Dr. Paul Tudor Jones

(John 12:20-32)

Perhaps you have been asking yourself this same question Sunday after Sunday as you sat in these pews in the summer’s sultry heat, mopping your brow and listening to the halting speech of an embryonic minister.  With Christian sympathy I have suffered with you and felt grateful within my own heart for the saints of God who suffer many things out of their sense of Christian duty.  But as my summer’s work with you draws to a close in this service of Common worship I find myself very happy in the memory of my new experiences in Christ’s spiritual realm, happy in the friendships formed with you, and hopeful that through Him the foolishness of preaching may accomplish something toward the establishing of Christ’s Kingdom on earth.

When misfortune, suffering and pain are our lot, we ask, “Why do I have to suffer this?  What have I done to deserve this bad fortune?”  My scanty study of philosophy has raised many questions in my mind and answered few of them.  In my first college course in philosophy our professor asked us this question:  “Is God all powerful, or all good?”  He cannot be both for the presence of suffering in this world is proof against that.  If he is good He must want to stop it but He doesn’t, hence He must not have the power to stop it and is not all-powerful.  If He can stop suffering and won’t He isn’t wholly good.  I have thought much about this since that sophomore college year and would like to share with you this morning some of my observations about this subject for it is a topic of vital interest to everyone.  All of us as human beings suffer and know that we shall continue to suffer as long as we live.

Merely the existence of impersonal suffering in a world created by the God whom we worship creates quite a problem for the Christian.  But the suffering of the righteous, those who worship and call upon God, is even harder to understand or to give satisfactory reason for.  All of human suffering may be divided into two classes: First, that which comes upon us as a result of willful sin or the transgression of the laws of nature.  This suffering is predictable.  Every intelligent being knows that over eating results naturally in indigestion, unnecessary exposure results in colds and pneumonia, and unclean and immoral living results in disease and death.  But it is not with this problem of suffering due to sin that I wish to deal.  That second class of suffering which comes seemingly without rhyme or reason, falling like the rain upon the just and the unjust, is the suffering that baffles us and tries the faith of the strongest of us.  This unpredictable suffering is what concerns us this morning, the question of “Why do the righteous suffer?”

This is a question that puzzled Job and which he never satisfactorily answered.  Job, you know, was a righteous man.  He loved and worshiped God.  For a while God blessed him and he prospered.  He grew rich in lands and possessions.  He was the father of many children, the greatest of all blessings that could fall upon the Hebrew.  Then came misfortune: first, economic distress, then his family all died, and last he was harrowed by the ravages of disease.  All this came to a righteous man, and the soul of Job cried out within him, “Oh why do the righteous suffer?”  Job never answers this in so many words – he lives the answer.  His personality is the answer.

This problem of human suffering has been one of prime consideration among all peoples and every philosophy, religion, and sect has advanced its theories concerning it, so there are many ways that we may face human suffering when it comes to us.

One way is that of the Stoic.  This is the attitude of accepting the fact of suffering and inwardly steeling oneself against it.  This is the way of Henley:

“In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeoning of chance

  My head is bloody but unbowed.

It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishment the scroll,

I am the master of my fate;

  I am the captain of my soul.”

Then there is the attitude toward suffering which might be called that of the disinterested participant.  This is the humanistic philosophy of Walter Lippman, for he writes: “And so the mature man would take the world as it comes and within himself remain quite unperturbed.  He would face pain with fortitude, for he would have put it away from the inner chambers of his soul.”  This attitude of disinterested, disillusioned aloofness is the way of the Buddhist.  He does things as one who does not do them.  Desire has been cut and action will go on as a wheel once turned will continue to turn even after the force applied has been removed, but gradually it will cease to turn and come to rest.

In the third place there is the attitude of the fatalist.  Come what may, pain or pleasure, he accepts it as the will of God.  He questions nothing.  It is enough to know that God wills it.  This is the way of the Moslem, and it is the way of many Christians who take to an extreme their belief in the sovereignty of God and predestination.  Fatalism is close to some systems of Calvinism.

The way of Christian Science is to wave all suffering, sin, and death out of existence as unrealities.  They reason something like this: “All is the eternal mind, and is the sole reality; we are a part of that mind; that mind can have nothing evil in it: therefore all is good; there is no such thing as sin and suffering and death; these things belong to the realm of the unreal and exist only in the mortal mind.” If there is no such thing as suffering then the cross of Christ is a travesty.

In the fifth place, there is that attitude that may be taken toward human suffering that we call self-pity.  There are actually many people who enjoy bad health.  Their pleasure consists in thinking that their lot is harder than anyone else’s.  They spend their time talking about what a hard time they have.

