Thinking about suffering

Reflection for morning worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator, streamed on Tuesday 21st March 2023 

‘Sickness brings patience, patience brings perseverance, and perseverance brings hope’.

If you’ve ever been to the Galway Clinic, you’ve most likely seen these words, written on the wall in the reception area close to the chapel, and attributed to St Paul. When I first saw them, I thought what a strange thing to write on the wall of a hospital. When I’m sick - in pain, frightened, suffering – I’m not inclined to feel patient. All I want is for someone to make my suffering go away!

These words are of course a variant of Paul’s words in his Epistle to the Romans (5:1-11), which we have just heard. ‘But we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’

Now we all know about suffering – it is a part of our common experience as human beings. And surely suffering is a bad thing, a manifestation of evil within the world. I don’t mean pain. Pain can be a good thing, when for instance it teaches us as children not to put our hands in the fire. Suffering is more a psychological torment that comes from feeling bereft, out of control, in danger, unloved, hopeless, only sometimes from unremitting pain. Suffering drives us to forget everything and everybody else around us in our rage to be rid of it. Suffering is evil.

So how can Paul possibly ask us to ‘boast in our sufferings’? Doesn’t that sound a bit like glorying in something evil? Let me try to tease out some thoughts about suffering.

First let’s think about the causes of suffering.

Much of the suffering that we see about us, and experience ourselves, is caused directly or indirectly by you or by me, or by other human beings. Consider the wholesale suffering caused by war and oppression, driven by human greed and thoughtlessness. Or what you might call retail suffering, from hurtful words to a loved one up the scale to violence, rape and murder, caused by people like you and me not living up to God’s loving message. This suffering is due to our human propensity to sin, what theologians call ‘original sin’. We know we are all sinners, we all need forgiveness, and Jesus assures us that our loving-father God will forgive us if we truly repent.

But there’s an awful lot of suffering that we really can’t trace back in this way to human sin. I’m thinking of the suffering caused recently by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. I’m thinking of the suffering caused by illness and disease, for instance by Covid-19. And I’m thinking about the suffering caused by the fact of death – in the long run we know death will separate us from all that we know and love. All of this suffering seems to be due to the working out of the natural laws of physics, chemistry, biology, in the universe created by almighty God.

As Christians we believe our God to be both almighty and loving.

But surely if God were really both, he would not allow such a burden of suffering to exist. He would not have made us humans subject to original sin, we would never cause others to suffer. He would have created a universe in which natural disasters and disease were absent, and where we would be immortal. Therefore, some say, if God exists he can’t be both: if God is almighty he can’t always be loving, and if God is always loving he can’t be almighty. This is known as the Problem of Suffering, or the Problem of Evil, and it has been debated by philosophers and theologians since time immemorial. How can we resolve this paradox?

St Paul cuts through this logical hair-splitting by focussing on God’s love. As he puts it, ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’. Jesus, with perfect obedience to his loving father God, suffered a cruel death on the cross, in order to show us all how to deal with the suffering and death, which every one of us will know. ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit’, Paul says. It is this love which gives us the character to endure suffering, and never lose hope. Our Christian hope is that by God’s grace our faith will justify us – that is our faith will put us in the right relationship with God – and so bring us ‘peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’.

How amazing it is that almighty God through his Son Jesus Christ should express such loving solidarity toward sinful people like you and me! How comforting we find that solidarity when we ourselves suffer!