3rd Sunday of Lent – 20 March 2022
Some of us may have heard of Harold Krushner’s 1989 book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. (It was followed in 2000 by a book, by another author, entitled, When Bad Things Happen to Other People!) Krushner’s book was an attempt to come to terms, in a philosophical way, with the experience of evil around us. Why do bad things happen to people who otherwise seem to lead good lives? It’s a question that often presents itself to us, and it’s a question that resists answer.
There can often seem to be an inherent unfairness to life. Life is unpredictable; it appears random in so many instances, and we are rendered with an extraordinary fragility and vulnerability, if we have the strength to admit it. We are at the mercy of the sheer weight of human freedom and the volatility of the natural world, whatever our illusion of being in control. How this is brought home to us in the face of the horror that is unfolding in Ukraine.
It is not unusual for us to seek to defend ourselves from these kinds of vicissitudes through an appeal to a god whom we believe must have manipulative control of life’s events, and to whom our efforts at goodness cry out as justification for immunity from life’s unpredictability. When our moral efforts fail to achieve such safety, as they invariably will, our prayer can easily shift from one of appeal to condemnation – condemnation of either ourselves or of the god in whom we had placed our trust. How often can we be greeted with the questions: “How could a good god let this happen?” and “What I have done wrong for this to have happened?” In some cases, people actually attribute their current tragedy with some past failing or wrongdoing, and voice that they consider their present illness to be God’s punishment on them, which is a dreadful burden to carry.
Life’s critical moments force out into the open the image of God that we carry – and whatever our intellectual perception of God, such moments often reveal that, deep down, we carry an image of God not far removed from a divine Santa Claus at best or, at worst, a god who is punitive and vindictive. Our primitive childhood projections of authority reach out with amazing force and hijack all that we have learnt about the true, living God disclosed to us in Jesus.
The question at the heart of our misfortunes demands an answer, and the image of God that we carry is frequently forced to carry the solution, and the answer often leaves us condemned.
This religious problem is one not foreign to Jesus himself who confronts it for us in today’s gospel as the people around him struggle to make sense of two tragedies of his own time. He refuses to enter into the logic of divine condemnation, for his own experience of God cannot admit of this sequence.
Jesus both affirms the apparent unpredictable freedom of creation and the sheer spaciousness of God, in whom there is no condemnation. The paradox of these two realities, side by side, confuses us deeply. We want one to answer the other, and are left mystified in the refusal of the translation.
There are many things that happen to us and to others which have no explanation. Life is what it is: often random, unpredictable, volatile. There is no answer to many of life’s experiences, and the gospel does not afford us the luxury of cheap religious clichés in the midst of vulnerability.
Does this mean, however, that God is simply some disinterested Creator who, having created, lives in some distant unaffected place?
Certainly not! In Jesus, we believe God has become one with us in what we experience, one with us in our suffering. It is this divine companionship in our very questions that enables us to enter into what we experience with dignity and love.
Because even though our religious faith does not provide us with clichéd explanations for life’s questions, it does enable us to hold what we experience, to break it open, and to discover there, yes, even in the most painful moments, the invitation to yet further life.
Though there may not be ready explanation for life’s contingent moments, there nonetheless exists an invitation in the midst of them – if we can stay present to them long enough to begin to perceive such a possibility. This is not merely the project of positive thinking, of trying to put a positive face on things. Rather, according to the profoundly Christian logic of life in death, the paschal mystery at the heart of our faith in Jesus, it is about entering what we suffer, and seeking there the intimations of new life.
And new life does await us in our suffering, even though it may take us many years to be able to understand it. Perhaps it is the invitation to take a different direction in our life; perhaps the invitation to be with those we treasure in a new way; perhaps the invitation to live in greater truthfulness. The invitation cannot be predicted, only acknowledged in the depth of our hearts and experience. As we replace the question of “How could God let this happen?” with the question, struggled with even over years, of “What is the invitation to me in what I am experiencing?’ then we are like the man nurturing the fig tree in his vineyard.
Lent is the time to listen more deeply to our experiences, both those we think we have created and those that have come to us outside our control, and to wonder at the invitation in them that whispers in our hearts. Then the fig tree of our own lives might bear fruit, and fruit in abundance, and we will know in those same hearts the power of Easter resurrection.
