By Bishop Greg O’Kelly SJ
It is a truth that for not a few people an experience of tragedy can squash faith.
How could a God of love allow a horrible event to happen? – the violent or pain-filled death of a child, or a loved one killed in an earthquake or hideous accident; or the experience of yet another year of crippling drought, destroying crops and stock and a lifetime of financial and family struggle; or my husband or wife or sister struck down by a lethal cancer, with so much of life yet to be lived, my prayers going into an apparent empty space, a silence of no comfort.
To many people knowing such pain of loss, academic, theological answers are of little help.
What does it mean to speak of God’s “permissive will”, that God did not directly activate an incident of tragedy, but because God respects freedom of will and God’s created laws of nature, God does not intervene to prevent such tragedies.
It is not God, this theory says, who is responsible when a reckless driver fatally injures an innocent cyclist, or Nazi men and women organise and conduct the gassing of almost two million Jewish children in the holocaust, or my wife and two children are gunned down by a madman at Port Arthur, or my boy who was a motorbike racer gets killed in a race, or the hope of my Religious Order contracts cancer and dies, as we say, far too young.
How does all this square with Jesus telling us that sparrows do not fall out of the air without our Father’s knowledge, and that all the hairs of our head are counted?
We know that if people decide to drink and drive, someone might be killed; that if you give people guns, someone will get shot.
God did not do it, and nor does God start wars; it is men who do.
We know that for the non-believer the Problem of Good matches the challenge that the Problem of Evil presents to the believer.
If we are nothing but an envelope of chemicals, and there is no afterlife and no God, then how explain heroism and generosity, how explain soldiers sacrificing their lives in order to save others, or policemen and firemen running into the Twin Towers to save lives.
If we have but one life, then we do not throw it away.
But we know that such self-sacrifice is a truly authentic human act, that we call such people heroes who inspire us, and all this only makes sense in a context of a truth beyond the immediate appearance.
There is mystery. Why did Jesus have to die a death of violence at a young age? Would we have been saved if Jesus died of old age? Was his murder necessary?
The truth is that God so loved the world he sent his only Son among us. God sent Jesus into our world, where man-made and natural tragedy is part of our human experience, where fanatics blow up themselves and others gun down the innocent; man-made motor cars catch fire; volcanoes explode as the earth contracts.
God is not distant; God is present in Jesus, sent amongst us.
St Paul says we continue on earth now what was lacking in the Passion of Christ.
What was that? It is his presence in time after the ascension when he left this earth.
We are the Body of Christ through baptism on our earth now. Jesus entered fully into our daily lives.
He was immersed in the River Jordan, with all that symbolism of full immersion.
He was plunged fully into the river of our humanity, good and bad, and he knew family life and weddings and funerals and rejection, hope and disappointment, he shared bread and wine, and he endured an innocent death of violence.
Only a spiritual gaze can address the problem of evil. It does not fully solve the challenge; the full answer we will only know after the Moment of Truth that is our death.
Christ suffered to identify with our humanity, to point us back to the Father. We are sometimes called to share that vocation.
Christ said “why have you abandoned me? Remove this chalice of suffering from me”.
It is very human for us to shrink from pain and endure doubt, as did Jesus. In our pain, however, Jesus remains our rock.
There is an ancient Christian prayer called the Anima Christi, a favourite of the early Jesuits, which starts “Soul of Christ, sanctify me”.
There is a line that I find most meaningful for people in suffering, “within Thy wounds hide me”.
Sometimes there is nowhere for us to go in our pain apart from the sufferings of the tortured Jesus, at a level without and beneath words.
So, in faith, we can identify with the Suffering One whom the love of God put amongst us, and who rises in time above and beyond death, in new and fuller life as we will.
For the non-believer there is nothing but chance and chaos and random, and there is no explanation for the goodness of people.
Seeing or experiencing suffering and evil is not at all easy for the believer, but with faith and perseverance we might receive the peace of Christ, the peace the world cannot give.
Many of us have seen people grow mighty as human beings through their suffering. It is a grace to pray for.