christian Choate’s agony that will be redeemed. The trauma, torture, and terror of human history twill not just be forgotten, but redeemed. The very reality of it will be caught up and transfigured–scars and all–in a way we can barely fathom.

In the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has broken open the cage of sin and death and decay that holds us all. The resurrection of Jesus is a ray of light piercing the cloud of Death that is cast over all people (Isaiah 25:6-9) guaranteeing that the world's story ends in resurrection and transformation. Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died (1 Corinthians 15:20). As Paul insists in Romans 8, that is a promise for all of creation as well. All of creation will be renewed.

In the meantime, creation continues to groan under the reality of death and decay. And not just the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies (Romans 8:23).

The Gardener come to repair and restore the garden

Mary Magdalene, who the scriptures point out followed Jesus because he healed her (Mark 16:9), not because she had any unusual need of forgiveness (despite later tradition to the contrary), came to honor his tortured dead body at the tomb. There she found the grave empty. She assumed someone had taken the body. What else would she suspect? She asks one she takes to be a gardener where they have taken the body of the one she had hoped would redeem Israel and the world. When the gardener speaks her name, she recognizes that he is in fact Jesus who had been dead, but is now risen and more alive than before.

But, in fact, Mary had rightly identified him the first time. Jesus is the Gardener, come to restore the Garden of creation and history that has been infected with the thorns and thistles of sin and death that have made it a curse for so many to be born (Genesis 3). According to the ancient story, the curse began with a tree in a garden. And the healing and restoration begins with a tree (the cross) and a garden.

The fullness of the restoration of all things remains a hope of the future. We do not pretend that all is already well. In Christ we have received the first fruits. We live in expectation. But, if we allow the Gardener to work in our lives, forgiveness and healing can begin now. New creation can begin now. Transformation can begin now. And as his Spirit moves in and through us we can participate with him in the healing of the land and live now in the shade of another tree in another garden at the heart of the City of the New Creation– the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22:2).

The tragic life and death of Christian Choate reminds us that we still walk in the valley of the shadow of death. Sin, with all its violence and greed, is still present. But the shadow of death has been transformed into the shadow of the cross, backlit with the hope of resurrection. Christ has died for our sins and was raised on the third day. In that two-fold event, God' mercy has entered into the deepest, darkest human reality of sin and suffering, like that of Christian Choate. And he has broken out of that hell with the promise of forgiveness, healing, and new creation. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

See also:

Resurrection:The Matter of Matter and Why it Matters

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Last Sunday, many of us heard the Passion of Jesus according to the Gospel of Mark which included this,

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘Listen, he is calling for Elijah.’ And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’ Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. (Mark 15:33-37)

Christian Choate’s body was discovered near Gary, Indiana one summer day. He was buried in a shallow grave under a slab of concrete behind the trailer where he once had lived. He had actually died two years earlier. He was only 13. 

Those were thirteen years of misery. Years of isolation and neglect. Years of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of his father and step-mother. He lived with them because his mother and her boyfriend had been accused of molesting him.

He was kept home from school and home schooled. The essays his step-mother asked him to write are heart-breaking. She asked to write about "Why do you want to play with your peter? Why do you still want to see your mom? Why can't you let the past go? What does it mean to be part of a family?"

Christian spent much of the last year of his life locked in a three-foot-high dog cage, with little food and drink and few opportunities to leave. He was let out briefly to clean and vacuum. And he endured savage beatings from his father.

One night in April of 2009, Christian was too weak to keep his food down. His father beat him to the point of unconsciousness, then locked his limp body in the cage. The next morning, his sister Christina found him dead.

Christian wrote of why nobody liked him and how he just wanted to be liked by his family. He stated that he wanted to die because nobody liked the way he 'acted.' Christian's writings detail a very sad, depressed child who often wondered when someone, anyone, was going to come check on him and give him food or liquid. Christian often stated he was hungry or thirsty.

[Linkto the news story]

But Elijah did not come for Christian. And we have no knowledge of his hearing God or being aware of God’s presence. Given the constraints on his life, we don’t even know if he knew enough to cry out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

It's a story that haunts me and has become a sort of test case or talking about God. Any god-talk  worth the trouble has to take this story and the myriad other stories of human suffering into account.

