8 The Choice — Religion With Or Without A Cross
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T
ST
HRIST
HE 21 AND
C
H
ENTUR UMAN
Y IN O S
URUFFERING
TIME SERIES
Series Editor: Anne Mathews-Younes, Ed.D., D.Min.
Managing Editor: Shivraj K. Mahendra, Ph.D.
First Edition, July, 1933
Second Printing, July, 1933
Third Printing, August, 1933
Fourth Printing, September, 1933
Filth Printing, October, 1933
Sixth Printing, October, 1933
Seventh Printing, December, 1933
Eighth Printing, October, 1934
Ninth Printing, December, 1936
Tenth Printing, March, 1937
Eleventh Printing, Revised edition, December, 2020
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CHRIST AND
HUMAN SUFFERING
Revised Edition
E. STANLEY JONES
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CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
by E. Stanley Jones
Copyright © 2020 by The E. Stanley Jones Foundation All Rights Reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrival system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher.
First published by Abingdon Press, 1933
The 21st Century in Our Times Series
Printed and published with permission by
The E. Stanley Jones Foundation
Email: [email protected]
www.estanleyjonesfoundation.com
Cover design: Marc Whitaker
Interior design: Shivraj K. Mahendra
ISBN: 9798690150532
MANUFACTURED IN THE USA
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DEDICATION
With great appreciation and deep respect for the courage, commitment, and sacrifice of the countless men and women who brave daily challenges as first responders and front line workers who risk their lives to save the lives of others, and protect public safety and health throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic. We honor and celebrate these heroes among us, as they extend care to relieve human suffering.
- Editor
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Preface by Anne Mathews-Younes ............................................................ 9
Foreword by Pastor Mark Suter ............................................................... 13
Introduction ................................................................................................... 19
1. The Confusion ............................................................................................... 23
2. Are Christians Spared? ................................................................................. 31
3. Various Ways of Facing Human Suffering ........................................... 47
4. The Christian Way—At Work in the Gospels ..................................... 68
5. The Christian Way—At Work Among the Early Christians ............ 79
6. The Christian Way—At Work Today ...................................................... 86
7. The Christian Way is Victory ................................................................... 101
8. The Choice—Religion With or Without a Cross ............................. 116
9. The Cost to God ......................................................................................... 130
10. Suffering as a Result of Wrong Moral Choice ................................. 147
11. The Attitude of Society Must Be Vicarious .................................... 156
12. Comfort or Character? ............................................................................ 165
13. The Last Word—With Life or With Death ....................................... 177
When Sorrow Comes .......................................................................................... 201
Commentary by Dr. Zac Varghese ........................................................... 216
About the Author ....................................................................................... 225
About the E. Stanley Jones Foundation ................................................ 228
Books by E. Stanley Jones ....................................................................... 230
Recent Publications by the E. Stanley Jones Foundation ................ 232
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C hrist and Human Suffering offers a positive and active way to deal with sorrow. This is a particularly significant book for our current pandemic crisis, where we are challenged by personal and collective suffering as a result of COVID-19’s march across our world. Jones’ book moves beyond answering the “why”
questions we so often ask of suffering and on to sharing just “how”
suffering can be used to further personal transformation. Jones affirms that we can make our sorrows contribute to transforming ourselves and others.
This view of suffering is nothing less than the power to take suffering up into the purpose of our lives and transmute it into character and achievement. “This is no mere philosophy of life. It is the very essence of the Christian faith.” (p. 206). According to Jones, the idea that the Christian faith offers escape from suffering is completely foreign to that faith. The Christian shares with the rest of humanity the ills incident to life in a world of this kind – death of loved ones, loss of health, loss of friendships, disappointments in love, the nonfulfillment of ambitions, the frustrations that come from living in an unfinished world. In an unfinished world we are bound to meet up with things that gall us, and if we let them they will break us.
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That is his point— “if we let them.” (p. 206). Our reactions to these things largely determine the result. It is not what happens to you, but what you do with it, after it does happen, that determines the result.
The same thing happens to two people, one it makes bitter, the other it makes better. Our inner attitude determines the result.
Jones continues, “There is a saying, ‘When Fate throws a dagger at you, there are two ways to catch it: either by the blade or by the handle.’” Fate is bound to throw a dagger at you, no one will be spared. “Whether we grasp it by the blade and let it cut us to the quick, or whether we grasp it by the handle and make it an instrument of defense depends on the inner spirit.” (p. 209) According to Jones, our reaction determines the result.
When life threw a cross at Jesus, Jesus took hold of that worst thing that could happen to Him and made it into the best thing that could happen to the world. The cross was sin, pure, unadulterated sin and Jesus turned it into the healing of sin. The cross was hate, and Jesus turned it into a revelation of love. The cross represented life speaking its darkest, cruelest word, and Jesus turned it into God speaking His most redemptive word. Jesus did not bear the cross, Jesus used it! A religion with a cross at its center doesn’t offer mere comfort, a drying of tears, it offers a moral and spiritual mastery that turns sorrow into song and a crucifixion into an Easter morning. (p. 209) United Methodist Bishop Bruce R. Ough also affirms, through experience, that God’s last word is not the cross, but the resurrection.
Bishop Ough writes, “I first read Christ and Human Suffering shortly after witnessing my parents’ debilitating anguish following the death of their 20 year old son (my brother) from heart disease. E. Stanley Jones saved me from a limited and limiting understanding of both 10
personal and corporate suffering and tragedy and set me on a path of understanding “God’s last word is not the cross, but the resurrection.” This has become the touchstone of my call and my ministry. Christ and Human Suffering is a timeless book. We have all known or witnessed suffering; it is a part and parcel of life in every age in every place. This classic work of E. Stanley Jones is a must read for every pastor, politician, philosopher, physician and prophet.
Ashram leader Denton Florian comments, “The problem of human suffering is the most difficult theological question and Stanley Jones wades right into the middle of it. He does not fall back on cliches or sugar coat suffering. Christ demonstrated a ‘working way to live’ and Jones challenges us to consider and apply it in our daily lives.
Christ and Human Suffering is a powerfully enlightening book and I believe is the best resource that is available on human suffering from a Christian viewpoint.”
This book has also been graced by commentaries from United Methodist Pastor, Mark Suter, who emphasizes that the Christian way of meeting suffering is not merely enduring it, but making it serve the higher purpose of the Kingdom of God. He adds that the current Covid-19 crisis presents today’s church and all of us with both a problem and a possibility. Let’s grasp the possibility!
Dr. Zac Varghese, a physician, writes that this book is not just about living with individual sufferings––innocent, self-inflicted or inflicted by other agencies; it is about dealing with personal suffering and having empathy and compassion for the suffering of others by growing with Jesus Christ in overcoming them. Dr. Varghese writes, “I have dealt with pain and suffering all of my professional life––yet gained a more profound understanding of suffering from this book. It is a good companion for all of us and particularly for those who are involved in the ministry of healing.”
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God is present with us in this pandemic moment as we open our eyes to a world of hurting neighbors and offer our love and connection to a world in need of God’s love through us. This is what we can do with suffering. We don’t bear it, we use it to serve others.
Blessings on you dear reader!
ANNE MATHEWS-YOUNES
December 2020
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M y first E. Stanley Jones book was a well-worn paperback copy of “Abundant Living” I borrowed from my father’s bookshelf. As a young student pastor, I was drawn like a magnet to the simple, yet profound, expression of the gospel, the Kingdom of God, and Jesus, the Word made flesh. I felt that I had touched middle C or found the answer key to life—Jesus. Just Jesus—
not a Bible story, a theology, not a church or religion, but the very essence of reality itself. In Jones, I had discovered worldview thinking long before I knew what it was.
But what does a young pastor do when life isn’t all that
“abundant”? When called to mediate a crumbling marriage? When a mother weeps over a wayward son and asks why? When a husband and wife are killed instantly in a head-on collision on the way to Sunday dinner? When a pillar of the church drifts away into dementia? When a young mother loses a long battle with cancer?
When suffering souls look to you for answers and you know you’re in over your head?
Perhaps that’s why this book was one of Jones’s earliest. As all pastors soon discover, that the question of suffering, or what C. S.
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Lewis called the “problem of pain,” is inescapable. Does the Christ of the Indian road, the Christ of every road, and the Christ of the Mount really know the road of suffering that everyone travels sooner or later?
Before there’s any abundant living, the question of suffering and pain would have to be faced. “Did the Christian gospel have a clear answer?” Jones asks. “And one that would work?” As with all his writing, he determined not to “write this book as theory. It must be a working way to live.”
Thus, Christ and Human Suffering is not a simplistic three-step solution or a resolution of competing theologies. Stanley Jones would never settle for “the Word become word.”We must instead have something actual and adequate to offer men and women and children sinking in stress, sickness, struggle, and suffering. Will our gospel be truly “good news” or turn out to be only “good views”? Is it the Word become word or the Word made Flesh? Is it just one of many equally valid options, or is it the only workable way to live in this world? Is it merely “a” way, or is it “the” Way?
