Life after Death....

Just a few days after I posted that great song by Steve Camp, There will be a Day, we get word that a friend of ours, Marina Thomas, went home to be with Jesus this morning. This mother of 10 had a nursing baby just 3 months old.

Ron Rolheiser comments about the book, "The Shack", and how it deals with pain, evil and suffering:

How does the God we meet in The Shack answer the question of evil? Pretty much like Jesus at the death of Lazarus, when he is asked: Where is God when bad things happen to good people? God, Jesus tells us there, does not necessarily rescue us from suffering and death. Rather He enters into them with us and ultimately, though not immediately, redeems them. Asked if he could have prevented Mack's daughter's death, God answers: Yes. First, by not creating at all. ... Or secondly, I could have chosen to actively interfere in her circumstance. The first was never a consideration and the latter was not an option for purposes you cannot possibly understand now.

So what is God's answer to the problem of evil? The God we meet in The Shack replies: At this point all I have to offer you as an answer is my love and goodness, and my relationship with you; essentially what Jesus offers us in the Gospels, not an intellectual answer but a relationship. 

Roheiser also wrote in another column:

The sisters of Lazarus, Martha and Mary, send a message to Jesus telling him that "the man you love" is gravely ill. Curiously though Jesus does not immediately rush off to see Lazarus. Instead he stays where he is for two more days, until Lazarus is dead, and then sets off to see him. When he arrives near the house, he is met by Martha who says to him: "If you had been here, my brother would not have died!"

Basically her question is: "Where were you? Why didn't you come and heal him?" Jesus does not answer her question but instead assures her that Lazarus will live in some deeper way. Martha then goes and calls her sister, Mary. When Mary arrives she repeats the identical words to Jesus that

Martha had spoken: "If you had been here my brother would not have died!" However, coming out of Mary's mouth, these words mean something else, something deeper. Mary is asking the universal, timeless question about suffering and God's seeming absence. Her query ("Where were you when my brother died?") asks that question for everyone: Where is God when innocent people suffer? Where was God during the holocaust? Where is God when anyone's brother dies?

But, curiously, Jesus does not engage the question in theory; instead he becomes distressed and asks: "Where have you put him?" And when they offer to show him, he begins to weep. His answer to suffering: He enters into peoples' helplessness and pain.

Afterwards, he raises Lazarus from the dead. And what we see here will occur in the same way between Jesus and his Father. The Father does not save Jesus from death on the cross even when he is jeered and mocked there. Instead the Father allows him to die on the cross and then raises him up afterwards.

The lesson in both these deaths and raisings might be put this way: The God we believe in doesn't necessarily intervene and rescue us from suffering and death (although we are invited to pray for that). Instead he redeems our suffering afterwards. God's seeming indifference to suffering is not so much a mystery that leaves the mind befuddled as a mystery that makes sense only if you give yourself over in a certain level of trust.

Forgiveness and faith work the same. You have to roll the dice in trust. Nothing else can give you an answer. And I do not say this glibly. I know too many people who have been hurt, brutally and unfairly, in ways that make it difficult for them to accept that there is an all-powerful God who cares.

But sometimes the only answer to the question of suffering and evil is the one Jesus gave to Mary and Martha - shared helplessness, shared distress, and shared tears, with no attempt to try to explain God's seeming absence, but rather a trusting that, because God is all-loving and all-powerful, in the end all will be well and our pain will someday be redeemed in God's embrace. 

 I post all of this because we are all in a state of shock.

Why? Death is indeed a regular occurance. It happens. But when it involved people you know, or the situation is one of a Mom with 10 children, you look up and ask the question, Why?

So I ask. Why? The answer is not what I am looking for...but it is an answer that involves trust and redemption. And for now, I have no alternative but to accept it.