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

They are the most disturbing of the words Jesus spoke from the cross. But, for me, they are also hopeful. The truth is I often find it hard to believe in God. Much god-talk strikes me as little more than sentimental fancy. Talk of god in a baby’s smile or the beauty of nature doesn’t quite cut it. Generic talk of “the Holy” or “the Sacred”? I don’t know what that means. Even talk of god as love, by itself, seems to me to too easily slip into sentimentality. All such talk falls flat in the face of the horror of Christian Choate’s story. Or the realities of Syria, the Congo, or Parkland, Florida.

But, this is different. From the cross Jesus cried with a loud voice, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" What are we to make of that? I want to suggest that there are at least a couple of things we can say.

Jesus, in the fullness of his humanity, experiences the horror of being betrayed, denied, and abandoned by his friends and rejected by his people. Jesus experiences all the torture, terror, and tragedy that humanity inflicts upon itself when it turns from God.

And, mystery of mysteries, Jesus, who knew such intimacy with the One he called ‘Father,’ experienced the awful, bewildering silence of God. Even as we remember that Jesus cried out using the worship language of his people as found in Psalm 22, there is no escaping that it was a cry of anguish. We dare not try to get around that.

But there is a second thing. In Jesus, we affirm that God’s very self entered into the darkest depths of human experience. As Madeleine L’Engle wrote,

For Jesus, at-one-ment was not only being at-one with the glory of the stars, or the first daffodil in the spring, or a baby’s laugh. He was also at-one with all the pain and suffering that ever was, is, or will be. On the cross Jesus was at-one with the young boy with cancer, the young mother hemorrhaging, the raped girl [and at-one with Christian Choate and his sister. And even with the broken tortured spirits of their parents]. We can withdraw, even in our prayers, from the intensity of suffering. Jesus, on the cross, experienced it all. When I touch the small cross I wear, this, then, is the meaning of the symbol.

The cross is what makes it possible to believe in God at all. That is on of the reasons this Friday is good.

William Temple, who was Archbishop of Canterbury during the first years of WWII, wrote in Christus Veritas,

The revelation of God’s dealing with human sin shows God enduring every depth of anguish for the sake of His Children. . . All that we can suffer of physical or mental anguish is within the divine experience. . . .He does not leave this world to suffer while He remains at ease apart; all suffering of the world is His.

Temple goes on to claim, “Only such a God can be God of the world we know.” Only such a God can be God in a world that includes multiple stories like that of Christian Choate. Only such a God can be God of our own stories.

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Let’s be clear. This is not Jesus vs God. This is not God the Father torturing Jesus so he won’t have to torture us. The God we know through Jesus is not like Christian Choate’s father. This is God, the Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – working in harmony to address the deepest, darkest depths of human need to bring forgiveness and healing and the promise of restoration.

And we know – thanks be to God, we know – that whatever Jesus experienced in his cry of dereliction, he did not despair and God did not abandon him. We know the rest of the story. We do not need to pretend on Good Friday that we don’t know what happens on Easter Sunday. We know that God was in Christ reconciling the world. Through the cross and resurrection God has come to transform the torture, tragedy, and terror.

This does exhaust the meaning of the cross. It does not answer all the questioned raised by the hard reality of human suffering. But, we can give thanks that in Jesus’ cry, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" there is the assurance that there is no human experience – not even the appalling, heart-rending experience of Christian Choate – that is finally God-forsaken.

(To be continued on Saturday with Of First Importance)

See also:

Jesus of the Scars

Click,Click, Click, Click - A Good Friday Sermon

Suffering and the Wildness of God

Suffering and Belief in God

Cathedral of St. Paul, Fond du Lac, WI,

Lent 3, February 28, 2016

Exodus 3:1-15, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9, Psalm 63:1-8

Why do you believe in God?

