From 12 to 5,376: Words on Suffering

On Thursday, at the start of my morning Philosophy class, our professor, a tall Kenyan man, began the lecture by continuing our previous class period’s notes on the board, but seconds after he began writing, he said, rather defeatedly, “Oh, you know it’s going to be a bad day when you start by writing the wrong letter on the board.” We all laughed a little, because, hey, it was funny in that African accent, whose consistency across much of the continent always surprises me, considering the vastness and uniqueness of all Africa’s people groups. After a brief period of quiet, from somewhere near the front bursted forth this comment by a student, “Good news is things can only get better.” I sort of screwed up my face a bit, finding the comment odd, and muttered only loud enough for those nearest me to hear, “Oh, no, it can get worse.” I wondered why the awkward response had been stated and thought it sounded a lot like Peter on the hill during the transfiguration, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” It’s an utterly absurd and stupid thing to say, and I wonder if Peter felt really stupid right after he said it, but I think he felt like he must say something. I wondered if that student felt like someone simply had to say something, and isn’t that always the comforting phrase we say to each other? It can only get better?

And so, being amused by this, I mentioned it the next day at lunch, and the response I got at the table was not the one I’d expected (because, of course, everyone was supposed to see it from my point of view—duh). People were shocked that I would even think such a thing. Truthfully, I’m not sure what it is they were shocked by—the fact that I believe things can get a lot worse, or that I would actually admit bad things can happen, really bad things, like worse than writing the wrong letter on the board. I was just being honest—the best policy, right? Or perhaps, what our culture really teaches is that flattery is the best policy, and comfort, the favoured state of mind. And honesty is only good in so far as it doesn’t attempt to reform our perception of reality.

One young lady at my table was appalled at how utterly “pessimistic” I was. When I said it was like thinking you knew how deep the bottom of the barrel was when in truth you had totally missed the barrel for a shallow cup you had deceived yourself into believing was a barrel, she said, “I’d rather believe it’s a cup when it’s actually a barrel than the other way around.” I wondered if to believe this was like not being ready for the Son of Man who was coming at an unexpected hour or like the five bridesmaids who foolishly didn’t bring enough oil. It’s a more painful fall to the bottom of a barrel when you thought the barrel was only the size of a cup than if you’d opened your eyes to the truth of how deep a barrel actually is. And then I contemplated if this may be the way we choose to ignore the harsh realities of the world, and, thus, disregard the suffering of God’s creation. In a barrel of suffering, we’ve trained ourselves to see only twelve ounces deep. Or twenty if we’re feeling Venti.

Suffering is a hard word for Western Christianity. It is a word, like “death,” that we treat as unfavourable and unclean. We run from it, hide from it, turn our backs to it, and drown ourselves in anything that will keep us from it. We treat it as if it is innately evil and in doing so, we have distorted our religion. We have long since allowed ourselves to forget and even, for many, deny, that one of the basic pillars of our faith is suffering. It is in every book of the Bible—the entirety of the book of Job is dedicated to it—and is all over our world. The very center of our faith is dependent on it. Had Jesus not suffered in death, he would have had no power in life. To deny this is to expose a great ignorance of our faith. Our undeserved gift of grace is rooted in the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Our road to our freedom of religion is lain with the blood of martyrs, and as we live our free lives, these same roads are currently being paved in the same way in other countries across the world. By blinding ourselves to suffering, we have not only re-written our Gospel, we have failed our Saviour.

Today, suffering in our world is at a level unprecedented. No age has seen suffering like ours. It has reached farther than once could have been imagined and deeper and more terrible than used to be possible. It is ever present, and yet we’re often shocked at the moments we stumble across it. Nothing about true Christianity—real Christ-likeness—lends itself to blindness. We owe it to the worldwide family of God and to those who have not yet discovered her to pay attention. And we owe it to God, herself.

Recently, I listened to a message at a college chapel on human trafficking. It was articulate and straight forward, balanced well by both illustrations and facts and was insightful and informative. Afterward, in a conversation with someone who had also attended the chapel, I asked how she liked it. She found it interesting, but prefaced her critique by stating how she doesn’t like when messages and sermons push a lot of emotion buttons and press us toward guilt. There is a level, of course, at which I think she is right, but there’s a bigger level at which I think she is wrong. The problem of being aware that suffering exists prolifically in this world is that it creates a well of emotions. The recognition of suffering should touch that in us. The very word evokes it. In truth, we should be emotional about it. Poverty and injustice and war should cause us to feel strongly. Suffering, be it our own, or someone else’s, reminds us that we are feeling human beings. “Pain,” writes the musical duo Over the Rhine, “is our mother. She makes us recognize each other.”

