WHY?
March 2, 1986, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

“And he answered them, 'Do you think that these Galileans were worse -

sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus?'" -
--Luke 13:2 (RSV)

Scripture
Luke 13:1-9

Russell Baker, nationally syndicated columnist. for the New York
Times,is a witty and wry observer of the human condition. He wrote a best-
selling autobiography, Growing Up, which is warmly human and occasionally
provocative. Near the beginning of the book Baker recalls what it was
like, at the age of five, to be told that his father was dead.

“He was 33... When I came running home, my mother. was still not
back... I was sent to the opposite end of town to Bessie Scott's -house.

"Poor Bessie Scott. All afternoon she listened patiently as a saint
while I sat in her kitchen and cried myself out. For the first time I
thought seriously about God. Between sobs I told Bessie that if God .could
do things like this to people, then God was hateful and I had no more use
for him.

"Bessie told me about the peace of heaven and the joy. of. being. among
the angels and the happiness of my father who was already there. . The
argument failed to quiet my rage.

"'God loves us just like His own children,’ Bessie said.
"“'Tf God loves my why did he make my father die?'

"Bessie said I would understand someday, but she was only partly
right. That afternoon, though I couldn't have phrased it. this way then, I
decided that God was a lot less interested in people than anybody. in.
Morrisonville was willing to admit. That day I decided.that-God was not.
entirely to be trusted.

"After that I never cried again with any real conviction, nor expected
much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear
that it would cost me deeply in pain. At the age of five I became a
skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the
prelude to some grim, cosmic joke." [Growing Up, pp.61-62; See also
Theology Today; 1/86, Burton Z. Cooper, “Why, God? A Tale of Two
Sufferers." ]

In a remarkable movie, Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen is at it, :

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as well, posing his favorite question about the meaning of life in light of
its end, and in light of human suffering.

The question is asked on all sides. Why? Why do innocent people
suffer? Why do tornadoes, hit nursing homes? Who does cancer strike young
mothers, and fathers have heart attacks? Why evil and suffering at all?
The question is asked even in the midst of our high and holy festivals if
you listen carefully enough. Who will say a word, for instance, for the
Egyptian infants - whose Passover deaths resulted in the Exodus? Or the
innocent babies of Bethlehem who were slaughtered by a psychotic tyrant
immediately after Jesus' birth? The season of Lent itself moves toward a
cross. Five days after an enthusiastic crowd welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem,
a larger, hateful mob, out of control, would scream for his execution. One
of the few things he said that was remembered and recorded in the language
in which he said it was, "Why?"..."Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani," he said
from the cross. "My God, why have you abandoned me?"

We follow this Lord to his death in Lent. And the human part of
following is the asking, age after age, "Why?" Why do things have to turn
our this way? Why does a gentle man who spent his life loving other people
and helping them live more fully end up with other men's spit dripping off
his face, a public spectacle, executed, with no more or less public
importance than the night-time electrocutions which have returned to
entertain and comfort us. "Why?"

It is asked on all sides. Russell Baker of the Times, Woody Allen,
Jesus on the cross, Job sitting on the pile of ashes that used to be his
home, his possessions, his family, lamenting:

“Though I am innocent, I cannot answer

For he crushes me with a tempest

And multiplies my wounds without cause..."
[Job 9:15,17]

Friends of Jesus posed the question one day in the same, familiar
context - random, unjust and senseless human tragedy. There had been a
public protest involving some Galileans. The government had reacted by
murdering them - all of them, just common people, while they were at
worship yet, in the Temple. Over at Siloam a construction accident had
killed eighteen workers. Why? The best thinking of the day concluded that
suffering resulted from sin... “Do bad things...and bad things will
happen." Sometimes that's true. Jesus told those who were with him that,
as a matter of fact, they were headed for disaster if they didn't mend
their ways. But he rejected the best wisdom of his day and the traditional
answer to the question of suffering. Those people did not die because they
deserved it, or because God was punishing someone.