The only way to know the answer to this question is to “put it under life,” even in the hardest places and the darkest moments of life. We cannot live on answers that “keep the word of promise to our ears and break it to our hope.”
The gospel more than meets the challenge and life’s demand. God spoke his clearest word in the Word made Flesh, in Jesus. Jesus took on all that humanity is and does and knows, even full identification with the sin and suffering of humankind, even numbering himself with all transgressors at the cross.
The method of Jesus, however, was not just to endure or bravely bear suffering as a martyr, but to take the absolute worst and make it 14
serve his ultimate purpose—the redemption of fallen men and women. Just so, the only way to take the sting and pain out of life’s inevitable suffering and struggle is to transform it and use it for a higher purpose in the same way God met our wounds in the wounds of Jesus, the Son—using the worst man could do to achieve the most God could do.
Christ and Human Suffering, then, is not so much an answer to a question as a way through a wilderness—a “working way to live.” It is the way of so many faithful saints and seekers I have known and admired over my years of ministry.
A woman virtually homebound with arthritis could not straighten out her fingers and labored mightily just to get across a room. Several of her joints had been surgically replaced. But when asked, she never failed to smile and answer, “I’m doing just fine!” And she was, in spite of. She turned her pain and limitation into a powerful prayer partner and card writing ministry—and was even able to type.
In a testimony service at Thanksgiving, a husband and wife began by giving praise and thanks to God with a genuine smile from hearts overflowing with God’s Spirit, made even more remarkable by the knowledge that their daughter and two grandchildren, had, some years earlier, been killed in a car crash.
A woman found herself alone and abandoned by an unfaithful husband, yet today is a powerful prayer warrior, still serves on mission teams around the world, and has led many to faith in Christ through her “overcoming” witness.
A church leader with an exceptional gift of encouragement was taken down by cancer and given just a short time to live. His last days saw a steady procession of so many coming to thank him for lifting them up and to witness the victorious way he faced sickness, 15
treatment, and decline, and to the last giving away more than anyone could ever repay.
I think of a young pastor and wife who traveled this road of making pain and suffering serve a higher purpose. Their life’s challenge was a daughter born with severe physical and mental handicaps. Their journey became a testimony of the Spirit of Christ shining through their brokenness, living the gospel as much as preaching it. Along the way, she spoke with Stanley Jones at an Ashram, who counseled surrender and trust in God’s larger purposes.
Part of those larger purposes was their influence and mentoring of my parents in their early Christian walk, part of which was a gift of Jones’s book, How to Be a Transformed Person. It became the beginning of my precious collection of all of Jones’s books and my conviction that his grasp of the timeless truth of Jesus is still true and cries out to be heard in our time.
It is not at all surprising, then, that this reissue of Christ and Human Suffering comes as the world is grappling with the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. E. Stanley Jones had the gift of articulating the distinction between the eternal and the temporal, the universal and the particular, the unchanging and the unpredictable, and the Kingdom of God and the Christian Church. So it is, Christ and Human Suffering that speaks hope and possibility, even in a worldwide pandemic, decades after he wrote this book.
If the Christian way of meeting suffering is not merely enduring it, but making it serve the higher purpose of the Kingdom of God, then the current COVID-19 crisis presents today’s church with both a problem and a possibility.
The sudden emergence of an invisible, insidious virus of unknown scope and severity came as a shock to the system, both 16
personally and corporately. Churches were suddenly closed and declared forbidden zones. Any sense of community and togetherness was shattered as we shuttered within our homes. Mere survival was, for a time, an open question.
For the Church, along with its pastors, the enforced isolation and extended closures have become a defining moment, forcing us back upon the first questions of faith and life. Who am I? What do I really believe? Who am I trusting? What are we living for?
Who are we together when we cannot even be together? How do we function as the church of Christ amid suffering, fear, and isolation? How do we care for the sick and hurting among us? What can we offer a world grasping for answers? What does a preacher do without a congregation?
As Paul reluctantly learned, with his thorn in the flesh, the prolonged pain of the pandemic may not be soon eased or eliminated.
The Church has been profoundly, and likely permanently, changed.
However, Christ and Human Suffering still speaks across the years if COVID-19 calls us back to who we are in Christ and what we are called to do. Are we still the church when we cannot gather to sing, pray, and worship? Is the gospel still good news in a hurting world?
Do we still serve a risen Savior even when church doors are closed on Easter Sunday? For those who surrender to the unchanging Christ at the head of an unshakable Kingdom, to ask it is to answer it.
The soul-searching shaking of a global pandemic of unknown origin and extent can become the church’s finest hour. It can draw us to deeper devotion to the person of Christ apart from the program of one’s church. It can shake us out of the doldrums of church maintenance and forever majoring on the minors. It can unite the Body of Christ as we long for the touch and closeness we are missing.
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It can open our eyes to a world of hurting neighbors and hungry souls just beyond the walls of our buildings and sanctuaries. It can ignite healthy change and creativity in how we communicate and connect with an online world. It can open new doors for our gospel of hope and transformation.
Unless suffering is allowed the last word, even a painful season of purifying and pruning can be taken up into God’s larger work of making his Church even more fruitful and molding his people into the likeness of Christ.
This is a book for our time because the questions and the heartache of suffering and pain are perennial and eternal. With great understatement did Jesus tell us ahead of time, “In the world you will have trouble.” Our own stories, tragedies, hurts, doubts, fears, unanswered prayers, and unanswered questions would fill many pages.
But it is also for our time because what Jones offers here is nothing more or less than the overcoming gospel of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen One, the unchanging Person and Lord of an unshakable Kingdom. “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
MARK SUTER
United Methodist Pastor
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In the midst of my work in that vast continent of suffering, China, I was forced to face anew, before my audiences, the question of human suffering, merited and unmerited. How could one escape it? The Chinese face masks more than it reveals, but even it could not hide the throbbing pains within. Their nation was in bitter travail; was it birth pangs or death throes? It was difficult to say.
Many alternated between hope and despair.
Besides this great national pain, each life seemed to hold some personal pain, often too deep for words. Usually they held it in check, but sometimes, unable to suppress it any longer, they blurted it out, as did one highly intellectual man, the head of a great university, in one of our Round Table Conferences: “I am lost. I cannot see my way. I have been looking for someone to talk to. I do not mind whether his advice is good or bad, I must talk to someone. I can hold my trouble no longer.” His son, a student in college, had recently died by suicide as a result of brooding over his country’s troubles.
In such a situation how could one escape facing human pain?
Did the Christian gospel have a clear answer? And is it one that would work? If so, what was it? I tried to interpret the Christian 19
answer and to show the way out. In one of the series of meetings a missionary lady, so badly crippled from childhood arthritis that she had constantly to use crutches, wrote to me this brief note: “Please write your next book on glorying in infirmities, I am!” That week she had seen what to her was a new way; life had been transformed and she was radiant. I smiled at the request, and promptly forgot it, for I had been collecting material for several years for another book on another subject and that task occupied the field. But on my way to that other continent of suffering, India, I stopped at Singapore and, while speaking to an audience there on this matter of meeting suffering in a Christian way, it suddenly flashed through my mind that this was the subject for the next book. It seemed not a vagrant thought to be pushed aside as interfering with one in the midst of an address, but an illumination from outside, one, so clear, so imperious and so compelling. When I returned later to the subject of the book on which I was working, it wasn’t there. This new topic held the field.
It possessed me.
When I looked around at the outer facts, they seemed to fit the inward illumination. The more I thought on the matter, the more was I convinced that on scarcely anything else is Christendom more confused, more pathetically tangled than on this matter of suffering and the way to meet it. But if Christendom is confused, then non-Christendom is more so. The suffering seems worldwide, and one of the most poignant elements in that suffering is that so many see no real significance in it. It all seems so senseless, leading nowhere. Or if they do see any meaning in it, that meaning seems to be a sinister one, namely, that this is a world of unfeeling chance. There is no Heart behind it. The pathetic thing is that many see no clear way out. Most people are just muddling through, or not getting through at all, they are left stranded amid a sea of troubles. Certainly, if anyone had any light on such a subject, now was the time to share it.
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But to write on such a subject is to walk on holy ground, hallowed by the tears and blood stained footsteps of many a wearied one. To bungle here would be serious. To raise hopes in a suffering heart that could not be fulfilled would only add pain to pain. I hesitated. But objection after objection seemed to be swept away, and I came to my final condition and took my stand there, refusing to go on unless I could be assured at this point: “I cannot write this book as theory. It must be a working way to live. I have learned something of this Secret, and it has been glorious; but I can write on this subject only on one condition, that you teach me, Father, to walk in this way, and to walk in it with abandon, as I try to unfold it to others.” He promised. Then, so did I. We will walk together, then, in a common quest.
