Where was God when...? A Christmas Reflection on Suffering.
Sarah turned away as unbidden tears rolled down her face. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said. “I’m the strong one in our family… I never cry like this.” I’d met Sarah about an hour before through a campus ministry outreach organized by students at Hunter College.
After sharing a bit about her background, interests, and major, our conversation turned to deeper questions. “If God were standing in front of you and you could ask him any question you wanted, what would it be?” I asked. Without hesitating Sarah said, “I’d ask about my mom.”
Sarah was in middle school when her mom’s diagnosis came. As Sarah transitioned from dress up and dolls to adolescence and young adulthood, her mother, a fiercely independent woman gradually lost control of her body, speech, and the ability to feed or clothe herself. Sarah’s tears spoke her question, “Where is God in mom’s suffering?”
It seems to me we all have an articulation of this question hidden in our history. Where was God when my parents separated, when my brother died, when I begged him to stop, and he didn’t? Where was God when the people who were supposed to help became the people who’ve hurt instead?
The Holy Innocents – December 28
Christmas is an odd feast. The church and the world go into overdrive celebrating a scandalous birth, on the margins of cultural and imperial power, because of a 2000-year-old testimony that it’s precisely under such conditions that the creator comes into our humanity. If our lights, presents, and rich foods obscure the vulnerability and marginality of what we’re celebrating, Christmas refuses to let go. The day after Christmas we celebrate the death of the first person put to death for his testimony to Jesus, Stephen.
Today the church remembers the death of the children in Bethlehem, when Herod, the self-proclaimed ‘king of the Jews’ behaved just like Pharoah of old and butchered children he imagined to be a threat.
Bullies always lash out their insecurities on the weak and vulnerable. So, where is God when it happens? Christmas points us to a God who enters into vulnerability. If Jesus is spared Herod’s wrath as an infant, it is not because he is to avoid death at the hands of a tyrant, simply postpone it until his message of healing, hope, mercy, and reconciliation can be seen and heard.
Where was God in the butcher of the innocents? Where was God in Sarah’s suffering, or in yours? Christianity does not avoid, dismiss, or flee from suffering. It stares unflinching into the horror, injustice, rage, and grief and says, God is here… even here. Sarah’s tears, even the ones full of rage at God, were not evidence of God’s absence, but of God’s presence even in unbearable grief.
The good news of Christmas does not insulate is from the ubiquitous violence and fears of tyrants. It frees us to what is right in spite of them.
If God were standing in front of you and you could ask him any question you wanted, what would it be?