The feeling we really hate, though, of course, is guilt. No one wants to feel guilty, and Americans feel the brunt of guilt a lot. But we should notice when the recognition of the suffering of the world causes us to feel it, because it is a good sign that something is wrong and that that something has directly to do with our choices. One year after 9-11, Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy delivered a poignant speech wherein she observed, “Donald Rumsfeld said that his mission in the War Against Terror was to persuade the world that Americans must be allowed to continue their way of life. When the maddened king stamps his foot, slaves tremble in their quarters. So, standing here today, it's hard for me to say this, but ‘The American Way of Life’ is simply not sustainable. Because it doesn't acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.”

Guilt for the world’s state of being is a feeling we Westerners have tried to turn off. It is our right to not feel it. In fact, it’s our right to not have anyone place guilt upon us. But we have long failed to understand that as Christians, it is not our right. It is no one’s right, because personal rights do not exist in the vocabulary of Christ-like Christianity. If the very God who has the right to the universe gave it all for the most humiliating and painful death of his time to save us—who are worth saving only for one reason: because we are God’s—then we have the right to nothing. By becoming angry at guilt or choosing to ignore it, we blind ourselves to the red flag it is waving. We don’t want to see the truth of the choices we make. Since the onset of globalization, we have chosen to ignore the plight of the poor who break their backs to make the clothes we wear on ours, for the children who work seven days a week making the toys our children play with and then throw away when they tire of them, for the children who serve as slaves in the plantations of West Africa to harvest the cacao beans that make the cocoa and chocolate we buy off the grocery store shelves. Do we think about the hands that go into assembling the cheap plastic toys we sometimes don’t even take out of the plastic wrapping when they fall out of our cereal box or are pulled out of the Happy Meal™? Do we wonder how our wealth has caused their poverty? Are we even aware that this is what globalism has done: made the wealthy wealthier and the poor poorer?

When we hear these things, it is hard for us. It is hard because we want to believe we are a conscious people and this exposes the truth that we are not. We do not believe we are deliberately cruel and yet so many of us deliberately avoid the news of the suffering. In the end, it is a choice. We choose not to seek out the poor, not to do our research and to fight for the plight of the needy. Instead, we fight for our right to not feel guilty. We get angry. No one has the right to tell us we’ve done anything wrong. We tell people it’s not our fault. We are safe because we didn’t know, and then when we do know we feel helpless. We forget that our God can move mountains and we simply cower like a dog and shrug our shoulders, saying, “What can I do?” And so we continue to do nothing, which is not really nothing but instead making the same choices that perpetuate the problem, and convince ourselves that guilt is an inappropriate feeling and we don’t need to be feeling it. We shut our ears to those who we believe cause it and fail to realize that guilt is internal and if words on the suffering of others make us feel guilty, maybe we are.

In the end, when we refuse the plight of the poor and suffering, we refuse the plight of Jesus Christ, the God of all, the God of the poor. We are no better than the Israelites and Judeans who the prophets were called to prophesy to, those who lived in wealth and comfort, who undoubtedly would have thought a broken down car was cause for great suffering, if they’d had cars.

In an oracle to Amos we read, “Thus says the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted away.”

To forget the Triune God is not to forget her existence. It is to fail her call. It is to ignore those God wants us to care for, to forget the needy, to limit our imagination so that we can’t even entertain the thought that they exist. Says the Lord to Jeremiah:

“Declare this in the house of Jacob, proclaim it in Judah: Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but do not see, who have ears, but do not hear. …this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart; they have turned aside and gone away. … Like a cage full of birds, their houses are full of treachery; therefore they have become great and rich, they have grown fat and sleek. They know no limits in deeds of wickedness; they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy. Shall I not punish them for these things? says the Lord, and shall I not bring retribution on a nation such as this? An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule as the prophets direct; my people love to have it so, but what will you do when the end comes?”

These are really harsh words, and we do not, of course, want to believe that these words could mean the same thing for us. But, in fact, why shouldn’t they? When we fail to recognize the suffering of the world, we should not claim we are serving God, because if God is anywhere she is in the suffering. And therein lies the crux of the issue.