In our day the question is asked relentlessly and eloquently by Jewish
author Elie Wiesel, who survived the holocaust to think about it and write
about and ask it... Why? In a world we want desparately to believe js
good, why is there such monumental evil? Some of Wiesel's stories are
almost too poignant, too powerful to retell. They involve elderly people

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and you people, Wiesel's family - being executed by the S. S. concentration
camp guards. “Where is God? Where is God now?," one of the characters in
a novel asks as he witnesses the hanging of several men and a boy.

Wiesel's answer is stunning: “He is there - hanging on the gallows."

Wiesel and others know that something is radically different for all of us
after Auschwitz. Either God is dead - there on the gallows, or the
comfortable theology of a good providential God is what died in the

Holocaust, or - most provocatively, God is there, somehow involved in that
ghastly scene,

In the objective saftey of the academy the scholars have always known
that the question of evil in the world and human suffering is the
philosophic question. Academically the problem can be expressed ina
tightly logical sequence -

a. God is good
b. God is all powerful
c. There is observable evil in the world,

Therefore

d. God either causes the evil, in which case one wonders about
God's goodness, or

e. God allows the evil, in which case one wonders about the
goodness some more, or

f. God can't do anything about the evil, in which case one
wonders about the power.

Mostly the issue presents itself to us personally in full power and
poignancy, not as philosophic abstraction, or a story ina book, but in the
reality of suffering we encounter and experience in our own lives. Why, if
there is a God in heaven, is there suffering at all? Who among us has not
asked it? “What have I done to deserve this? What is the reason for

this?"

The traditional answers are not satisfying. Sometimes suffering is a
result of sin, but not all suffering is explained that way. The little
parable of the fig tree in our text this morning is a fact of life. There
is a cause and effect relationship sometimes. Engage in gluttony and pay
the price: violate the atmosphere and watch the trees die: pollute the
water and get sick. Thomas Jefferson, who struggied with the morality of
slavery even while living with it and profitting from it, said that he
trembled for his country when he remembered that God is just. If there is
a just moral order in the universe, injustice is an essential violation, a
disturber of the order. It will be paid for. We - all of us - still suffer
because of the corporate, societal sin of slavery. Generations later we
are still paying for it.

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But not all suffering can be reduced to that equation. One time Jesus
rejected the suggestion that a man was born blind because of his parent's
sin. Job's friends tried the argument on him and were wrong. Job was
innocent. We bring.some. suffering on ourselves - but not all suffering.

"It is God's will" we are told by well-meaning souls in the midst of
grief. "It.will teach you something." And our intuition rebels, just as
surely: as. Russell. Baker's did. All you have to do is stand by the bedside
of a dying child to know that while you may indeed be learning something,
it is blasphemy even to suggest that God is stage managing it for your
edification,..The idea that God causes suffering is contrary to every word
of the New Testament.

William Sloane Coffin, Senior Minister of Riverside Church in New York
City preached at his son's funeral several years ago. His son had died in
an automobile accident. He told about a woman who, meaning to be helpful,
had said, “I just don't understand God's will." Coffin's response is one
of the most honest and eloquent Christian statements on the subject I have
ever read...

"Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy
windshield wiper of his, that he was probably driving too fast in such a
storm, that he probably had a couple of 'frosties‘ too many? Do you think
it is God's will that there are no street lights along that stretch of road
and no guard rail...? The one thing that should never be said when
someone dies is 'It is the will of God.‘ Never do we know enough to say
that. My own consolation-lies in knowing that it was not the will of God
that Alex died: that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's
heart was the first of all our hearts to break."

As we think through the difficult matter of the reality of evil in
God's world, may we have the courage and theological integrity to say that
God does not. will it. May we also have the mature love to understand the
spiritual pain of. the dear person who must not only suffer but hear others
say that God-is responsible for it.

