4th Sunday of Easter Year C

The Enigma of Suffering

Why do we live in a world where people can suffer and die so suddenly – without any apparent reason?   Why can there seem to be such a randomness about suffering and death?

I asked myself this question when I was at the funeral recently of a girl who was knocked down and killed by a lorry in Nottingham, in the first year of her university course there. She had done well at school, and an adult life that was full of promise was suddenly snatched away.   Some of you may also remember the death in a road accident a few years ago of Nick Duffell from Alsop, someone else who was abruptly taken from his family in the cruellest of ways.   Then there was the little girl shot by someone aiming to kill her step-father in a drug-related feud, mentioned again in the newspapers last week.

These are individuals.   We will no doubt also remember the recent earthquakes in Bam; Gujarat; Armenian; and any number of other natural disasters which have killed large numbers of people, seemingly without reason.   Or those murdered in Rwanda ten years ago; the civilians caught up in the violence in Iraq; any millions of other innocent victims of war.  

In all these instances one can point to immediate causes of these people’s suffering and death – but we still cannot say why those particular people had to suffer.

Suffering and death remain shrouded in mystery, at least when we try to understand the rationale for particular people’s suffering.   Since ancient times there have been those who have asked why certain people suffer more than others. In the Bible there are various examples of this:

• In the psalms we read of those who ask why the righteous seem to suffer more than the wicked.
• The author of the book of Ecclesiastes comments morosely that all is vanity – ie meaningless, empty; there is no purpose to life – people simply live, work and die.
• The book of Job considers why a good man, a man favoured by God, should suffer – is the suffering sent by God, or is it a result of something Job has himself done?  
• In the New Testament there is the story of the man who was born blind:   people asked Jesus – who sinned, this man or his parents?   the assumption being that suffering was a result of sin.   But the fact that this trick question was being asked suggests that people realised that the answer was more difficult and more complicated; that the reason why righteous people suffered was not clear.

So what does the Christian faith have to say about this problem? I would like to suggest various responses:

• suffering can be a result of the bad things people do to one another – violence, selfishness, war etc.   God gave us free will – so some people choose evil, and others suffer the consequences.   This applies in some cases of suffering but not in those where the suffering seems to be random and arbitrary.  
• suffering may be a result of things you do yourself – mistakes you make, harm you do to yourself, not looking after your health, for example – but this is by no means a complete explanation of why some people suffer through illness.
• More fundamentally, it may be that on this earth there is simply a limit to our knowledge of certain things, whose rationale is kept from us.   We simply cannot always understand why some things happen.   ‘My ways are not thy ways’, says the Lord (Isaiah).   But the effect of our attempt to wrestle with these impossible questions is that we are kept humble, and reminded that we are not God, we are not omniscient.  
• Leading on from this - we cannot always understand or know God’s purposes, which may be beyond what we can discern.   We cannot believe that the sudden death of a loved one or a close friend can be in accordance with God’s purposes.   But maybe it is just wrong to be looking for a ‘reason’ in God’s plan why this happens – think of the millions of lives which are cut short every year around the world through disease, war, accidents, hunger or poverty.
• The suffering and death of someone who is close to us reminds us that we can take nothing for granted in this world.   In previous generations far more people died early, or unexpectedly, than today.   People were more used to living with the possibility that this would happen.   More people then seemed to be aware of the need to prepare for one’s death, and to be thankful for each day which one was alive.   For things will never go on indefinitely as we would wish them to – as Eileen Woodroffe once said to me, when your number’s up, it’s up.
• We also have to remind ourselves of the eternal dimension to existence.   Our brief span on earth – and it is brief, compared with the 13.5 billion years the universe is now thought to have been in existence – is not all there is – so our Christian faith tells us.   Christians have always believed that our real home is in heaven   - ‘in my Father’s house there are many mansions’, or dwelling places.

But of course none of these points will completely take away the sadness and sorrow of bereavement. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn?”   How can we believe this?   Yet I have found that some, at least, of those who have had to cope with unexpected loss have eventually emerged stronger, more aware of the gift of life that we all enjoy, less ready to take life for granted, more ready to commit our lives – and our time of death – to God in prayer and in a spirit of trust in him.

When we lose someone close to us we are driven back to the love of our family and friends, and especially to the hope that in spite of our darkness and distress we will be given the resolve and courage to carry on.   We have heard in today’s gospel reading about Jesus the Good Shepherd. He is the one of whom we think whenever we say the well-known words of Psalm 23 – ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I’ll not want’ (ie we will lack nothing).   Notice that we are not told that he will keep us for ever from death’s dark vale.   There will come a time when this can’t be avoided.   But at that moment we should not fear: ‘in death’s dark vale I fear no ill’.   Let us then today hold onto the knowledge, that even if our faith is weak, God will be with us.   For surely the green pastures of Derbyshire, so familiar to all of us, are a reminder of the eternal green pastures in which the Good Shepherd will lead us, if we follow him