E. STANLEY JONES
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THE CONFUSION
I spoke of India and China being the “continents of suffering,”
but can we stop there? Is not every person at some time or other involved in this common human suffering? The gentle Buddha, brooding long and deeply over life, came to a conclusion that fairly takes our breath away. It was this: Existence and suffering are one. As long as we are bound to the wheel of existence we are bound to suffer, for existence and suffering are one, not accidentally or incidentally, but intrinsically and inescapably. The only way to get out of suffering is to get out of existence itself. What a startling, breathtaking, one might almost say, life-taking conclusion to come to!
And yet hundreds of millions of our human brothers repeat that for a creed as day by day they say: “Ameisa, Duklca, Annath, ”
“Impermanence, Suffering, Emptiness.”
The conclusion is more thoroughgoing but not startlingly different from that of the writer of Ecclesiastes when he says: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.” In the book of Job it is said, For affliction cometh not forth of the dust, Neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; 23
But man is born unto trouble,
As the sparks fly upward.
And the book itself was written to deal with this problem of unmerited suffering. Whether the answer found in this ancient book is an adequate one we must study later, but the problem bore down upon the men of that day, as it does of these days and demanded a solution.
A more modern person cries out in these lines: “My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves, So dark that men cry out against the heavens.” I suppose there is nothing that makes men and women cry out against the heavens so much as the anguish that comes to the heart unbidden and seemingly unmerited.
A very modern young woman hires an airplane, and when in mid-air steps out into the void, leaving this note behind: “I have had nothing but discord, and I long for harmony. Perhaps I shall find music where I go.” She felt that she could not find it in this kind of a world. So, she takes upon herself, the great responsibility and steps out.
Horace Walpole says, “To those who think, life is comedy; to those who feel, life is tragedy.” There are few of us who do not “feel.” Then, is life a tragedy to all? In Pompeii, the guide will show you the remains of the theater in which only comedies were played, and alongside of it those of the one in which tragedies only were presented. But can comedy and tragedy be separated in life in this way? Do they not flow together in an amazing confusion?
Life at the present time seems to be decidedly tragic, because, first of all, we are passing through an age of sweeping transition. It differs from other ages of transition in that it is deeper and more thoroughgoing. Things upon which men and women had depended, 24
THE CONFUSION
and in which they had trusted and hoped, have gone out from under them. Yesterday, these things were solid, today they are gone, gone except for the lingering pain they leave behind. This is happening, not only in the realm of the material, but in the realm of the spiritual as well. Many have exposed themselves to the breath of modern thinking, with the result that many of their spiritual values have been dissolved. They have not deliberately turned away from them, but have awakened to find them not there. Their absence leaves them with something akin to what
French Scholar Ernest Renan
experienced when he broke
with the church and told of
Life at the present
the experience in these words:
time seems to be
“The enchanted circle which
decidedly tragic,
embraced the whole of life is
because, first of all,
broken, and the feeling of
we are passing
emptiness is left like that
through an age of
which follows on an attack of
sweeping transition.
fever or an unhappy love
affair.” The growing distrust
of life itself leaves many
people empty and confused. As someone has put it, “It [modern culture] has set man on the world’s vacant throne; but it can no longer worship its idol. Self-worship is seldom successful. This is the skepticism that is destroying us. Under the garish, flamboyant surface of contemporary Western culture is a growing distrust of life itself.”
You cannot be happy except in the sum total of things, and many face the gnawing question as to whether the sum total of things has any meaning or purpose.
Some of our modern suffering comes from this transitional period and some comes from the fact that we are embodied spirits, 25
and must work out our destiny with recalcitrant matter. We have infinite desires and are embodied in a very finite, material world. So, we feel thwarted and cramped and stultified at every turn. It has been said that “the difficulty is not that we are a higher hog and a human soul, but that we are both at one and the same time.” The hog side of us loves filthy mud holes and would naturalize us there, but the soul side of us does not really love mud and sets up its protest and cries out to be delivered. It feels the call of the Eternal. This conflict is deadly to happiness.
Once, a fortune teller accosted me, and to catch my attention and to get me into a frame of mind in which I would allow him to tell my fortune, he began by saying: “You seem happy, but it is only outward.
In the inside, you are always thinking, thinking about getting something you cannot get. So, you are not happy.” I laughed and told him that he had missed it! The fortune teller was shrewd enough to know that the approach would work in most cases. For most people are wearing unseen crosses about which they do not whisper, save in the ears of God, provided, of course, that they can find him. But if they cannot find him, then, they must smother down the choking ache and suffer it, alone.
Besides these sufferings incidental to human living, there come the special calamities that often fall upon us suddenly and leave us stunned and blinded. Today, I picked up my letters, with eagerness, to find out about my daughter’s graduation from high school in the Himalayas, an event I had reluctantly to miss, because of my China tour. After describing the happy event, it told of a trip from the mountains toward their homes in the plains, and event always full of joy and bubbling happiness. But not this one! For one of the girls, who also had graduated, turned to wave goodbye to some of her companions on the hills above, stepped backward against a low wall, 26
so she thought; but it proved to be an open space in the wall and down she fell, two hundred feet, to her death. And, she was a widowed mother’s only daughter.
Why did this calamity happen to this particular widow so recently bereaved of her husband? Why did it not happen to the daughter of somebody else, mine, for instance? It is here that our problems become acute and baffling. And many are badly confused at this point.
In China two missionary children belonging to different families came down with diphtheria at the same time. One child recovered and the other child died. I found the father of the child that had died deeply embittered because his child, an only child, had died, while the other child, belonging to a family in which there were other children, was spared. His faith seemed to slip away from him. Doesn’t God answer our prayers in such a case as this and intervene? Some feel that he should, and does. But when he does not, as obviously he does not, then what? The universe tumbles in on one, and faith crashes too. It is at this point that the faith of many suffers its deepest shocks.
In one of our Round Table Conferences in India a fine young Englishman, a leader among the group of business men who wanted better relationships between India and Great Britain, said in rather a disillusioned way: “God let me down. My brother was wounded in the war. I prayed to God that my brother might live. Any decent person would have answered such a prayer. But God didn’t, and my brother died. Now I have no faith left. I do think that Christ was the greatest Personality that ever lived. But God let me down, so I have no religion. I wish I did have one.”
This question was sent up by a student in China: “My sister was a very godly woman. But she suffered dreadfully in childbirth. Why didn’t God spare her this suffering, since she was such a godly woman?”
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A professor in a great university in America was struck by a truck, knocked down, and his leg broken. After he recovered, at the first appearance in the chapel service he said to the students: “I no longer believe in a personal God. If there were a personal God, would he not have whispered to me to beware of the danger of the coming truck and have saved me from this calamity?” He was struck down, and in the fall his faith crashed too.
An Indian arose in one of my meetings in India and said: “Since I have become a Christian, I have had no more troubles at all. God has saved me from all my troubles.” He sat down with a great deal of satisfaction, for his statement seemed a proof, that God was pleased with him.
Now, here are four illustrations: one from Britain, one from America, one from China, and the fourth from India, all converging on one thought, namely, that God should spare the righteous from trouble. When God does not, it is either a sign that he does not exist, or that, if he does exist, there is something wrong in him or in us.
They all agree that if there is a God, he should spare his children from troubles and calamities. In the case of the Indian the fact that God had so far done so was a sign of his special favor.
Isn’t there something fundamentally wrong here? Does the gospel teach that if we follow Christ, our child will never be taken away by diphtheria when she is an only child? —That our brothers will not die when wounded in war if we will but pray? –That our sisters, if they are righteous, will not suffer in childbirth? —That God will undertake to whisper a warning to us, his children, when we are about to be knocked down by a truck? And that when he does so intervene and save us from all troubles, it is a special sign of his favor? And that his doing so is proof that religion works? There seems to be something fundamentally wrong here.
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THE CONFUSION
Suppose it should be guaranteed that calamities would always strike the wicked alone, and that the righteous would always be saved, what kind of a world would this be? Its laws would always be in process of suspension whenever the righteous were involved. Gravity wouldn’t pull you downward even though you leaned too far out over the parapet, provided, of
course, you were righteous.
What kind of a universe
would we soon have?
God has chosen to
Certainly, not a dependable
run the universe by
one, for in a situation about
order rather than by
to develop, you would not
whim and notion.
know whether laws would act,
The laws are orderly
for you would not know the
because God’s
character of the persons
mind is orderly; they
involved. You would find out
are dependable
only when the event
because God is a
happened. If the person was
dependable God.
good, the law would be
suspended; if bad, it would
smite him. It would indeed
be a very undependable universe. Moreover, what would be the result in the characters of the persons concerned? It would be disastrous.
I do not question that God can and sometimes does intervene and save his children in particular situations, for God certainly cannot be put in a straight jacket in his universe. The laws of the universe are God’s habitual way of running that universe, and to say that he cannot do otherwise is to make him less than his modes of action.
God has chosen to run the universe by order rather than by whim and notion. The laws are orderly because God’s mind is orderly; they are dependable because God is a dependable God. But to say that he 29
cannot do other than he does habitually is to leave us a God who is the victim of his own ways. I believe he can intervene. But what I do object to, is saying that God should intervene in impending calamity whenever his children are concerned; and that when he does so, it is a special sign of his being pleased with the persons involved; and that when he does not, there is something wrong either in God or in them.
