As I write my thoughts, the news around the world is dismal. There is fighting and uprising in nations around the globe by people who seek freedom from dictators and repressive regimes. People are being killed in the streets by their own government. There is the tragedy of a family of five children who were killed in a house fire while their farmer parents were working. And of course the horrendous news of the fifth largest earthquake in the world that hit Japan, causing a devastating tsunami that killed more than 10,000 people, followed by nuclear reactor meltdown and contamination. These headlines quickly take the place of those of only a month ago from Christchurch, New Zealand, cyclone and flooding in Australia, or a year ago devastation in Haiti. Some may wonder how faith in our loving God can survive the seeming indifference to tragedies that overtake so many on earth.
The lunch bunch group that meets each Wednesday at noon has been reading the book Disappointment With God. Phillip Yancy deals with some of these difficult questions:
Is God Unfair? Is God Silent? Is God Hidden? Through a study of the Bible and how God dealt with the people, sometimes directly as in the Exodus and wilderness experience, then through the prophets who spoke God’s word, finally through the Son who IS God’s word with us, and the Spirit who continues to be God with us, Yancy makes a case that direct revelation often inspires more fear and distrust than faith. The irony is that during what is often the most trying of circumstances, faith shines through. Most heroes in scripture (Abraham, Joseph, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ruth, Job) discovered God in the midst of struggle. Each managed to hold on to trust in God, not because their lives were carefree, but because they trusted God’s presence through the hardships they endured. In doing so, their faith moved from a ‘contract faith’- I’ll follow God if I am treated well – to a relationship that could transcend challenges. “Was life fair to Jesus?” asked one man Yancy interviewed because he expected him to be disappointed in God after suffering severe health concerns in his own life and through his wife’s cancer. “For me” he said, “the cross demolished for all time the basic assumption that life will be fair.” Jesus reacted as many of us did to life’s challenges. He had compassion on those who suffered, he cried when his friend Lazarus died, he asked for his own suffering to be removed, he wondered why God was silent as He hung on the cross. Yet the cross revealed not only what kind of world we have – a world that too often is not fair and too often is filled with pain and suffering, even by innocents – and what kind of God we have; a God of sacrificial love who suffers with us. Jesus offered no immunity, no way out of unfairness and our human condition, but rather a way through it to the other side.
Tony Campolo, sociologist and evangelist, is known for his faith-filled admission:
We live in a good Friday world – but Sunday is coming!
Just as Good Friday demolished the instinctive belief that this life is supposed to be fair; Easter Sunday followed with its startling clue to the riddle of the universe. They call it Good because through his death, Jesus conquered sin and death. Out of the darkness – the worst that the world could do – a bright light shone. The Cross of Christ may have overcome evil, but it did not overcome unfairness. For that Easter is required.
Pastor Carol