Why do you believe in God? Maybe you’ve had some mystical, burning-bush experience like Moses in this morning’s Old Testament lesson. Maybe you’ve had a dramatic conversion experience and you can point to the difference God has made in your life.  Maybe you are struck by the beauty and grandeur of creation. Or maybe, you were just raised that way and you don’t know any better. All of these reasons are fine and good, as well as whatever other reasons you might have. But for me, when it gets right down to it, I believe in God mostly because of the suffering and injustice in the world. 

I know that the suffering and injustice in the world is supposed to be the great stumbling block to faith in God. But, I’m just peculiar enough to find that to be the starting point for my belief. Let me explain. When I was around 30 years old, I came very close to giving up on Christianity and declaring myself an atheist. When I tried on being an atheist I found that as an atheist I would be forced to live a contradiction – a contradiction between my mind and my heart. Either I went with my mind and I followed the logic of atheism to its utmost conclusions, or I followed my heart. But the two could not be followed together. 

I tried to be an atheist and followed the logic of my mind I was forced to conclude that the beginning of all that is, and the beginning of all that I am, was an accident.  The end of all that is and all that I am will also be, more or less, an accident. Everything in between is a meaningless event suspended between two accidents. Nothing, ultimately, has any meaning. Nothing, ultimately, has any purpose. All we are left with is our personal preferences and prejudices as to what is good and what is not so good. I was forced to agree with Albert Camus who wrote that if we believe in nothing, then it does not matter ultimately if we stoke the fires of the crematorium, as did the Nazis, or if we serve the lepers in Africa, as did Albert Schweitzer. It all comes to the same thing.

The question “How can there be a good God when there is so much suffering in the world?” is a serious question. I do not mean to make light of hard realities that provoke it. But, is a parallel question that is just as challenging for an atheist, “If there is no God and no meaning, why do I care about the suffering in the world?” Why should I? In fact one of the things I felt when trying on atheism was a sense of relief – I didn’t have to care so much.

When a pack of wolves attacks and kills an elk calf we do not feel any moral outrage. Morally, it is a matter of indifference. That’s what wolves do. But, why do we feel moral outrage when a gunman shoots teenagers at a high school. Why are we outraged by the violence of war? When animals brutalize each other it is a matter of moral indifference. Why are we indignant when humans brutalize each other or even other animals? For an atheist there is no logical reason to give the lives of humans priority over the lives of other animals. We are all just the accidental byproducts of evolution and history. Our inclination to feel otherwise is only conditioned sentimentalism.

But, that, as the Psalmist says, is “a barren and dry land where there is no water” and humans cannot live there. That is why it is hard to find an honest atheist. However much our minds might say that there is no ultimate meaning, purpose, or value to life, our hearts cry out, “No!” Our hearts insist that there is meaning. There is purpose. Life has value. It’s not a matter of indifference. When a child is abused, tortured and killed, my outrage is not just a matter of my own personal preference. The response of my heart is in tune with the response at the heart of the universe. The offense I take at the slaughter of innocents, or for that matter the accidental deaths along the way, is not just an offense against my personal taste. It is an offense against the very fabric of reality.  That offense, the offense we take in the face suffering and injustice, does not prove that there is a God, but it at least pointed me toward God.

But, not just any God. The only god that makes sense to me in light of the reality of suffering is the God of Jesus who is also the God of Moses and of Israel. We just hear the story of Moses and the burning bush. Out of the burning bush – out of the burning heart of reality – Moses heard, “I have observed the misery of my people . . . I have heard their cry . . . I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them.” The God of the Bible is not aloof and indifferent to the suffering and injustice of this world. That God’s commitment to engaging misery and suffering culminates in his coming along side us in the flesh in the person of Jesus.

I’ve been thinking about all of this because in this morning’s gospel, some people come to Jesus, and ask, “What about the people who were murdered by Pilate and whose blood was mingled with their sacrifices?  Were they killed because of their sins?” Jesus responded, “No.” “What about the people who were killed in the accident in Siloam when the tower fell on them?  Did they die because of their sins?” Again, Jesus answers, “No.” According to Jesus, God is not in the payback business. The God revealed in Jesus is not about karma. God about grace, redemption, and transformation.