But not one of these five attitudes toward human suffering is the Christian attitude.  As noble as is the Stoic attitude it cannot be the Christian.  This attitude produces the flint like character, impervious to the suffering and pain of others, and drives out the Christian virtues of love, compassion and tenderness.  As sound philosophically as may be the attitude of disinterestedness it cannot be the Christian way.  The cardinal virtue of the Christian is sincerity.  He must enter into life with all his being, betting even his heartstrings upon the outcome of a struggle of gigantic forces.  The Christian cannot accept the attitude of the fatalist, even though it ascribes power and holiness to God, for it rules out hope and striving and progress.  The doctrine of the fatalist is an opiate.  Though it is a beautiful faith and produces a noble optimism, the thinking Christian cannot accept the answer of Christian Science to this problem of human suffering for it dodges the issue, it refuses to face facts.  The Christian cannot indulge in self-pity when his way is hard, strewn with suffering and sorrow – that is the very essence of weakness and the Christian is strong.

What then is the Christian way?  What is his answer to the question, “Why do the righteous suffer?”  First, the Christian faces the facts, admits the reality of suffering, not just in this world but within the experience of the Christian fellowship. All about us we see our Christian friends suffering the very pangs of the damned, and it seems so very unjust.

The forces of nature deal with the Christian and the non-Christian alike.  Lightening strikes to destroy both saint and sinner.  The earthquakes on the west coast demolish the homes of church member and non-church member.  When the Mississippi River goes on a rampage it sweeps death and destruction to all in its way.  The great drought in the Middle West this summer is a disaster which whole states en masse suffered together.

Social forces and conflicts bring suffering to the righteous and those innocent of any responsibility in connection with the conflict.  The righteous soldier lives no charmed life.  In Germany today the Christian churches are sorely persecuted because they are out of step with the party in power.

Physical sickness and death are the common lot of human kind, regardless of religious convictions it seems.  Disease microbes do not stop because they are attacking consecrated flesh.  God does not step in miraculously to snatch one of his saints from the path of a speeding machine just as that saint is about to be struck down.

Suffering from the cause of economic distress comes to us all, Christians and non-Christians.  We need no lengthy illustrations to bring this vividly to our attention.  Memories of the last five years and the facts of the present are sufficient.   Our Christian friends, and even we ourselves, have been caught in the landslide of economic depression and felt the suffering that it can bring.  Some of us have slid to rock bottom and experienced what it means to be hungry, and have no way of getting food for ourselves and our family.

All these forces, natural, social, physical and economic, are seemingly impersonal in their attack upon mankind.  And yet the Christian believes in a personal God – One who hears prayers – and hence he cries, “O God, Why do the righteous suffer?”  Why be a Christian if it avails nothing along this line?

The Christian’s first answer to the question, “why do the righteous suffer,” is that it is the price that we pay for living in an ordered world.  It is the thorn that grows along with the bright, red rose.  There are laws in this universe that God has wrought for our benefit.  Imagine the confusion of a world in which Summer, Spring, and Winter days came at random one after the other, rather than at the appointed seasons of the year; imagine, if you can, the chaos of a world in which the law of gravitation was suspended; imagine a world free from disease germs, where all living organisms grew old but never died or decayed.  Can you think of a more hellish life than existence in such a world?

But you may ask, and rightly, what about prayer? Does it avail?  If the universe is governed solely by cold, impersonal laws, why pray?  I firmly believe that God does answer prayers, and that in many cases the laws of nature are contravened by God in answer to prayers; but this is the exception and not the rule.  And you may again ask, and rightly, what about unanswered prayer?  Why are the prayers of one righteous person answered and the prayers of another seemingly unheeded?

If God answered the prayer of every Christian then the Christian would turn out to be the cosmic pet, and a petted child is always a spoiled child.  Dr. E. Stanley Jones writes in his book, Christ and Human Suffering, “If it could be proved that the Christian is infallibly spared pain and suffering when it falls on others, the result would be a degradation of Christianity.  The multitudes would flock to our churches and accept Christianity and its protection as one would take out a fire insurance policy.  It would be also to the degradation of the Christian, for he would miss that discipline that comes from living in a universe of impartial law.”  Dr. Jones also tells the story of a young Englishman who made this declaration at a roundtable conference: “God let me down.  My brother was wounded in the war.  I prayed to Him that my brother might live.  Any decent person would have answered, but He didn’t, and my brother died.  Now I have no faith left.”  Another man prayed once that he be spared the agony of a cross and God did not answer that prayer.  God did not deliver Him from the cross, even though the crowds taunted, “Others he saved; himself, he cannot save.”  But God did something better.  And it is along this line of something better than deliverance that we must search for the Christian answer to the question, “Why do the righteous suffer?”