The Christian solution of the problem of suffering does not lie along this line. If it did, then the Christian would turn out to be the cosmic pet, and a petted child is always a spoiled child.
When Jesus was hanging on the cross, deserted of men and seemingly of God, the crowd cried out, “He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he desires him.” If God should deliver him, it would be a proof that Jesus was good and pleasing to God; but if not, then it was sure proof that God did not desire him, so they thought.
God did not deliver him. But he did something better. And it is along this line of something better than deliverance that we must search for the Christian solution of the problem of suffering.
30
ARE CHRISTIANS SPARED?
T o get a clue to the Christian solution to this problem, let us look at a passage in which Jesus puts before his followers, in a most vivid picture, the tribulations that would probably come upon them.
Evil is of two kinds: one, which arises from within, from the choices of our wills; that evil we call sin. The other evil comes from without, from our social environment and of the natural universe; that evil we call suffering. It is easy to understand why we should suffer as the result of our inner choices, but why should we suffer when we do not choose? Why should these evils come upon us from without? Jesus tells us very clearly in Luke 21: 8-19, that evils would so come upon us. In this passage, from nine different directions, sufferings come upon us.
There are nine “Blesseds” in the opening words of the Sermon on the Mount, and here in this passage there are nine “Troubles”
predicted in the closing words Jesus was having with them. Let us look at these nine avenues of suffering, for in them we see summed up practically all the ways from which sorrow and pain come upon us.
31
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
1. Suffering from Confused Counsels in Religion
“Many,” he said “shall come in my name, saying, I am he; and, the time is at hand: go ye not after them.” There is no doubt that these confused counsels in religion are a deep pain to many. Why aren’t things plain and incontrovertible? Religion touches us at our deepest place, and to be uncertain there is to spread uncertainty into the whole of life.
In this age of transition and reconstruction men and women are afflicted in an acute way at this point. Old molds of thought and outlook are being broken up. Life,
for many, has lost its old certainties.
In the Straits Settlements, one of
the schools received an application
The religion of
form for the admission of a pupil
this age is
filled in by the Chinese father. In
“Confusion.” It
the column in which the religion of
was never
the parent was to be stated he had
deeper than at
written, “Confusion.” He meant
the present
“Confucian,” of course, but he was
time.
probably nearer the facts in his
misspelling than if he had spelled it
correctly. The religion of this age is
“Confusion.” It was never deeper than at the present time. In one of my meetings, a Hindu chairman rambled on at the close of my address for about as long as I had talked. He alternated in his ramblings between the oldest of orthodoxies and the newest of theories. The crowd was getting restless, but howled with laughter when he capped everything by saying, “I have been studying all religions lately, especially “Confusionism.” Everybody could see that he had been studying “Confusionism”!
32
We smile at the brother’s statement, but the smile soon fades away and a pain takes its place, for this confusion in our mind eats at our happiness like a canker. No one can be happy with uncertainty at the center. Why has not God made everything clear in this most important place of life, as clear, say, as the multiplication table? Well, suppose he had? Then the mystery would die out of life; adventure of spirit, which is so necessary to character formation, would be absent, and the soul would find no more disposition to pray to a God devoid of beyondness than we have to pray to the multiplication table, however true and clear it may be. No, it is necessary that the deepest things be sufficiently hidden, to develop within us power of discrimination and spiritual insight, by the weighing of alternatives, and by choosing between competing ends the one that seems highest to us. But the process is painful and brings much mental and spiritual suffering.
2. Suffering from Wars and Conflict in Human Society Jesus says, “You shall hear of wars and rumors of wars.” We are members of human society, bound up in a bundle of life that has its conflicts and wars. We may not choose these conflicts; we may loathe and repudiate them, but writhe as we may, we cannot disentangle ourselves from them and their results, in human pain. How few people chose this last war! The ones who really willed it could probably be counted on one’s two hands, and yet the millions that suffered and are still suffering from the choice of those few! There was a time when relatively few of the total population suffered when professional armies clashed on a battlefield, but those days of simplicity are gone; life has become so complex and interwoven that a conflict anywhere affects us everywhere. We used to talk about going to war to protect the women and the children and the weaker 33
members of human society. That day is past. We know now that war has lost its power to protect the weak, for no one suffers more in war, as now carried on, than the women and the children. Not merely armies, but whole peoples are involved in war and in its consequent misery.
Certainly, the Christian is not exempt from this particular pain. In fact, he suffers doubly, mentally and spiritually, from the fact that war is an utter denial of all the teaching and spirit of his Lord, and from the fact of actual participation in the physical suffering involved. If here and there a Christian feels that a special providence has saved a loved one in war, it is no answer to the problem of suffering, for how can we explain the fact that equally good Christians did not find themselves or their loved ones spared by a special act of Providence?
3. Suffering from Physical Calamities in Nature such as Earthquakes
“There shall be great earthquakes.” Earthquakes strike without asking whether you are good or bad. It is simply not true that earthquakes hit the bad and spare the good. An earthquake in India shook down a mission building and left a brothel standing nearby. In Burma, a severe earthquake shook down everything in the locality, but left a Christian’s house standing in the midst of it, and this was considered an act of Providence. But what about those cases where it does not happen in this way? The Christian, providentially spared, answer to this problem leaves us in a road with a dead end, for it doesn’t work out in life.
Consider the result if it did work out that way. 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.
34
The multitudes would flock to our churches and accept Christianity and its protections, as one would take out a fire insurance policy. It would also be the degradation of the Christian, for he would miss that discipline that comes from living in a universe of impartial law.
He would be exempted from that struggle with impersonal and impartial forces of nature, out of which alertness and strength of character are formed, and through which he is made mentally and spiritually and physically fit to survive. That exemption would be his elimination. Moreover, his religion would degenerate into magic. He would wear it as we do a talisman. It would become as pernicious as the custom in the Philippines, where the students about to take examinations, bring their pens to the priest to have them blessed in order to assure success in the trial awaiting them. It would weaken his mental and moral fiber. A lady asked me in all seriousness to pray that the ticket, which she had taken on the Derby Sweepstakes, might be the winning one; if I did, she added, and the ticket won, she would
“divide half the amount with the church.” I replied that I would pray that she might get a new conception of religion in general and of Christianity in particular.
Christianity is not a magical, but a moral revelation, and the end is the production of moral character, and not the saving of its devotees in particular situations from the operation of the laws of physical phenomena. The head of a school who enrolled his child in his own school but exempted the child from the operations of the disciplines and penalties of the school, would do himself, the child, and the school a distinct and serious harm.
Jesus told us that we would suffer from earthquakes.
And we do.
35
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
4. Suffering from Physical Sicknesses and Infirmities
“There shall be…pestilences.” There are those who say that God always undertakes to spare his children from pestilences and to heal their sicknesses, and that when this result is not obtained, it is a lack of faith that is responsible. That God does heal diseases by his direct touch upon men and women, I have not the slightest doubt. Has not my own wonderful physical
health, beginning fifteen
years ago, been the direct
Christianity is not a
result of a touch that I
magical, but a moral
received at that time? To
revelation, and the
deny this would be to deny
end is the production
my very life. But that God
of moral character,
promises always to heal all
and not the saving of
disease, and that an absence
its devotees in
of such healing is a sign of
particular situations
a lack of faith I seriously
from the operation of
question. Some of the
the laws of physical
greatest saints have been
phenomena.
smitten with pestilence and
the finest of the earth have
languished on beds of pain.
A young consecrated mission doctor in Mukden, beloved of all, fighting almost alone a scourge of pneumonic plague, was stricken in the midst of it and died, when he was seemingly most needed.
Howard Walter, a rare, saintly spirit, with brilliant gifts and just coming to his period of greatest usefulness, was stricken in his young manhood and died of influenza just when India needed him most.
The blow shattered the health of his wife, and scattered the children among relatives, a home broken up. And yet, who were seemingly 36
more qualified to set up a model home than those two rare souls? The cholera germs that killed John Forman, the saint, did not stop because they were attacking consecrated flesh.
I know that the ancient Jewish writers seemed to hold out something different when they said,
A thousand shall fall at thy side,
And ten thousand at thy right hand;
But it shall not come nigh thee.
Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold
And see the reward of the wicked. . .
There shall no evil befall thee,
Neither shall any plague come nigh thy tent...
With long life will I satisfy him.
If you spiritualize this, it can be used; but if it is to be taken literally, then it raises questions. The New Testament does not teach this. Nor does life teach it. It is the insistence upon the literal fulfillment of such promises, as the above and the conflict it raises, with the daily facts around one, that stuns and shatters the faith of many. It simply does not work out that no plague comes near the dwelling of the righteous and that they are invariably satisfied with long life. It is quite true that righteousness does tend to saner and healthier and longer living. A life lived in the Christian way fits the facts of the universe better, makes a man happier, and therefore on the whole gives longer life. But the exceptions to this are so many that we cannot expect the solution of the problem of suffering to consist in being spared from plague, and being satisfied with invariably long life. It raises more problems than it settles.