Jesus does not offer a nice and neat answer to why there is suffering. But, then Jesus rarely seems interested in answering our questions. He is more interested in questioning us. His response in this morning’s gospel is uncomfortably blunt. In essence he says “Those deaths were tragic. But, we are all going to die, maybe sooner, maybe later. So, today is the day to start living our lives in sync with the burning Heart of the universe. That heart burns with mercy and love. Begin now learning to love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus does not answer our questions about why there is suffering. He does not attempt to get God off the hook. Which is, of course, the point of the Gospel. On the cross, God puts himself on the hook. God, in Jesus Christ, enters into the mess that we have made of the world. God, in Christ, on the cross, enfolds and absorbs the pain and suffering of the world.  He transforms it into resurrection. There is the promise that we too will be transformed, our pain, our suffering, will be transformed. By his wounds, we will be healed. 

In the parable this morning, Jesus recognizes that, as the bumper sticker used to say, “‘manure’ happens”. But manure is fertilizer. If you look at your own life, often it is the hurts and the sufferings that cause spiritual growth. I do not think Jesus is suggesting that God causes the suffering in our lives. Rather, God transforms it.

French poet, Paul Caudel, wrote, “Jesus did not come to remove suffering, or to explain it away. He came to fill it with His presence.” Jesus does not explain suffering. He fills it with his presence and the promise of its transformation in the final resurrection of which his is the foretaste.

We live in a world of great suffering, of great injustices. It can be a hard place. It can be a hard place to believe in God, especially the generic God of human imagination. But the God we know in Jesus Christ is not a God of our own imagining. He is the God of the cross.

William Temple, who was Archbishop of Canterbury during WWII, wrote,

The revelation of God’s dealing with human sin shows God enduring every depth of anguish for the sake of His Children. . . All that we can suffer of physical or mental anguish is within the divine experience. . . He does not leave this world to suffer while He remains at ease apart; all suffering of the world is His.

– Christus Veritas

And

Only a God in whose perfect Being pain has its place can win and hold our worship.

– Readings in St. John’s Gospel

In Jesus  – on the cross and in the resurrection – heart and mind meet. And that’s a God you can believe in.

See also Suffering and the Wildness of God

Suffering and the Wildness of God

[A version of the following piece was published in The Living Church after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. It's still my best attempt at making some sense of such things.]

We live in a world where we are regularly confronted with the reality of natural phenomena like earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, famine, disease, etc. Each of these events raises with fresh urgency the perennial question of belief in God in the shadow of destruction and suffering. The magnitude natural disasters and their seeming randomness is awe-inspiring and dumbfounding. What can one say to make sense of such a catastrophes? Where is God in all of this and what kind of God would allow such things?

Christians should be wary of nice and tidy answers to such questions. But, it is also unsatisfactory to allow ourselves to slip into a speechless agnosticism. What, with due caution and humility, can we say?

Among other things, it is good to remember that removing God from the equation does not resolve the mystery of suffering. The flipside of the question, “How can there be a good God when there is so much suffering in the world?” are the questions, “If there is no God and no meaning, why do I care about the suffering in the world?” and “Why should I?” Indeed, if there is no God, reality is indifferent to all suffering. And there is no real reason for us not to be indifferent. Our inclination otherwise is only conditioned sentimentalism. If there is no God, we can only conclude that we have evolved into an existential cul-de-sac in which we have now come to see the emptiness of the belief in meaning and human worth that helped us evolve this far but are still stuck with the deep vestigial instinct for meaning and worth.

But, that is a dry and weary land where no water is. And humans cannot live there. However much the logic of our minds, absent God, might say that there is no meaning, our hearts cry out in contradiction, “No!” Our hearts insist that there is meaning. It’s not a matter of indifference. We do not believe that the offense and sorrow we feel in the wake of the devastation of a natural catastrophe is not just an offense against our personal preferences. It is an offense against the very fabric of reality.

Still, the questions remain. Where is God in all of this? What kind of God allows such things? These are questions that beg answers. And so, we create answers. Whether to protect God or to bring tragedy under control, we invent ways to explain the suffering that befalls us and others.

