MenuWhere’s God in My Suffering?
A member of Holy Cross occasionally emails me jokes and anecdotes. The last one ended with the phrase: “The best sermons are lived, not preached.”
Recently, at the request of another pastor who was out of town, I made a hospital call on a woman from another congregation. I didn’t know what to expect, except that she was in the emergency unit.
Her warm smile bespoke a pleasant greeting, and she introduced herself even before I had a chance to. She told me her situation and how a chronic condition which afflicted her had suddenly become acute. Even when she recovers and leaves the hospital, her chronic condition will plague her for a long time, perhaps her lifetime. Yet as we talked, as I shared a psalm with her, and as we prayed together, this Christian woman almost unfailingly had a smile on her face.
As you may recall, on July 8th I preached on “Rejoicing in Weakness” using our Epistle reading, 2 Corinthians 12, as the text. That’s where St. Paul boasts “only of my weaknesses.” (2 Cor. 12:5) In dramatic detail, Paul relates how he suffers from “a thorn given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from being conceited.” (2 Cor. 12:7)
Paul wanted that “thorn” to be gone. He wanted to be rid of it. He wanted to suffer no longer. So he prayed to God. This was a serious, prolonged prayer concern. “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.” (2 Cor. 12:8)
But Paul did not get the answer to prayer that he was looking for: “But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor. 12:9a)
So Paul writes to his Corinthian friends, “Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Cor. 12:9b-10)
About this passage, the Lutheran reformer Philip Melancthon wrote (in Article XIII of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession): “Troubles are not always punishments for certain past deeds, but they are God’s works, intended for our benefit, and that God’s power might be made more apparent in our weakness. So Paul says God’s strength ‘is made perfect in weakness.’ Because of God’s will, our bodies should be sacrifices, to declare our obedience, and not to pay for eternal death. God has another price for that: the death of His own Son.”
Apart from the cross of Jesus Christ, human beings experience suffering in a meaningless, out-of-control world that offers no hope. Hopelessness induces people to look at God and cry, “Why me?” Hopelessness makes suffering people susceptible to desperate temptations to take matters into their own hands and, if all else fails, even to eliminate the sufferer… anything to relieve the pain.
Christians don’t like suffering any more than anyone else. But through God’s Word and Sacraments, we begin to see the visible things of God through the cross and suffering.
What does this mean? We place our trust in the cross of Christ for salvation from our sins through Jesus’ sacrificial suffering and atoning death in our place. Through the cross of Christ we have hope for the hereafter AND we are reborn to live a new life, here on earth, in a community of faith in the meantime. And that means enduring some suffering now, and looking for God’s presence and assurance and hope through Christ, and trusting in His promises.
The wonderful Christian I visited in the hospital understood that God chose to reveal His heart to her in the cross of Christ and in her own cross of suffering.
“Where is God in our suffering?” He is with us, right in the middle of it.
I pray that our Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, will help us keep our balance as we walk with one foot in this broken world and one foot in the hope of the world to come.
- Pastor Nickel
