If You Can’t Say It at a Child’s Grave…
Suffering is our theme for this weekend’s worship. Job’s our text. Sounds awesome, huh?
Having let the cat from the bag, I hope no one stays away because suffering is something that comes to all of us, sooner or later. None of us is getting out of this life alive. It’s possible to read through the entire book of Deuteronomy and never once make a connection to your own life. Read the first couple of chapters of Job, however, and it’s obvious: he is us, just drawn in starker relief.
While suffering is something that comes to all us, it’s also something nearly all of us get wrong. After ten years in ministry, I can’t tell you how many graves, bedsides, funeral homes and ER’s I’ve stood near and heard well-meaning Christians utter the most banal and even destructive platitudes. By and large we have no idea how to speak of suffering, which, when you think about it, is ironic for a people that worship a crucified carpenter.
This week I’ve been rereading David Bentley Hart’s little book, The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami? It’s a life-changing kind of book.
In it, David Hart recalls reading an article in the NY Times shortly after the tsunami in South Asia in 2005. The article highlighted a Sri Lankan father, who, in spite of his frantic efforts, which included swimming in the roiling sea with his wife and mother-in-law on his back, was unable to prevent any of his four children or his wife from being swept to their deaths.
In the article, the father recounted the names of his four children and then, overcome with grief, sobbed to the reporter that “My wife and children must have thought, ‘Father is here….he will save us’ but I couldn’t do it.”
In the Doors of the Sea, Hart wonders: If you had the chance to speak to this father, in the moment of his deepest grief, what should one say?
Hart argues that only a ‘moral cretin’ would have approached that father with abstract theological explanation: “Sir, your children’s deaths are a part of God’s eternal but mysterious counsels” or “Your children’s deaths, tragic as they may seem, in the larger sense serve God’s complex design for creation.” It’s all part of God’s plan in other words.
Hart says that most of us would have the good sense and empathy to talk like that to the father (though my experience tells me Hart would be surprised how many people in fact would say something like it).
This is the point at which Hart takes it to the next level and says something profound and, I think, true:
“And this should tell us something. For if we think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another’s sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them.”
The test of whether or not our speech about God is true, then, isn’t whether it’s logical, rationally demonstrable or culled from scripture. The test is whether we could say it to a parent standing at their child’s grave.
Hart’s axiom shows, I think, how only God-talk that’s centered in the crucified and risen Christ passes the test.
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Nice. Love over logic.