Sermon Archive
Suffering
Sermon preached by Ken Boyd at Evensong on 13 January 2002
Isaiah 51 9-23, 52 1-10; 1 Thessalonians 1
In tonight's second lesson, St Paul reminds the Christians in Thessalonica how they had received the word in much affliction. Affliction, powerlessness before suffering, has been the lot of innumerable people. There has rarely if ever been a time when some individuals, or even whole populations, have not been afflicted by grievous suffering or trouble of some kind. In the case of the Christians in Thessalonica, it took the form of inter-communal violence; and the world is still all-too-familiar with this, in Northern Ireland, in Israel and Palestine, and in many other countries - so many indeed that we find it almost impossible to take in. Writing twenty years ago, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera described the effect of this in the modern world of mass communication. ?The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.?
Much the same might be said today, as the memories of September 11th are drowned out by the deaths of innocent victims of bombing in Afghanistan, and now in the past few days the suffering of the people of Gomo in the Congo, as rivers of fire destroy their city. How long will it be before these sufferings also begin to be forgotten, by all except the survivors themselves? Who now, if they have not read Conrad's Heart of Darkness, remembers the appalling sufferings of black slaves in the 19th century Belgian Congo, or even, in recent decades, the countless victims of civil war in Congo and its neighbouring Rwanda?
Perhaps it is only the human capacity to forget, that allows humans to go on living in a world where so much suffering is inflicted on the afflicted by other humans. Yet this scarcely reflects well on human nature. Humans also, of course, can make heroic efforts to alleviate suffering, to build peace processes, and to alter the environment in the hope that suffering may be prevented in the future. But these efforts are often too little and too late; and when affliction is caused not by people but by nature, it can shake the very foundation of hope that we live in a meaningful universe. If such events are, as insurers say, ?acts of God?, who can trust, or perhaps ultimately believe in, such a God?
In modern times, the case against such a God was made most effectively by Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov . It is claimed, he says, that a wise and an all-powerful God, whose ways we cannot understand, will bring about an ultimate harmony - something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed; it will suffice not only to make forgiveness possible, but also to justify everything that has happened to men.? But against this, Ivan protests: the actual suffering of real people, and especially of little children, is just too high a price to pay for any promised future harmony. If all this is the will of God, then we must reject God.
This argument, in one form or another, has been enormously influential in the modern Western world. Whatever other reasons there may be for the decline of religion?s influence in society, probably the most emotionally as well as intellectually persuasive, is the charge that if the traditional theological picture is true, God is even more cruel and immoral than men. Persuaded by this argument, many people have decided that the very idea of God must be rejected, and that we must have the courage to accept that there is no more to the universe than what we can discover by our senses and sciences. This view is now widely taken for granted among Western intellectuals and in the media.
Karamazov's argument has been influential moreover not only among those with no time for religion, but also among religious people, many of whom have rejected the way in which the churches, at height of their worldly power, often portrayed God. Christians have been forced to ask if the kind of God whom Ivan rejected is the God they see in the face of Christ - Christ who said, ?what you have done to the least of my brethren, you have done to me? - Christ who ended up among the defeated and lost, and whose resurrection is a reality for faith alone. If we see God in the face of Christ, that is, it is no longer a God above, but within human suffering and struggle; and if such a God has any reality, all we know of that reality is what we discover in our own experience.
So what do we know? We know the same world as everyone else knows: a world never, it seems, free of meaningless and cruel affliction; yet a world in which so many try to do what they can to alleviate suffering; a world by which countless people, like Christ himself, are defeated; yet a world which, for all its horrors, is also a wonderful world, and in which anyone at any time can be surprised by joy. Is such joy, as St Paul writes in tonight's reading, ?inspired by the Holy Spirit? Are our epiphanies and our efforts, in other words, part of some larger meaning? Or is our enjoyment of the world, and are our efforts to improve it, largely dependent on the fact that occasionally we manage to forget how awful the world really is?
Well, the world as we know it is much too ambiguous to answer that question for us. It is up to each of us to answer it for ourselves. But in trying to do that, we would be wise to reflect on three consequences of accepting the kind of argument advanced by Ivan Karamazov and many others.
The first of these consequences is that if there really is no meaning to life other than that which individuals give to it, then all those who have died defeated by life, are truly lost for ever. If what we know by our senses and sciences is all that there is, if whatever people have meant when they spoke of and called on God is an illusion, then there is also no ultimate justice for the defeated and lost.
We may believe that. But if we have any human feeling, any compassion, we shall surely want to protest against that conclusion. The same human emotion that made Karamazov reject God, will make us cry out for God's absence to be filled. ?Wish-fulfilment?, many today will reply. Yet across history, we also hear the voices of countless defeated and lost people themselves, calling on God: De profundis, clamavi, Domine. Which is the more authentic voice of humanity - that of those who reject the very idea of God, or that of those who cry to the God they see in the face of their fellow sufferer? Regardless of the received opinions of our time, that question refuses to go away.
The second consequence of Karamazov's argument is no less troubling. If the record of man's inhumanity to man really is so appalling that only our capacity forget preserves our sanity, then the faith in human progress which has kept us going during the last few centuries also is an illusion. Historically, this secular faith may have been parasitical on the religious faith which preceded it. But why, on a deeper level, with so much going against it, do humans continue to hope? This question was once posed in another way by the poet Stevie Smith. No great believer in conventional religion, in her poem Away Melancholy she complains that men mistakenly call good, God. Yet at the end of that poem, she expresses what, in the face of man?s inhumanity to man, and of what insurers call ?acts of God, still kindles hope in human hearts of a greater but as yet unattainable meaning.
Man aspires
To good,
To love
Sighs;
Beaten, corrupted, dying
In his own blood lying
Yet heaves us an eye above
Cries, Love, love.
It is his virtue needs explaining,
Not his failing.
It is his virtue needs explaining,/Not his failing.?These words may make us pause before endorsing Ivan Karamazov's rejection of man's creator. Yes, we may still wish to reject the God of the insurers. But is that God, that human construct, God?
A deeper answer is given by Dostoyevsky himself in the same great novel. The third consequence of accepting Karamazov's argument is that his rejection of God, while fully justified as a rejection of facile ecclesiastical talk about God's will?, may also be a refusal of the responsibility which we humans too, share for the world's sufferings. As if in response, and echoing Stevie Smith's refrain ?Away Melancholy?, another of Dostoyevsky's characters, Father Zossima, says this.
'Fly from.. dejection, children! There is only one means of salvation, then make yourself responsible for all men?s sins, that is the truth, you know, friends, for as soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for everything and for all men, you will see at once that it is really so, and that you are to blame for everyone and for all things.?'
?You will see that you are to blame. In what is sometimes called our?blame culture? we continually ask which other person is to blame. That perhaps is nothing new, since the search for scapegoats is as old as history. But Zossima asks us to turn away from that search, and make ourselves responsible. He asks us, in effect, to share God?s responsibility for the world?s suffering. And is not that what the God we see in the face of the human, suffering Christ, himself appeals to us to do? Only if we truly respond to that appeal, and accept our share of responsibility for the world?s suffering, can we begin to glimpse the experiential reality buried in the theological argument that Ivan Karamazov rejected - God with us, within the human struggle, whose ?arms of love, aching, spent, the world sustain.
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