37
5. Suffering from Economic Distress
“There shall be famines.” The economic distress upon the world at the present time brings home this problem in an acute form. An unemployed man breaks my heart. What is the answer to this form of suffering? Are the good, prosperous, and the bad, economically pinched? It is true that in the long run, the good will probably be better off economically, for the universe stands behind righteousness and stands against evil. The universe is not built for the success of a lie, whether it be a lie in lips, or a lie in merchandise. But, it is difficult to prove, that this prosperity works out always for the individual here and now.
The book of Job takes up this problem of suffering, and ends the whole drama by saying that Job got back just double what he had before his losses, and that he lived to a ripe old age. Again, if you spiritualize this and make it include heaven within the scope of its operation, we may use it; but if you insist upon its literally working out in life that way, then we are up against insuperable difficulties. The New Testament does not give this for an answer. It does not promise here and now, a ripe old age and a double return for all losses in this life.
It is true that there is one passage in the New Testament which seems to teach this: “There is no man that hath left house or brethren, or sisters, or mother, or father, or children, or lands, for my sake, and for the gospel’s sake, but he shall receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come, eternal life” (Mark 10. 29, 30). But this can scarcely be taken literally in the case of the “houses” and “lands,” any more than it can be taken in the case of the “mothers,” where it is obviously impossible to have
“mothers” a hundredfold. Unquestionably, it must be taken with a 38
metaphorical meaning, namely, that when we belong to Christ, we own nothing and yet everything is ours, all women our sisters, all men our brothers, all mothers our mothers, all houses and lands our houses and lands, we are children of the Father; he owns all, and we use the inheritance while owning nothing. But note that the account adds, “with persecutions,” to remind them that what he was offering was not a way of material gain or pleasure, but an inner attitude of life, that owning nothing, possessed everything, and exulted even in persecutions.
Jesus had nothing to divide at his death except his seamless robe.
Peter was compelled to say at the Beautiful Gate, ‘’Silver and gold have I none.” Paul died penniless.
It is true that Jesus said that if you “seek first the kingdom of God, all these things shall be added unto you”; but the “all things”
that were to be added were “food” and “clothing.” Life has now become so complex, wants have been so multiplied and made into necessities, that for most of us to get only food and clothing would be akin to “famine.”
The Christian is not guaranteed against economic loss, nor will he be repaid double for losses incurred in this life. There is no book of Job in the New Testament. It has its own distinctive answer to the problem of suffering.
6. Suffering from one’s Own Fellow Men and Women
“They shall lay their hands on you and persecute you.” Society demands conformity. If you fall below its standards, it will punish you; and if you rise above its standards, it will persecute you. The Christian is the creation of a new type of being, as different from the 39
ordinary man, as the ordinary man is from the animal. In the language of biology, he is “a variation” upward. He is the embryonic swan, but in the meantime to human society, he is the “ugly duckling” and is
“picked on” accordingly. When I announced to my companion in the law library, where I was working, that I had been converted the night before, he promptly replied in a tone of scorn, “I’ll knock that out of you in two weeks.” He, representing human society, had the sure instinct that I was getting out of hand, so he immediately began to
“lay hands” on me.
Of course, it is dangerous to get “the persecution complex,” for many Christians think they are wearing martyrs’ crowns, when they are only wearing fools’ caps. Self-pity is the most pitiable of all pities. A whining attitude is a weakening attitude. The Christian must have nothing to do with it. He follows a Master who, while on his way to a cross, said to the women weeping for and pitying him, “Weep not for me.” The Christian, if he is to keep his self-respect, must say the same.
While making allowance for the possibility of a persecution complex, there still remains the fact that Christianity is an affront to things as they are, and the Christian who departs from the accepted order of things, will be looked on as “odd,” and will often have to pay the penalty for the departure. “They will lay hands on you,” as my companion did to me in the law library.
7. Suffering from Religious and Secular Authorities
“They shall persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons.” Here are two types of trouble represented by the word
“synagogue” and by the word “prison,” one religious and the other secular. There is a sting in that word “synagogue.” We would have expected him to use the word “temple,” for the temple was the more 40
ARE CHRISTIANS SPARED?
hardened institution standing for the rule of the priest. But the synagogue represented a more or less lay institution, more congregational and freer. At the heart of the temple was the stone now found in a Constantinople museum with the inscription on it,
“Let no foreigner enter within the screen and enclosure around the Holy Place. Whosoever is taken so doing will himself, be the cause that death overtakes him.” There was no such sentiment in the synagogue. It stood for freedom. But an institution standing initially for freedom, now becomes an
instrument of persecution. It
is the old story, the history of
almost all religious
Freedom has turned
denominations. They begin
into freedom to
with revolt and end with
persecute—the
stifling all revolt from
light has turned into
themselves. This is the
darkness, and how
depravity of institutions; in
great is that
the beginning they are given to
darkness!
express life, they end, however,
in throttling that very life.
They therefore need recurrent
criticism, constant readjustment, and a perpetual realignment with life and progress. But the one who attempts this realignment will find exactly what Jesus found, when he announced his program of freedom in the synagogue at Nazareth. “They were all filled with wrath in the synagogue, and they rose up, . . . and led him unto the brow of the hill where their city was built, that they could cast him down headlong.” The result of any departure may be persecution, as open as the casting down from the brow of the hill, or it may be as subtle as the arching of the brows of our companions in the synagogue; in either case the heart has closed and we are on the 41
outside. Freedom has turned into freedom to persecute—the light has turned into darkness, and how great is that darkness!
Or the suffering may come from authority in secular affairs:
“bringing you before kings and governors.” The state demands the right to be supreme, and even to coerce the conscience of the individual. Two students in China went to a magistrate to protest against the arrest of some of their companions for marching in a patriotic procession. By their insistence, they offended the dignity of the magistrate. He demanded that they apologize on bended knees or else be shot. One of them, to save himself, made the apology. The other refused, saying that the time had gone by, when they bent the knee to anyone. The magistrate ordered him to be shot in the feet; but standing on wounded feet, he still protested against the injustice done to his comrades. The magistrate ordered that he be shot through the abdomen. They did so, but he still protested. Then the soldiers were ordered to shoot him through the neck, and as the student fell over, his last words were the reiterated protest. Most of us have no such courage before insolent might. We bend the knee and conform to unjust authority. The amount of suffering which innocent and righteous people have undergone through unrighteous authority, is incalculable.
8. Suffering through the Home Life
“You shall be delivered up even by parents, and brethren, and kinsfolk, and friends.” These words refer to the specific betrayal of the follower of Christ by those in his own home. This kind of suffering is real in the early stages of the acceptance of Christ in a non-Christian land. I have looked into hundreds of faces of young people and seen them tortured, with the pain of finding themselves cast out of the 42
home circle, because of their new spiritual allegiance to Christ! Only the inward urge of the Spirit could carry them through this pain.
This particular kind of suffering in the home is very real, but not as widespread as the kind that arises from the incompatibilities and the daily irritations of unhappy homes. Through loyalty to the other members of the family, the face wears a smile before the world, while the cross of a constant irritation presses upon the sensitive spirit. But it is worn in silence.
When I spoke to Dr. Hu Shih, the father of the Renaissance Movement in China, about Christ fulfilling the best in Chinese culture and life, mentioning the home life of the Chinese as a thing to be preserved, he replied: “But which of our homes are happy? None!”
An overstatement, of course, but think of the possibility of unhappiness of the most intimate kind, in the homes of four hundred million people. Then, spread that through the rest of the world in more or less varying degrees, and you have an amount of unhappiness that is enough to wring the heart of a statue. Suffering in the home has been increased by the shadow of unemployment. The sting of not being able to support wife and child who are dependent upon the father, eats like acid into sensitive natures.
It is not true that the Christian is always spared the pain that can come through home life. Sometimes the incompatibilities between husband and wife are heightened, because of the difference in ideals and allegiance. It is true that because the Christian lives more in harmony with the moral universe, many are saved from those hurts that come from being out of harmony with moral law. But there are other sources of suffering in the home, from which neither partner appears to escape.
43
9. Suffering from the Fact of Being Associated with Christ
“You shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake.” Simeon, the aged saint, saw that Christ would be “a sign” that would “be spoken against.” He was right. Christ has been. For by his uncompromising attitude, he puts things in such a way that we have either to crucify our lusts, or crucify him. Someone has said that if Christ came to Congress, he would first be popular, then puzzling, and then persecuted. We either passionately love him or passionately hate him.
Of course, we can take neutral attitudes toward him, but only if we stay in the dim distance from him. Get close to him, and the soul either stiffens in opposition or melts in surrender. The Christian partakes of that same uncompromising quality.
