Blessed Assurance, by The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkipatrick
Posted on
March 25, 2016
Good Friday
Trinity Hartford
It is a natural human tendency to want explanations for things that offend our sense of justice and fairness. Now my family thinks I carry my desire for explanations to a ridiculous and even embarrassing extent. But surely if anything seems to demand an explanation it would be the events we remember this Good Friday evening, events which represent human evil.
Given the love and mercy of an all-powerful God, the crucifixion of God’s beloved son Jesus seems to demand an explanation because it challenges what we believe about God’s power and concern for all things human and most particularly for God’s own son. The bloody and painful journey from the arrest of this non-violent compassionate religious teacher and healer to his excruciating death on a cross brings us into the heart of evil: of events that challenge our fundamental beliefs about what is fair and good in God’s dealings with the world, a world that God created in love and whose ultimate fulfillment God intends. A morally innocent man who taught love, compassion, gentleness and self-sacrifice is brutally beaten before he is nailed to a cross. In the face of this horrendous act, we want to know: why did God, who is all-powerful and all-loving, let, or even worse, cause this to happen? We want, we demand, an explanation. And Christian theologians have not been reluctant to provide one, or, in fact, many. One explanation, which is becoming for many Christians no longer plausible, is that God, like a medieval monarch, was dishonored or shamed when God’s human creation turned against him at the moment of the original sin and spread that sin to every human being since then. God, in this view, demands that someone restore the divine honor and that someone should be a morally innocent person whose death would free God to forgive all other persons. This explanation, as I noted last year on Good Friday (I don’t know why I keep being given this preaching slot: that, too, demands an explanation), turns God into a petty prince who can’t get no satisfaction unless someone dies to restore his honor. This is a view of God as a vengeful tyrant who demands innocent blood and sacrifice before he will deign to love again what God originally created in love. This is the kind of God who has been used by human fathers and mothers to justify their abuse of their children until they’ve paid the price for their disobedience to their parents. Whatever theological merit this view of God once had it has lost its power for many Christians today who find it mired in long-lost medieval assumptions about honor and revenge and the demand for innocent blood.
Another explanation that has been offered to the problem of evil appeals to the mysterious will of God. We are told that human suffering and evil simply must be part of a divine plan even though we can’t see what it is. Our finite and sinful natures are such that we can’t explain or justify the horrendous evils of the world but, we are told, there is in God’s mind a justification for all this evil. But this explanation hardly satisfies us either and leads many into atheism. It requires us to say to the parents of a child suffering from a painful terminal illness, it’s part of God’s plan that your child suffer; it’s God’s will that you and your child live in agony, even if we can’t possibly discern why God would will such a thing. This explanation by appeal to the mystery of God’s will often winds up justifying every human and natural atrocity by the assurance that God wills it for reasons we can never fathom. But such an assurance does little to persuade us that this God is a God of love and compassion.
What explanations are left, then, if we find these two unacceptable? I’m beginning to think, even as a person whose professional career has been dedicated to seeking explanations for virtually everything (as I admitted earlier to the despair of my family), that Good Friday invites us to set aside the search for explanations and instead to step personally into the narrative of Jesus’ death and to join him as he moves through his last hours. The enormity of evil is perhaps not best approached by reassuring explanations or justifications or by theological mysteries but rather by undergoing existentially events that cannot be explained or justified. Explanations have a tendency to domesticate evil, to make it more acceptable because it is willed by God. Explanations hide the enormity of evil from us by covering it with the false reassurance that’s all part of God’s plan for us.
But Jesus’ undeserved suffering is not a pre-scripted play or a charade, though some early Christians believed his divine nature left his body before the first whip was laid to his back or the first nail driven into his hands and feet. It is not a drama in which the plot has already been resolved by the author. Jesus is not just going through his part already knowing how it will all turn out. Jesus really suffers and bleeds and cries out to God asking why he has been abandoned or forsaken. Those are real cries from the heart, not words from a script which has already been written.
Today in a world which seems overrun with moral atrocities, with the grossest of all violations of human dignity, with everyday pain and brutality and natural disasters, the attempt to offer reassuring explanations for all this evil seems callous and inappropriate to the existential suffering people are actually going through. But a suffering person does not first want a theoretical explanation for his plight: he wants a cup of water, or a blanket, or a shelter, or food or medical care or whatever will rescue him from his horror.
In our liturgy and readings for this night, we are being asked to join Jesus as he is dragged from one event to another on his way to the cross without the comfort of an explanation. Joining Jesus means stepping into the details of this horrendous night, into the specific moments of his humiliation and agony and sense of desertion and abandonment by God. Confronting or experiencing each of those moments in their stark and merciless immediacy, unprotected by the warmth of a reassuring explanation, is perhaps a better way of identifying with the evil Jesus encountered and through him the evil that faces so many of us today. The evil of injustice, oppression, neglect, indifference, callousness, and inhumanity. The evil of the death of innocent children, the slaughter of civilians by fanatical terrorists wrapped in the mantle of religious zealotry and ideology. The evils of this world are too numerous to count. So instead of counting them or theorizing about them or explaining them, we can I think do no better than putting ourselves, at least temporarily and through our imaginations, into the shoes or often bare feet of those who are unjustly undergoing evil.
When we do that we join Jesus on his way to Golgotha. And what do we take with us on that journey? What Jesus took with him: a simple assurance without a protective explanation that no matter what was happening to him, he would never be ultimately abandoned by God. In the moment of his deepest despair, as found in the words of the Psalm which he recited on the cross, after asking why God seemed to have abandoned him, he returns to his fundamental conviction that God did not and will not despise the affliction of the afflicted; Jesus says that God even in the midst of horrendous evil “did not hide his face from me, but heard me when I cried to him. . and I will proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.” God did not explain what was going on or why but instead heard Jesus and delivered him from its most fearsome aspect: a sense of being abandoned by the one who loved him. This deliverance did not stop the nails from being driven into his flesh but it did ensure that his death on the cross did not sever his basic and enduring link to God.
God has and will deliver us from the power of evil to take away our loving relationship with God and will even deliver us from explanations of evil that do more harm than good to our understanding of God’s love and mercy. That love will get us through the horrors of evil and it is upon that love, not upon explanatory justifications, that we should rely. For in the end only an unexplained and unearned love which is with us at every moment of our journey through the valley of the shadow of death can ultimately deliver us from evil and its most insidious threat, the threat of being left alone by God in the midst of evil itself. Our ultimate reassurance is that nothing will ever separate us from the love of God. And that reassurance is worth far more than an explanation that winds up explaining away the evil that confronts us.