Goodness and Suffering

Goodness and Suffering

Mary Catherine Hilkert O.P.
One of the most powerful homilies I ever heard at a wake was a single sentence by young woman who stood with her mother and sisters and brothers before her father’s casket and said: “We have God’s promise that death is not the end. We are here to hold God to that promise.” The genre of lament and the tradition of arguing with God, both firmly established in the Jewish tradition of prayer, have everything to do with holding God to the promises of the covenant. But lament goes further in incorporating into prayer accusation or complaint against God in protest, anger, or anguish, precisely because the present situation seems incompatible with the covenant. Boldness before God that “cries out to heaven” for a response is rooted in an understanding of the covenant as a relationship binding on both divine and human partners….
It is not possible to know the inner experience of Jesus with certitude. But those who take seriously the full humanity of Jesus can begin to imagine the stark reality behind the gospel portrait of Jesus’ anguish in the garden of Gethsemane or his cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The one who preached absolute trust in the reign of a compassionate God was left in darkness to face rejection of his mission and the utter silence of Abba. Jesus knew the experience that many describe as nothing short of abandonment by God.
On the one hand, in connecting Scripture, liturgy, and human life, preachers must confront the genuine stumbling block: the cross of Jesus, like all human suffering, raises profound questions about God and God’s fidelity. On the other hand, it is precisely the language and symbol of the cross that enables preachers to identify the religious depths of all human suffering, to connect our grief and our God in ways that are beyond comprehension or words. Without condoning or glorifying suffering, one of the tasks of the preacher is to hold open the hope that there is no experience of human anguish that is beyond the absolute presence of God.
The challenge of preaching the wisdom of the cross requires us to hold on to the conviction that at the farthest edges of darkness we fall into the hands of the living God, while at the same time rejecting any religious legitimation of human suffering as God’s will. In an age of massive and senseless suffering including two world wars and the Holocaust, Edward Schillebeeckx, among others, has underscored the scandal of the cross. He has gone so far as to suggest that in one sense we are saved in spite of the cross of Jesus, rather than because of it. Nevertheless, Schillebeeckx concludes that in the end Jesus faced the cross as the final consequence of fidelity to his preaching mission with a radical hope in the compassionate God he knew as Abba. He filled an experience that was in itself meaningless and absurd with meaning, love, and solidarity with all the innocent who suffer.
What Christians celebrate is not the cross, nor the sufferings of Jesus, but the power of a love that is faithful even unto death.
                                                                        From “The Passion of God” New Theology Review  (2001)