The protracted conflict has intensified in recent days, with other countries, including Iran, stoking the flames. “Human nature, as it is, always produces the same results.” There is little in history to argue with Thucydides. The irony disappears from the headlines.
If human nature is prone to violence, the question remains how a good God could allow such destruction. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel says anger is the last remaining evidence of God.
Wiesel believes that memory is both a curse and a source of salvation. It denies comfort and refuses to let the past remain in the past. But memory turns suffering into witness, and witness turns into responsibility. This responsibility applies to Israel, America, and all those who remember their pain but ignore the pain they inflict on others.
One of the strangest concepts in classical Christian theology is God impassable-The claim that God does not suffer and cannot be moved by anything other than divinity. At first, the idea repulses you. People who cannot feel pain suspect that something is missing.
Explanations for evil inflicted by a loving God pale when the real questions are ignored. who cares? And how does God show it?
There are many different causes of deep pain. But what I need from you is not an answer, but a presence. Someone who stays with me, not with explanations.
We value empathy and often treat it as the highest virtue. Suffering with those who are suffering seems like the most obvious sign of love. For this reason, many modern Christians have resisted the impossibility of God. Indeed, they argue, a loving God must feel it. If God doesn’t share the world’s pain, can love be real?
If Christ reveals divinity, what happens to the cross? If impassability means that God cannot suffer, does that mean that Jesus’ suffering does not reveal divinity, or does it mean that God does suffer after all? But from the first centuries, theologians maintained that an eternal God must be immutable and impossible. This was not a flaw, they said, but a consolation.
This means that God’s attitude toward the world never changes: it is always loving, just, and good. Divine love is not just a feeling, but a constant reality that never diminishes, no matter how dark the circumstances.
A little analogy may be helpful, although it may be a bit silly. Imagine that you are falling into a fast-flowing river and are heading towards a huge waterfall. Rescuers are standing on the shore. There is no need for a rescuer to jump in and say, “I understand your pain!” I’m glad you understand, but what I need is a rope.
Or imagine you are about to undergo major surgery. Two doctors came and one sat with you and said he understood how you were feeling. The other is quiet, skilled, and a master of manipulation. Compassion is good. Skills are better.
Dostoyevsky was the only contemporary to predict that the 20th century would bring unprecedented tyranny rather than humanitarianism. in possessed personone of his characters declares, “I begin with infinite freedom and arrive at infinite despotism.” Without the power to secure freedom, freedom collapses into its opposite, and so does mercy. A God who can only weep beside us, but cannot raise us up, leaves us where we are.
The psalmist says, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, You are with me.” Not just so I can have company, but also to get out of there. When we cry out to God in our suffering, we are not asking for fellow sufferers. We are appealing to the One who already protects our lives, who knows our pain, and who in time will deliver us from it.
This is what lies behind the claims of ancient Christianity. God saves us not by sharing our helplessness, but by overcoming it. Holy Week may challenge this. The Gospels describe Christ’s suffering in the garden, the scourging, the crown of thorns, the nails, and the cry of abandonment. Doesn’t this indicate that God is suffering?
Tradition answered: Suffering is real and scary. In Christ, God is shown to be able to endure suffering without being conquered. The cross is not evidence of God’s weakness. It is the moment when the forces that define human tragedy – death, abandonment, violence – encounter something insurmountable. What appeared to be a defeat turns out to be a victory.
This also sheds light on the claim that God is love. For God, love is not a temporary emotion. It is the very existence of God. Will not flare up or fade. It simply is.
God faces suffering not to share our weaknesses, but to break our strength. Easter is a promise, not a platform. There is no definitive decision in death and despair. “The judgment is mine, and I will repay, says the Lord.”
As the hymn says, “If we revealed our strength, our efforts would be defeated.”
And this promise resonates. “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
notes and reading
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War,transformer. Rex Warner (1972), 1.22.
Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) was a Romanian-born American writer, Holocaust survivor, and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner. his memoirs night (1960) remains one of Shore’s foundational testimonies. Throughout his life, Wiesel argued that it was a moral obligation to bear witness to atrocities, and that to remain silent in the face of suffering was to be complicit in it. look night,transformer. Marion Wiesel (2006) and his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “Hope, Despair, and Memory,” December 10, 1986.
Gustavo Gutierrez At Work: The Story of God and the Suffering of the Innocents,transformer. Matthew J. O’Connell (1987), esp. ch. 1. Job is not primarily about why humans suffer, but about what it means to be human when God is truly God. It resists the religious urge to imagine a good God that conforms to our emotions and moral expectations.
iris murdoch sovereignty of good (1970). Murdoch offers an explanation reminiscent of the classical doctrine of divine impossibility. The ultimate good is not a sympathetic companion in suffering, but a stable moral light, unaltered by events, that allows for the clarity and love to respond correctly to suffering. Murdoch’s ideas are broadly Platonic and non-theistic.
JS Bach Fugue in G minorBWV 542 (“Great”), Paul Jacobs, organ. Its harsh counterpoint and collective resolve reflect a movement from lament and judgment to a promise that does not deny the darkness. YouTube (5:44)
Preservation of appearance
easter is approaching
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