One way that some have sought to resolve the questions is to suggest that God cannot intervene in historical and physical reality. But, that hardly seems to do justice to the Christian revelation even if it appears to get God off the hook.

Another common answer is that it is God’s way of getting back at us for our sins. Tragedy and suffering are divine payback.

The idea of reincarnation is a related way of addressing the reality of suffering. You get what you deserve, if not in this life, in the next. And whatever you get in this life, good or bad, is the result of what you earned in lives before. Everything that happens to you is karmic payback. The karmic ledger, sooner or later, will be balanced. Reincarnation is a clear and logical answer to why there is suffering.

But, to all such attempts to explain suffering, Jesus says, “No.” In Luke 13:1-9, some people come to Jesus, and ask, “What about the people who were murdered by Pilate and whose blood was mingled with their sacrifices? Were they killed because of their sins?” Jesus responded, “No.” “What about the people who were killed in the accident in Siloam when the tower fell on them? Did they die because of their sins?” Again, Jesus answers, “No.” Jesus does not offer a nice and neat answer to why there is such suffering. His response in the gospel is uncomfortably blunt. In essence he says “The suffering of others, the tragic deaths of others, might well give us pause to remind ourselves that our time also is short and we have no guarantees of how long we will be around. Therefore, today is the day to repent. Today is the day to turn and seek God. Today is the day to love God and neighbor.”

It is not a very sentimental approach. But, Jesus is not sentimental when speaking of God or the human condition. And for that I am thankful. Sentimental images of a Nice-Guy-in-the-Sky don’t cut it when we are confronted with real tragedies like earthquakes or tsunamis or hurricanes, or, for that matter, real personal tragedies like injury and disease. Nor do romantic notions of human nature or the nature of creation. Reality demands something wilder.

The world is a wild place. In creating the world in which we live, God makes space for us and for all creation to be free. That means God also makes space for us to make a mess of it, to make a mess of one another, and to make a mess of ourselves. And it means there is space for things like cancer cells and earthquakes. It also means that the God who creates such a world must be as wild as the wildness it contains. Why does God have to make so much space for freedom? Why does God tolerate so much suffering and injustice? Why has God created such a world? If God is at the heart of it all – the Creator and Sustainer – God is not off the hook.

Which is, of course, the point of the gospel. On the cross, God himself is on the hook. In Jesus Christ, God enters into the mess that we have made of the world. And God enters into the wildness of the world God has created. On the cross, God in Christ takes on the sin and suffering of the world. The world’s passion becomes Christ’s passion. God transforms that passion into the promise of resurrection. There is the promise that we too will be transformed – the suffering of the world will not be lost, but gathered up and transformed in resurrection. By his wounds, we will be healed. And so will be the rest of creation which eagerly awaits being set free from its bondage to futility and decay (cf. Romans 8:18-24).

We live in a world of great suffering and great injustice. It can be a hard place to live. It can be a hard place to believe in God – especially the generic God of human imagination. But the God we know in Jesus Christ is not a God of our own imagining. The God we know is the God of the cross. William Temple, who was Archbishop of Canterbury during WWII, wrote,

The revelation of God’s dealing with human sin shows God enduring every depth of anguish for the sake of His Children. . . All that we can suffer of physical or mental anguish is within the divine experience. . . He does not leave this world to suffer while He remains at ease apart; all suffering of the world is His.

– Christus Veritas

French poet, Paul Claudel, wrote, “Jesus did not come to remove suffering, or to explain it away. He came to fill it with His presence.” Jesus does not explain suffering. He fills it with his presence and the promise of its transformation in the final resurrection of which his is the foretaste.

It does not resolve all the questions or remove all the pain, or eliminate all the anger resulting from something like the devastation of a natural catastrophe or man-made tragedies. But a God wild enough to create and sustain such a world as ours and wild enough to pour his love out on the hard wood of the cross is wild enough to absorb our questions, pain, and anger. And such a God is wild enough to take it all into himself where it will be transformed by his love, joy, and peace in ways we can barely imagine.