Christ on his cross disturbed “the feast” at Jerusalem. The Jewish leaders asked that he be taken down from the cross, for his presence upset their feast. The Christian upsets the trivialities of men by the grandeur of his purposes, and disturbs their feasts by his sacrificial spirit. The Christian is, therefore, not a popular hero. No monument has ever been set up in any city of the world for the world’s most heroic figure, “The Christian.” To military heroes? Yes. But not to the Christian. A statue set up in Princeton University campus, entitled
“The Christian Student,” evoked an agitation for its removal. It was too much of a judgment seat.
Secretly in our heart of hearts we may admire the Christian ideal, but superficially we fight it until we surrender. Then it becomes to us all in all. The words of Jesus are literally a fact, “Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you,” for if they do, then you are accommodating yourself to all men, including their sins.
Christ being what he is, and the Christian being what she should be, is bound to know suffering as the result of following that Christ.
44
ARE CHRISTIANS SPARED?
Here, then, we see that suffering comes upon us from nine different avenues: From the mental and spiritual confusions in regard to the deepest things of life; from the association with society, which becomes involved in wars; from the fact of physical calamities, coming from the rampant powers of nature, such as earthquake, fire, flood, and storm; from pestilences that creep silently into our foods, into the air that we breathe, and into the polluting touch of our fellow men; from economic distress; from the fact that society lays hands on us, because of our
departing from its spirit and
standards; from the oppression
that comes from religious and
What answer can
secular authorities; from the
we give to this
incompatibilities of the home;
undoubted fact of
and from association with the
unmerited
Man whose symbol is a cross.
suffering? In giving
Surely, there is no promise to
that answer we
the good man, that he will be
must walk softly...
granted an immunity and
protection from the sufferings
that fall on others.
To complete the picture, we must add to the above nine special ways that trouble comes, the fact that death steals into our homes and, whether they be homes of goodness or of evil, takes away our dearest, sometimes at the very height of their power and usefulness. Death is the universal fact. I glanced up from the writing of that sentence and my eyes fell upon these lines in a letter on my desk, “When my husband passed beyond, my one desire was to get away from the world, to find some corner to be alone in with my hurt.” The woman who wrote those lines is one of the noblest and gentlest, the very 45
epitome of all that is finest and most beautiful in womanhood, and yet she was left alone to face the world with six small children.
In sketching the face of humanity, I trust that I have not drawn the lines of suffering too deeply. There are other sides, of course, but that there is this side cannot be escaped. What answer can we give to this undoubted fact of unmerited suffering? In giving that answer we must walk softly, lest in bungling, we add to suffering, the disappointment and disillusionment that come from following ways that “keep the word of promise to our ears, and break it to our hope.”
We must tread this ground with a prayer upon our lips.
46
VARIOUS WAYS OF FACING
HUMAN SUFFERING
W hat are the various answers given to this problem of suffering? In looking across the world of human thought, one is struck with the variety of answers. Most all of them are sincere, for at this point men lay aside the spirit of trifling cleverness. We may not agree with the answers given, but we are struck with the evident sincerity of them.
1. Remake the World with the Possibility of Suffering Left Out Omar Khayyam, the Persian poet, looked upon the world with its misery and pain, and in his fierce reaction against it proposed:
“To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
. . . shatter it to bits, and then
Remold it nearer to the Heart’s desire!”
In the “Rubaiyat,” he presents perhaps the most thoroughgoing reaction against the world and also the most thoroughgoing remedy for the problem of suffering, he would remake the world with the possibility of suffering left out of it. This may be “the heart’s desire” of many of us at times of peculiar perplexity and pain, and yet it remains 47
only a heart’s desire, for we know that we have no power to put it into effect; nor does our mind in its most thoughtful moments accept the thought of a world with the possibility of pain left out. 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 without the possibility of pain we are not sure that character could be attained.
We must accept the world as it is, and try to find the solution of the problem of suffering, not through fantasies of smashing universes, but through the facts as they are. We must start with things as they are, there must be no dodging of issues, there must be no illusions. For every exaggeration ends in prostration, whose only issue is death.
2. Accepting the Fact of Suffering, and Trying to Meet It, by Always Anticipating It
This is the opposite of the first answer to the problem of suffering.
This method of accepting the fact of suffering, and trying to meet it, by always anticipating it, is the type of mentality tries to cheat the jinx, by always expecting it. It says to itself: “I knew it would come. I was not caught unawares, for I hold everything, expecting it to be snatched from my hands.” This is the attitude of disillusioned cynicism. It gets what happiness it can, out of the fact that it knew beforehand, that there was no happiness. This perspective is a rather thin diet, it is true, but many who take it are able to point to their own anemic lives as proof of the truth of their contention that there is no real happiness. But it hardly solves the problem of suffering, it only illustrates it.
48
VARIOUS WAYS OF FACING HUMAN SUFFERING
3. The Attitude of Self-pity
Some people meet the problem of suffering by feeling sorry for themselves and get pleasure out of feeling sorry for themselves. Many exaggerate their troubles in order to enlarge the possibility of self-pity. There is a touch of this in the fact that almost every man thinks his troubles to be the greatest.
I was once on my way home after a long tour, and naturally anxious to get home. But I missed five different train connections at five different junctions, one after the other, until I wondered if the railways were entering into a conspiracy to keep me away from home, for none of these misses were due to any fault of mine. I remember in my perplexity praying the prayer, “Lord, is there anything you want to teach me through these delays? Please teach it to me and let me get home!” I was twenty-four hours late when I arrived at the station in Sitapur on a midnight train. At that time of the year, February, we do not have rain but once in a blue moon, but just as I arrived at the station a terrific thunderstorm broke. I was on a little unprotected native cart, an ekka, and it took us two hours to get the two miles from the station to my house. I was soaked to the skin and it was cold.
But as I came into the Mission compound, I saw a light on the veranda. How welcome it seemed! The missionary who was living in the same house met me, as I jumped from the ekka and ran on the veranda, soaked and feeling very sorry for myself after the escapade of misses, culminating in this! I expected some expression of sympathy and pity, but his first words were, “I haven’t slept a wink all night.” I lay back and laughed. He was astonished at my laughter, but I saw my lesson. Every man thinks his troubles are the greatest! He was concentrating on his own sleeplessness, and I was concentrated on my combination of troubles, and each was pitying himself.
49
In this case it was laughable, but very often it becomes a serious malady. Missionaries are peculiarly liable to it. It can often be seen protruding itself, as we recount how many burdens are on us, how bad the climate is, and how weary we are! But to meet trouble with self-pity, is only to create a pitiable and pitiful self.
4. The Attitude of Stoicism
This is the attitude of accepting the fact of suffering, and inwardly steeling oneself against it. An Indian tribe in South America begins early to instill this attitude into its young, for as soon as a child is born the father greets it with these words: “You are born into a world of trouble. Shut your mouth, be quiet and bear it.” The stoical Indian is the product of this early hardening.
In more elegant language, but breathing the same spirit, are the words, “My head might be bloody, but it will be unbowed, under the bludgeoning of Chance.” Many repeat this sentiment to themselves to harden themselves inwardly, against the knocks of life.
There is a touch of the lofty spirit in the words of Abigail Cresson, and they compel our admiration:
“Though I am beaten
Nobody shall know.
I’ll wear defeat proudly;
I shall go
“About my business
As I did before.
Only when I have safely
Closed the door
50
VARIOUS WAYS OF FACING HUMAN SUFFERING
“Against friends and the rest
Shall I be free
To bow my head
Where there is none to see.
“Tonight, I will shed my tears;
Tomorrow when I talk with you
I will be joyous again.
“Though I am beaten
Nobody shall guess, For I will walk
As though I knew success.”
These tender lines of a noble-spirited girl find enlarged and somber echo, in the vast and splendid pessimism of German philosopher and historian Oswald Spengler, who after describing the decay of all things, including
man and his civilization, ends in
these words:
Time does not
suffer itself to be
Time does not suffer itself
halted; there is no
to be halted; there is no
question of
question of prudent retreat
prudent retreat or
or wise renunciation. Only
wise renunciation.
dreamers believe there is a
way out. Optimism is
cowardice. We are born into
this time and must bravely follow the path to the predestined end.
There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in Pompeii, who during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That 51
is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from man.
Bertrand Russell puts the same attitude in smaller compass when he says that, “the fairest achievements of man are destined to be destroyed, at last by the trampling march of unconscious power,” and that therefore, the best that we can do is to hold “an unyielding despair.” In the words of another humanist Joseph Krutch: “Ours is a lost cause, and there is no place for us in the natural universe; but for all that, we are not sorry to be human. We would rather die as men than live as animals.” Spengler says, again, that “we human beings of the twentieth-century go downhill, seeing.” This somber procession which he describes may go downhill, “seeing,” but, it is hardly seeing a way out. The road leads to deepening shadows and final night, and the only light is the flickering spirit of man, momentarily flaring up in protest, just before it goes out eternally.
A very brilliant lecturer on psychology said to me with tears in her eyes, “There is no meaning anywhere, and all I can hope for is that my spirit will not break, and that I will go down in the end, with my head up, as befits one with my breeding.”
This attitude and spirit and final end are about as far removed from the Christian solution as can be.