Suffering is a place where the face of Jesus can be seen more clearly than any place else on this planet. When we read the story of Jesus Christ it is impossible to miss how much of his time is spent with the outcasts, with the suffering of society. Considering what we know about that culture, that the sinful and unclean were exiled to beyond the city limits, it is easier to conclude that it was not so much that the desperate were drawn to Jesus but that Jesus was drawn to the desperate, to the suffering. In a message on suffering, my friend, Sarah, once remarked, “If you’ve lost sight of Jesus, if you’re not quite sure where to find him, there’s one place that you can go and he’ll always be there. And that is in the suffering.”

Ultimately, if we refuse to turn away from guilt we feel is being placed upon us and instead choose to look it in the face, it leads us less to shame and more to action, because that kind of guilt is ultimately not intended to break us down, but to break our hearts. And maybe we’ll even begin to think like Mother Teresa who said, “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.” To look into the eyes of suffering will not drown us in a pool of shame. Instead, after we come to terms with the fact that the twelve ounce cup of suffering we once thought was the be all end all is actually a 5,376 ounce barrel—forty-two gallons—we just might begin to feel a desire for our hearts to change.

To live in the suffering of the world is not to take it upon our shoulders and attempt to carry a load that is only intended for Jesus Christ. But it is to look it in the face, to live sacrificially for our God and toward those who have no choice but to live in it. It is to take on that piece that makes our neighbor’s load a little less back-breaking. We should not turn away from the horrors of it. We should not be revolted at the ugliness of it. We should care for those who are in the midst of it. We should be saddened by the heartbreak. We should grieve with the suffering. And we should grieve for a long time. We should remember that we are human. Suffering shows us what Ash Wednesday and Lent remind us of, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. To look in the face of suffering and sit with those in it breaks our pride so that we can finally serve sacrificially as we have been called to do.

The answer to suffering is not the absence of suffering. The answer is love. To look into the eyes of suffering is to look into the eyes of Jesus Christ and it is to remember how humble we should be that he suffered for us. “When you look into the eyes of suffering,” says my friend Sarah, “it takes you to the cross. Suffering always brings us to the cross because Jesus is always present in the suffering. … In Jesus, in the story, this crazy, ridiculous love story of the crucifixion, we see that what is deeply wrong in the world can only be mended by sacrificial love. What is deeply wrong in this world can only be healed by cross kinds of sacrifice.”

And this does not leave us with an easy answer, because it likely is asking us some very hard questions. In truth, what lies at the bottom of that barrel is not just the suffering of the world, but the consequences of our choices. Where we see injustices, we do not have the right to stand back and pretend we didn’t see them, or worse, act as if we have nothing to offer of ourselves. We do not have the right to not seek out injustices, to make choices that encourage poverty. We are faced with the reality that we must confront the bad choices people and corporations make. We must recognize and pinpoint the very things we cringe at. We don’t want to be the ones who not only admit that Wal-Mart commits the greatest human rights atrocities of any corporation on record and that The Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic hire children in India to make their clothing—our clothing—but that once we know this, we have the obligation given to us by Christ at the moment we signed up for his saving grace to no longer shop at such places, and to notify these businesses as to why. These are not the choices of the ultra-liberal, the feminist gay-rights activists, the environmental tree-huggers. These are the choices we find at the foot of the cross. God does not ask us to find her on Sundays, to drop a dollar in the cup of the homeless man downtown, to write a check for that charity, and then to go home to our comfortable lifestyles and get lost in the culture until the next week. God doesn’t want us on our time. God wants all of us all of the time. This does not mean that every Christian needs to take up residence in the poorest places of the world, but what if God is asking more Christians to do this than we want to admit? And what does this mean for those who are not asked of this. We are still asked to be in the suffering. So what does that mean?

We are faced with a life altering choice, and so I will end with these words from Sarah, because I think she’s right and we should consider what she has to say: “This is our chance, this is our test of discipleship. Will we stay alert and stay present to it? Will we run and hide and get away until things get better? Will we betray Jesus in our lives—selling him out for something that feels better and is easier to get? And I don’t know what it is for you. I don’t know where that rub is in your life, but I know it’s there, somewhere. There’s some place and you know it well where there’s this rub of discipleship where Jesus is asking you in little small ways, ‘Will you choose me? Will you look at my face in suffering and will you choose me? Or will you betray me? Or will you leave me? Are you willing to pay the real cost of discipleship?’ The cost of discipleship will cost us everything and don’t let anyone deceive you into thinking that it won’t.”