We are left, however, without an answer, In fact, we are left with
the realization that the Bible doesn’t answer the question: that scripture
does not always supply simple answers to tough questions. Job's lament
is resolved when he remembers the transcendent holiness of God and confesses
that he had been speaking when he should have been listening. The Biblical
response to the question of suffering is the being of God:

“My thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways
says the Lord.
For. as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are my ways higher than your ways
And my thoughts than your thoughts."
[Isaiah 55:8-9]

That is not an answer, of course. It is a suggestion that we may be

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asking the wrong question. But ask it, we must, it seems. And if God
doesn't cause suffering to punish us or to teach us a lesson, why does it
exist? Why does God allow it? The reason has to do with our freedom,
because God values human freedom. God has created a world so free that
magnificent things can happen and terrible things: Mozart and Adolf
Hitler, beautiful sunsets and murderous volcanic eruptions, a world class
athlete and birth defects. Biological mistakes occur, and jet engines
fail, and people fall off step ladders. There is no celestial puppeteer
pulling the strings. Rather God gives us the risks of freedom in the same
way as a human parent does. Parents want children to stand alone, to be
strong and live their own lives, and in order for that to happen a freedom
must be extended in which they can, and frequently do, get hurt. There. is
no other way. To guarantee their safety is to prevent them from becoming
persons, It is never to let them out of sight. It is to rule out the.
delight of swinging because he might fall, or swimming because she might
drown, or riding a bicycle because he might be hit by a car. To let a
child out of sight is significantly to increase the danger and possibility
of tragedy. And the better part of parenting is just that loving and
granting freedom, and then being there with strength and comfort when
suffering results. It is not easy. To watch a child suffer because of .the
freedom you extended is painful. To resist the temptation to intercede is
very hard. To love is to accept the risks of freedom.

The Christian word on suffering and evil in the world is not an ~
answer, in the final analysis. The Christian word begins with the
uncertainty of all of history. We don't know why. We know what doesn't
sound right, or seem to fit. We know what we can't bring ourselves to
believe. But we don't know the answer.

Qur word about suffering begins with the belief that in Jesus Christ
God participated fully in our humanity. The theological name for the
Christian word about suffering is Incarnation.

At the heart of the faith which we embrace and which we hold out to
one another, is the belief that God held nothing back when he became a
human being in Jesus Christ. The New Testament does not pull back from the
radical implications of his humanity, although Christian people sometimes
do. The Gospel narrative presents a Christ who was born as one of us, grew
up in a family, learned a trade, made a vocational choice, enjoyed friends,
laughed and cried, was joyful and angry, liked good food and drink enough
that critics one time called him a glutton. The astonishing assertion is
that Jesus was fully human: that when God came among us he did so without
reservation or condition. That means that when Jesus was crucified, when
he experienced the searing intensity of physical pain, and the even deeper
pain of loneliness and abandonment, God experienced it, was subject to it,
felt it. That is the beginning of our word on suffering.

Christianity presents its Lord, at the climax of his life, not
ascending a throne, but rejected by society, betrayed by his disciples,
abandoned by friends and ridiculed by the powerful leaders of his nation.
Christianity's highest and holiest and most meaning-filled symbol is a
cross and its most profound assertion is that God was on it: that God took

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on himself the suffering and evil and pain and loneliness which was that
death. :

That is the response of faith to the question of suffering. The cross
of Jesus Christ is not an answer to the dilemma. As a matter of fact I'm
not certain that we would find an answer helpful even if there was one,
What we need is something to stand under, something to hole on to. The
cross is, for us, a brave, beautiful, life-saving victory because, by God's
grace, what appears to be proof of suffering's permanence and the power of
evil, is transformed, becomes a symbol of something entirely different - a
love that will never let us go. Here we are promised that the God who
created us in freedom does not simply observe our lives, our comings and
goings, our joys and tears, with studied neutrality.

It is here we are promised that when we laugh, God's laughter echoes
our own: and when we weep, God's own tears mix with ours: and when we hurt
and cry out, "My God, why have you abandoned me?" God hears and knows and
feels that deeply too. And when we love the world or life, or another
person so deeply we do not even have words for it, God's humanity
encompasses that as well.

Here, at the cross, we are promised a mystery: that Ged is involved
with human suffering, shares human suffering, takes human suffering into
his arms and heart. It is here at the cross of Jesus that we know that in
suffering we are not alone and will never be alone: that nothing in
creation - not even this - can separate us from the love of God in Jesus
Christ.

Why?
The cross of Jesus Christ, God incarnate, God participating fully in

our humanness, is the Christian word on suffering and evil. It is also the
Good News. Thanks be to God. Amen.