5. The Attitude of Buddha
The gentle Buddha sat under the Bo tree at Gaya, and in his deep meditations discovered the four sacred truths: Suffering, the cause of suffering, the destruction of suffering, and the way to the destruction of suffering. He summed it all up in the startling conclusion:
“Existence and suffering are one.” He went further than saying, that 52
VARIOUS WAYS OF FACING HUMAN SUFFERING
there is suffering in existence, he said that suffering and existence are fundamentally and inextricably one. From this basis, he began to work his way out toward a solution. The way was this: The thing that keeps us going in the round of rebirths is desire, for out of desire deeds spring, and deeds keep up the necessity of the weary round of birth and rebirth, to get the fruit of those deeds. As long as there are deeds, there will be the result of those deeds, this is the law of Karma. The law of Karma necessitates the coming back to birth, to work out the overplus of reward or punishment. Buddha then propounded the obvious proposition,—that to deal with this whole evil, we must go back beyond the deed, to the desire. We must cut out the root of desire, even for existence itself. Then, one will get out into that passionless, actionless state of Nirvana. This state is the dissolution of personality, as we now know it. If it isn’t the cessation of being, it is at least the cessation of becoming. It is the state literally of, “the snuffed-out candle.” In this state, one has passed beyond all pain, all suffering, and in fact, all everything. For there is no “one” to suffer.
Until the follower of the Buddha attains that, he is to be compassionate to all men and creatures, for they are all bound up in the Weary Round of Suffering. But the enlightened one, is to manifest this spirit of compassion, in a spirit of disinterested, disillusioned aloofness. He does these 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. So, the enlightened one who has cut the root of all desire, will go on with his deeds of compassion, until the final and everlasting rest in Nirvana.
There is something lofty and grand about Buddha, even when one must fundamentally differ with him, regarding his basic principle that existence and evil are one. For we must differ with him in this. Jesus 53
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
said that there is evil in existence, but get the evil out, and you will find that existence is fundamentally good, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” Buddha would reduce life to that of the vegetable and call it victory. Buddha would counsel us to get rid of the personality in order to get rid of the suffering bound up with personality, in other words, to get rid of our headache by cutting off our head. It is a remedy, but at too big a price.
And yet Buddha was right in diagnosing our difficulty as “desire.”
It is the desires of men reaching out to this thing and that thing that leaves them disillusioned,
pained, and in suffering. We
Love fastened
seem to be infinite beings trying
upon the flesh,
to find satisfaction with finite
degenerates into
things. The result is suffering!
lust and is
Yes, Buddha was right in finding
degrading, but
the root of our difficulty to be
fastened upon a
in desire, but he was wrong in
personality like
his remedy. He would try to get
Christ, rises into a
rid of all desire, when the fact is
higher form and is
that there is no possible way to
redeeming.
get rid of one desire except to
replace it by a higher desire.
One does not get rid of desire
by its suppression, but by its
expression in a higher form. Love fastened upon the flesh, degenerates into lust and is degrading, but fastened upon a personality like Christ, rises into a higher form and is redeeming. In the one case it brings suffering, and in the other case it brings the cure of suffering. The unsatisfied desire is therefore removed, not by its extinction, but 54
VARIOUS WAYS OF FACING HUMAN SUFFERING
through its satisfaction. The love of the lower is cast out by the love of the higher. Buddha caught glimpses of the truth, but the final truth evaded him, for he saw no One, who was worthy of fastening our love upon, —-the gods spoiled God for him. Since the heavens were blank, earth too, was blank, life was blank, and the only possible end is the state of “the snuffed-out candle.” When you lose God, as Buddha seems to have done, then life itself goes to pieces. The arches crash, for there is no keystone to hold them together. You cannot believe long in man unless you believe in something more than man, you cannot believe in life unless you believe in Life.
There is an attitude akin to Buddhism in the order of Christian nuns whose one greeting to each other is the words, “Sisters, we are born to die.” There is also an order of monks who are called “The Grave Diggers” from the fact that each day they dig a shovelful of earth from the hole that will one day be their own grave, thus reminding themselves daily that the end is death. This practice is more Buddhist than Christian.
6. The Hindu Attitude toward Suffering The Hindu holds an attitude akin to that of the Buddhist, for he too, views the injustices and inequalities of life, and posits a previous birth, from which all these sufferings and inequalities come. The sufferings, which we think come from our environment and from our fellow men, are not really from them, the Hindu says, for they are from our own choices in a previous birth. All suffering has its antecedent sin, somewhere. As a calf will find its mother among a thousand cows, so your deeds will find you amid a thousand births. All suffering, therefore, is just. “Jesus must have been a terrible sinner in a previous birth, for he was such a sufferer in this one,” said a Hindu to me one 55
day. From his premises, he was logically right. “Why do we help the sick in the hospitals, by doing so, are we not interfering with the law of Karma, which is making them suffer as a result of their previous deeds?” asked another Hindu. He was right from his standpoint. Two students were living above low-caste people in the rooms below. The students thoughtlessly threw their garbage down on the outcastes beneath. One student’s conscience was aroused, and he suggested that they desist with throwing trash on others. “But,” said the Hindu,
“these people are low caste, because of sin in a previous birth, and they could not suffer from us unless they deserved it.” Karma had justified their sufferings, for, according to it, everything that is, is just.
Of course, many things are softening and modifying this outlook, so that the Hindu is usually better in his attitudes toward suffering than the doctrine would suggest, but that it is there, and that, it seems to me, is the real root of the tendency for every reform in Hinduism to be halting.
Now, the Hindu of the Vedantic school, and this is the really dominant philosophy in India, points the way out of suffering by positing our identity with the Divine. “Tat twam asi” — “Thou art That,” is the supreme affirmation of Vedantism, and when the devotee learns to reply in very truth, “Aham Brahmasmi” – “I am Brahma,” —then he is released from all bonds, all sufferings, he is merged into the Divine, or rather, he recognizes his essential oneness with the Divine. For the reason he seems separate is because of Avidya, ignorance, which brings Maya, illusion, the illusion of the reality of the world and of our separateness from the Divine. Since Brahma in its highest state, the Nirguna, which means without relationships, without bonds, without deeds, is that state of pure being, the devotee is to cease all deeds, good or bad, concentrate his attention between his eyebrows in his dreamy silence, and thus 56
VARIOUS WAYS OF FACING HUMAN SUFFERING
realizing his unity with Brahma, pass out into It. I say, “It,” for Brahma is impersonal.
While the devotee is in the process of realizing this, he may do good deeds, provided he does them “nishkarma,” without desire for fruit or reward. He is to do them in a detached, aloof way. He has no attachment to anything, he belongs to the Detached, the Great Aloof.
He steps out of the wheel of rebirth, and finally enters into Brahma, who is “sat, chit, ananda,” being, intelligence, bliss. His personality is lost at last, in the ocean of Being, and with it there is, of course, a cessation of all sorrow, all suffering.
The Hindu, therefore, lays the basis of suffering in a twofold fact, the fact of rebirth, which accounts for the inequalities and sufferings of this life, and the fact of the sense of separateness from the Divine.
In examining this answer to the problem of suffering, are we confined to the hypothesis of a previous birth, to account for the inequalities and sufferings of this life? Is there any other way to account for inequalities and sufferings?
Before we enter into a discussion of this, let us plainly state that there is a deep and abiding truth in the law of Karma. We do reap what we sow. This is a universe of moral law. We shall discuss this more thoroughly later. Rebirth is a hypothesis, added to the law of Karma, to explain the inequalities of life. It is a corollary, but no necessary part, of the doctrine of Karma. One may believe in Karma and not accept the hypothesis of rebirth. For it is only a hypothesis, incapable either of proof or of disproof. One may see evidence sufficient to accept the hypothesis, or may deem it insufficient and reject it. But there is no proof. Can we account for inequalities on another basis, and one which is more satisfactory than that offered by rebirth? I think we can.
57
There are three distinct streams of influence which make for inequalities. One is the innate heredity, our genetics. Parents differ and pass on different qualities to their children. The influence of heredity may skip back to a grandparent or great-grandparent, but whether immediate or remote, it is a powerful influence in the producing of differences that may sometimes seem to be inequalities. But genetics does not account for all inequalities.
There is another stream of inequalities coming from the social heredity. By the social heredity, we mean the sum total of influences that play upon the child from without, the environmental, the social, the moral, the religious, the climatic, and the political. Society is organized in favor of some and against others. A child born in an outcaste home in India, is subjected to a set of influences that largely determine what kind of a man or woman he or she will be. But take that child from birth out of its social heredity, and subject it to a new set of social influences, and one can practically make a new being out of it. Many things which we think are inherent, are only environmentally and socially conditioned. The social heredity has a powerful influence in producing inequalities in life. But it is not all-conclusive, as the mechanistic psychologists would claim.
There is a third stream making for inequalities, namely, a person’s own choices. Within the framework of one’s innate and social heredities, there is sufficient freedom for moral choice. This freedom is sufficient for one to determine his own character by his own choices. As Johnson said, “We are free, and we know it, and that is an end of it.” These choices may cancel or congeal many of the tendencies that come from the innate (genetic) and the social heredities.
