A couple of years ago, a colleague shared with a few of us that her daughter was suffering from a likely terminal cancer. The child rallied and faltered, and we rode the waves with her family in our prayers. We cooed over photographs of her bald little nine-year-old girl,  we counseled her when she asked us how she was going to explain her daughter’s illness and eventual passing to the younger siblings, we rejoiced when an experimental treatment seemed to be working, and we grieved with her when her daughter entered hospice care and passed into the arms of our Lord. At the end, we asked with her. “Why, God?”

She shared with me, on more than one occasion, how several well-meaning Christian friends had made the suffering worse by overlaying the prosperity gospel onto her family’s pain. They asked her about, even accused her of not having enough faith, not praying enough, not believing enough (as if belief could be measured like a gallon of milk) so that God would heal her daughter. Let me be clear: It is not only bad theology, but a form of spiritual abuse to blame those who are suffering for their own pain.

Back in the 1990s Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book entitled When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In it, Kushner asks the age-old theological questions of theodicy: How, if God is both all good and all powerful, can human suffering continue in God’s creation? If God were not all powerful, we could understand it; suffering would be stronger than God. God might want to prevent our suffering, God might indeed be wholly good, but sometimes a little suffering might leak through, God lacking the power to stop it. That’s a pagan idea, of course, in which the gods were limited in their power and often in competition with one another. For the Christian, it is unfathomable.

On the other hand, if God were not wholly good, we could understand suffering in a different way: God could be smiting us for his own amusement. The ancient pagans did not need to wrestle with this question; their gods were capricious and enjoyed watching humanity squirm. Ancient Sumerians believed the Flood was the gods’ way of dealing with humanity, which had gotten too noisy and was disturbing their rest. Ancient Greeks believed the gods toyed even with their heroes. Our faith, however, demands a better answer.

The monument of Grieving mother. Volgograd, Russia.

False teachers today will give ready-made answers, which are satisfying to people who are comfortable but desperately afraid that suffering could be lurking around the corner. We want to be able to do something, blame someone, or otherwise escape suffering with gentle words packaged as theology. Some of these ideas, as gentle as they seem, can quickly become abusive when applied to actual, real-world adversity and pain. After all, the prosperity gospel preachers will tell you that if we just believe enough (and send them some money) we will have health and wealth and happiness, but when that doesn’t happen, what do we do? Do we blame ourselves for not having had enough faith (or money) to avoid a capricious deity?

God, as much as we would like him to, does not promise us that the Christian life will be easy. C.S Lewis famously summed it up, saying: “I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”

Similarly, in the Scriptures, St. Peter tells us not to be surprised when the “fiery trials” come upon us. (1 Peter 4:12) Suffering, no doubt, is inevitable. In fact, it seems that suffering is intended to form our character. If even our Lord dared to suffer, if even our heavenly Father knows the pain of loss, then who are we to think ourselves exempt? The pagan gods often delighted in human suffering, for their own entertainment, but at the time of death, the ancient pagans were alone. The gods withdrew; they could not be in the presence of death. Instead, our gracious Lord, who on the Cross accepted death in his own body in order to give us life, stays to shepherd us in the valley of the shadow of death. Our God shares in our suffering; he unites his very self to it.

This is the call: that we also unite ourselves to his suffering. Jesus, after all, speaks at length, praying for his disciples and for his disciples in generations yet unborn, that we might share a mutual indwelling with him, a mutual “abiding” that we acknowledge each time we receive the Sacrament, asking that “we may dwell in him and he in us.” St. Paul even calls us to “rejoice” in our suffering because: “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh, I do my share on behalf of His body (which is the church) in filling up that which is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.” (Col. 1:24 NAS) Paul could not serve a suffering church unless he shared in Christ’s suffering himself.

Of course, neither can we. We are called to participate in Christ’s suffering, to share in one another’s suffering, to take up our own pain and to bear it. We do not bear it alone, nor are we burdened with suffering without end. Instead, we participate, as Christ did, in the suffering of this world, because our humanity does not permit us to walk above it. We suffer our own burdens and those of others because our shared finitude demands our shared suffering. Most of all, we share in the sufferings of Christ because he, who was without sin, shared our suffering for the sake of us sinners.

Do I now have a satisfying answer for the questions my friend asked? Not really.  Suffering is still a discordant note in the order of God’s perfect creation. Nonetheless, I can walk with her through this not-yet-perfected world and share with her in the pains of the Cross. God is wholly good, so good that he permits us to share in his work of walking with us through our suffering. God is wholly powerful, so powerful that God in Christ can let the power of the heavens slip idly through his fingers to take on the weakness of the Cross for our sake. Perhaps, in his wisdom, it is our suffering that he sanctifies to us, to make us a little more good and a little more powerful, a little more like his very self, along the road to glory.