Suffering and God's Love
One of the features of the modern television news bulletin is that we are confronted on a daily basis with the reality of suffering in the world of today. We have witnessed the brutality of the street to street battle for the city of Mosul. The horrific effects of poison gas on men, women and children were brought into our living rooms. Then closer to home we have had the tragic loss of four members of the Irish Coast Guard, failing to return from a mission to rescue others.
And we ask ‘Why?’ Where is God in all of this?
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
The words, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” have always spoken very powerfully to me, it underlines for me a pain that goes to the very heart of the God head as the intimate relationship between Father and Son is stretched to breaking point. Jesus who felt so at one with the Father, dies totally alone, God forsaken: ‘My God! My God! Why have you abandoned me?’ The pain of the Father. Too often our theories of atonement have cast the Father at Calvary as a remote figure, needing only to be appeased. But we must remember words of Jesus to Nicodemus, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his Son’ and the description of God we have in the 1st Letter of John, ‘God is love’.
Lisa Goertz lost most of her family including her husband and children in the Holocaust. Overwhelmed by grief she felt she could take no more and decided to end her life. But, as she explains in her book, I Stepped into Freedom, an extraordinary experience changed her mind: “I walked out into the night, feeble with hunger, half-crazy with fear and fatigue, and made my way down to the river Neisse. In a few hours, all would be over, I told myself. What a relief! And there it happened. Across the dark river, I saw the Cross and Jesus Christ on it. His face was not the face of a victor; it was the face of a fellow-sufferer, full of love and understanding and compassion. We gazed at each other, both of us Jews, and then the vision disappeared.” This brought Lisa Goertz to Christian faith and the ability to face the future with hope.
The cross is not be seen in terms of a transaction – the cross is encounter.