The Protestant missionary Martin Burnham was killed, June 7, 2002, when he was caught in the crossfire between his captors — the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf — and soldiers of the Philippine army. In the aftermath, some members of his family and church were quoted as saying that they were able to accept his death because they knew it was “God’s will.”

This morning, I watched an interview with the mother of a young man who had been raped by a priest at the age of 12 and who had ended up committing suicide several years later. She was asked by the reporter if these events had shaken her faith. She replied that her faith was as strong as ever. “I know that God did not want this to happen to my son. I know He doesn’t want it to happen to anyone.”

The will of God is not an easy thing to discern, particularly when we try to explain suffering and death. For millennia, human beings have sought to fathom a deeper purpose behind their suffering. A common view among pagan religions was that suffering was a punishment for angering the Gods. But in the Book of Job, we are confronted with a different view. Job is a righteous man and he seems to have committed no sin that would justify his punishment. In the end, the only answer the Biblical author can offer is to confront Job, and the reader, with the overpowering majesty and “otherness” of God, before whom Job can only say that “I have dealt with great things that I do not understand…therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes.”

Such an answer, even if ultimately correct, seems to frustrate the human mind. We want to understand. It is in our nature. The risk is that in our quest to make suffering intelligible we make God into something He is not. It is no accident that the mass destruction and genocide that characterized the 20th century led to theologies that suggested that God was somehow incapable of preventing such evils. The alternative — that a gracious and loving God was capable of stopping the Holocaust but chose not to do so — seems almost too terrible to believe.

It is precisely because we believe in a God who does respond to prayer and who does intervene in the world that the burden of suffering becomes almost unbearable. We can imagine two men, both pious and devout, each of whom prays for the recovery of his terminally ill daughter. One daughter recovers, the other does not. The first man praises the God who saved his daughter. But what is the second man to think? That God did not wish his daughter to recover?

I confronted this question several years ago when a good friend of mine had breast cancer. She was a single mother in her early 40s, with two children in middle school. I prayed for her every night for three years, saying “God, if anyone deserves a break, it’s Peggy. Please don’t take her away from her kids.” In the end, though, she was not spared.

I do not have an answer. But I am skeptical of easy pieties. I don’t necessarily believe that Peggy’s death was part of any divine ‘master plan,’ although I don’t rule it out either. I am similarly skeptical of the view that God brings misfortune into our lives in order to make us better people, that suffering is the ‘blow of the sculptor’s chisel’ that makes us perfect. But I don’t entirely rule that out either.

In the end, I am thrown back, like Job, before the overwhelming mystery of God, who deals “with great things that I do not understand.” When I look up at the cross, I know that whatever suffering I must endure, I do not endure alone. Whether that suffering is the will of God, or something that gives Him great offense, I know that He loves me, that I can trust in Him, and that there is nothing, not even my death, that can separate me from Him.

Sursum Corda
June 14, 2002

© Peter Nixon 2002. Used with permission.