If suffering be the price that we pay for life in an ordered universe and the benefits derived from the laws of nature, then it is also the price we pay for God’s gift of man’s exercise of his free will.  If the hand of the Almighty reached down to stop all our foolish activities that would eventually result in suffering and pain we would not be men but puppets.  Someone has said that experience is the best teacher.  If our education comes chiefly through experience, which means through the trial and error method, we would never learn if we were not given a will of our own, capable of making mistakes but capable of learning therefrom.  “In our mind of minds we know that the end of life is character and not happiness, and that happiness can only be a by-product of that character, and that without the possibility of pain we are not sure that character could be attained.”  A recent Reader’s Digest article testified to the fact that the Franklin Delano Roosevelt who ran for vice president of the United States in 1920 was a promising young man of sterling worth, alert, popular, and a man of action.  Shortly after he was stricken with paralysis and lost the use of the lower part of his body.  The man elected to the presidency in 1932 was this cripple who had still the genial smile of former days of health, yet the man of action had developed into a man of thought capable of making lightening like decisions of far reaching importance.  Through suffering he had developed from a hail-fellow well met into the chief executive, the man of destiny to a nation in despair.  St. Paul suffered with a thorn in his flesh and he prayed three times that it be removed.  It was not removed; God did not answer that prayer; He did something better; He gave Paul the grace to bear it and transformed that thorn into a blessing.  “The Christian is not to escape pain and trouble, but to use it.  The Christian has learned the secret of an alchemy by which the base metal of injustice and consequent suffering can be turned into the gold of character and into the gold of the purposes of the kingdom of God.”  (Jones — Christ and Human Suffering)

The Christian then, after he has faced squarely this reality of suffering, answers our question of “Why do the righteous suffer” by saying first that it is the price that we must pay for living in a world governed by natural laws; second, it is the price we pay for the endowment of free-will and the possibility of character development; and third, it is the price we pay for belief in a Suffering Savior and membership in His church.  From contemplation on these does the Christian work out his attitude toward human suffering.

In our Scripture lesson this morning we heard from St. John’s Gospel of the coming of the Greeks and their words: “Sirs, we would see Jesus.” We know that Jesus talked with them, but the conference is not recorded in the Gospels.  Then follows Jesus’ discourse upon his resolve to endure the coming suffering and death at Jerusalem.  It is not far fetched to believe that the Greeks came to suggest that Jesus come with them to Athens to enjoy there the life of ease and prominence as one of their philosophers.  They knew, as did Jesus, that the Jews bided their opportunity to destroy Him.  The conference with the Greeks, then, opened this conflict within the heart of Jesus; whether to go to Athens with its bright, surface interest, but sounding no depths, or to Jerusalem with its cross.  Would he go to Athens to escape suffering or would he go to Jerusalem to face it?  And these words come from Jesus’ lips as he chooses the Via Dolorosa.  “Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit.   He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.  And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”  The German, Goethe, said, “If I were God, this world of sin and suffering would break my heart.”  Of course it would. – It did.  For God was in Jesus upon the cross, reconciling the world unto Himself.  The Cross is the price that God must pay to get us in spite of our sins.  The Cross, then, is the reconciling place between Law and Love.  The upstanding beam represents Law, how straight and unbending it stands!  The other beam, the wide-stretching one, represents the love of God reaching out arms to save and heal.  Those two, the Law and the Love, coming together – make the Cross.  The Cross makes them one.”  (E.S. Jones — Christ and Human Suffering)

If the Captain of our souls chose the way of suffering can we, his soldiers, expect less?  At heart Christianity must of necessity be a suffering religion.  Sorrow and suffering come to us all, including the Christian.  While suffering may break the spirit of some, it may make the spirit of those who have learned the secret.  Pain and suffering must be necessary if character is the end, for a kite cannot go up except against the wind – we cannot rise except we rise upon something defeated.

PASTORAL PRAYER

O God and Father of mankind, Your heart we daily break through our willful sins; O, Lord Jesus, Your body we cruelly crucify through our lovelessness for our brothers; O Holy Spirit, against you do we sin the sin of a closed mind and hardened heart to your overtures.  Forgive, O Holy Trinity, forgive our feverish ways.  Reclothe us in our rightful minds, that in deeper reverence we may render unto Thee our tribute of penitent thanksgiving and praise unto Thee, who art our maker, redeemer, and friend.

Grant unto us, O Most merciful Father, pardon for our sins, individual and collective, for our national sins of haughtiness, pride, greed, graft, and oppression; for our Church sins of self righteousness, selfishness, self satisfaction, and self pity.

This morning, O God, we would pray for the safety and health of our loved ones, far and near.  Grant us the faith and trust to commit them into Thy tender care.  Heal those who are sick, comfort those who mourn, speed the traveler safely on his way.  We know that we live in a world of suffering and, if it be not Thy will that we and ours be spared, will Thou grant unto us the grace to bear our sorrows as our Christ bore his Cross, and through the fire of suffering and pain and disease wilt Thou forge us into instruments of greater usefulness in Thy Kingdom.  If we may not be spared suffering grant unto us the grace to use it.  Help us to reach that place in our faith where nothing can happen to us that we cannot stand.

CALL TO WORSHIP

“The Lord is at hand.

In nothing be anxious, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.

And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus.”

INVOCATION

God of all grace grant unto us Thy peace that passeth understanding, that the quietness that comes from friendliness with man, and true Divine friendship with Thee may possess our souls; that we, withdrawn awhile from the turmoil of the world, may gather the strength that we have lost, and established and strengthened by Thy grace, pass on through all the troubles of this our earthly life, safe into the haven of eternal rest; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.