These three streams, the innate and the social heredities and a person’s own choices are sufficient to account for the inequalities of 58
VARIOUS WAYS OF FACING HUMAN SUFFERING
life. No one of the three taken by itself, can account for these inequalities, but taken together they can, and do. And let us be reminded that these factors are not hypotheses, but laws actually at work. We are more and more discovering what sort of ‘laws’ belongs to each. If the Hindu thinkers had known of the laws of heredity, they would not have been forced into the hypothesis of a previous birth to explain inequalities.
Moreover, the theory of rebirth can hardly be called a very just, or adequate system of rewards and punishments. There is no memory brought over from one birth to another, and therefore to punish one without connecting fault and punishment by the link of memory, can hardly be called a system worthy of the justice of the universe. It is no answer to say that some people do remember their previous births, for this assertion too is incapable of proof; and if it could be proved, it would still be without universal application, for only one or two out of millions of persons ever even claim to remember a previous birth.
It would be like punishing a boy of eighteen for faults done in childhood, of which he has no memory, and concerning which the punisher refuses to enlighten him.
These three streams account for the inequalities, but they do not justify them, for we are only accountable for the stream of our own choices. We cannot choose our parents, nor can we choose the social heredity in which we are born. Of course, we are responsible for the passing on of innate heredities when we become parents, and for the passing on of the social heredities when we become members of society and put our stamp of approval on any resulting inequality, producing social systems. But the center of our responsibility rests on our own choices. The New Testament recognizes this and announces the idea of differing degrees of responsibility. It says in essence: “To whom little has been given, little shall be required; to whom much has 59
been given much shall be required.” To whom little has been given in these innate and social heredities, little shall be required at the place of responsibility of choice; to whom much has been given in these heredities, much shall be required. A varying standard of responsibility will right the inequalities. These three streams account for them, and a varying standard of judgment will right them.
But while that answer is true as far as it goes, it lacks the full content of the Christian answer. It lacks a final touch. That final touch is the part that God takes in receiving these inequalities and injustices upon his own heart, to let them break it upon a cross. Here the universe becomes not only just, but redemptive. We must return to this later.
We must now look at the Hindu solution of suffering, by considering oneself part of the Divine. The Hindu says that since we are God, there can be no sin, no suffering. Salvation is to be by Gyana, knowledge. This is not knowledge in general, but the specific knowledge that one is God. In that knowledge, passes away all thought of sin and suffering as part of Maya, illusion. This is obviously very different from Buddha’s conception. Buddha said that existence is suffering, and the Vedanta says that there is no suffering at all.
How does this way work? It is certainly a sublime affirmation to wave out of existence with one glorious gesture, all the pain and suffering there is. But one has the feeling that it is an attitude that can scarcely stand the shock of the facts of life. It may lift one up while he is drunk on the wine of this idea, but there is the inevitable reaction, the inevitable “morning after the night before.” Buddhism with its pessimism about all being suffering, is the morning after the night before of Vedantism, with its strained affirmations of there being no suffering.
60
VARIOUS WAYS OF FACING HUMAN SUFFERING
In one of our Round Table Conferences a Swami told of what religion meant to him in experience: “I am the Divine. I am the Mother of all. All people are my sons and daughters. I have no sickness, no sorrow, no pain.” After this remarkable statement he caused us inwardly to collapse by saying, “Now you must excuse me for I must go and worship Hannuman.” Hannuman is “the monkey god” of mythological Hinduism. Whenever you try to lift yourself up by an overstrained statement
such as the above, it is bound
to be followed by some such
descent as the Hannuman
Instead of
illustration. Polytheism always
acknowledging
coexists with pantheism. India,
the suffering and
holding to that doctrine, that
facing it and
all is the Divine and hence
getting rid of it,
there is no suffering, has had
Vedanta waves it
the Nemesis come on her of
out of existence
being the land of the greatest
and pays the
suffering in the world. Instead
penalty.
of acknowledging the
suffering and facing it and
getting rid of it, Vedanta waves it out of existence and pays the penalty. For we repeat, all exaggeration ends in prostration whose only issue is death.
There is a nobler method tried by the Hindus in acknowledging the existence of suffering, that of maintaining an attitude of indifference. The ideal is the poised man who withdraws within himself, and is indifferent to praise or blame, heat or cold, pleasure or pain. This is noble, but it falls far short of the active Christian way of love. In the early Christian centuries, they tried to Christianize the 61
term and conception of the Greek ideal of “Apathy.” However, it could not be done. The active principle of love within Christianity prevented this negation. The Christian method of life is not and cannot be withdrawal from life.
7. The Muslim Attitude toward Suffering is that all that Happens is God’s will.
This is perhaps simpler than any other attitude. The Muslim is impressed with the sovereignty of God. All that happens is God’s will.
God has predetermined and predestined all that happens. The good and the evil that come upon us are alike his will. The attitude of the faithful is to submit to that will. Islam literally means submission to the will of God. The Muslim view of suffering, therefore, is to accept it as the will of God and submit to it.
There is no doubt that this attitude has produced “the patient East,” patient, yes, but not progressive. The East is now demanding progressive life, so that Indians more and more rebel against this acceptance of everything as the will of God. They see it as an incubus upon the soul of a nation. A friend of mine, a Swami, was talking to a rich landowner and taking him to task about his oppression of his tenants, but the landowner countered every embarrassing query by unctuously saying, “It is the will of God for them.” The Swami lost patience, pulled off his shoe, and struck the rich landowner, saying,
“Then this is the will of God for you!” The landowner was furious at such an indignity, the worst that can be given to an Indian, and threatened court proceedings against the Swami. But, upon further reflection, he changed his mind and decided to dedicate a temple to the courageous Swami, and did! India is less and less ascribing things to the sovereign will of God. Her temples will more and more be 62
VARIOUS WAYS OF FACING HUMAN SUFFERING
dedicated to those who show a righteous wrath against the ones who cover exploitation with piety, and hide their predatory wills under
“the will of God” cloak. To ascribe all suffering to the will of God is the new blasphemy.
Islam, great and noble in many ways, has nevertheless sterilized the life of vast portions of the East, because its acceptance of inequalities and sufferings as the will of God lays a paralyzing hand on any civilization that adopts it. It is an opiate.
8. The Jewish Attitude toward Suffering Links the Absence of Suffering to Righteousness
In our discussion in a previous chapter we noted in passing that the Jewish mind felt that God would look “with favor upon his people,” would “save them out of all their troubles,” would let no
“plague” come nigh the dwelling of the righteous, would give the righteous double for all his losses, and would satisfy him with long life and prosperity. It is true that some of the prophets, Habakkuk, for example, struck a deeper note in the glorious words:
“For though the fig tree shall not blossom, Neither shall fruit be in the vines,
The labor of the olive shall fail,
And the fields shall yield no meat;
The flock shall be cut off from the fold, And there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.”
Isaiah went deeper still, when he depicted the Suffering Servant:
“By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who among them considered that he was cut off out of 63
the land of the living? . . . They made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, although he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him.”
Here was another note, deeper and cutting straight across the surface note of expectation that the righteous would be prosperous and live long, and see only with his eyes the troubles that would fall on others.
The Jewish nation as a whole never responded to that deeper note, and when Jesus sounded it in his own life and teaching and outlook, they rejected it, taunting him at the end as he hung on his cross, that God would show that he was pleased with Jesus, only if God saved him from the cross. God did not intervene, so they felt doubly sure as they went home from the cross, that they had been dealing with a
“deceiver.”
Islam has inherited this same attitude about Jesus. They believe him to be a prophet, but they cannot bear to see the prophet of God end ignominiously upon a cross, so they teach that Jesus was miraculously saved from the cross, taken triumphantly to heaven and another crucified in his stead.
This Semitic line of thought has passed over into Christendom in spite of the cross. The confusion within Christendom concerning suffering arises from the attempt to reconcile these two conflicting elements. When we as faithful Christians are not spared troubles, our faith is deeply shocked, for we have back in our minds these Jewish promises that we would be spared. These promises do not square with life, so the foundations of our faith give way. We are unmindful of the fact that the New Testament holds out no such promises, but has a different attitude and method for the facing of suffering. We need not anticipate just now what that attitude is, except to call attention to the altogether different note which sounds in the words of Jesus, “In the 64
VARIOUS WAYS OF FACING HUMAN SUFFERING
world you shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
9. The Christian-Science Method of Dealing with Suffering and Pain Denies the Reality of Sin, Suffering and Death as Unreal This method may be summed up in brief as follows: 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 mortal mind; realize your
Many sicknesses
identity with the Eternal Mind and
are mentally
all sin and suffering and death pass
conditioned
away as unrealities.
and feed upon
depressed
Many have doubtless been
mental states.
helped by this method, for there is
running through it a strain of
wonderful optimism. To many
who have been centered on themselves and their troubles, it has come with a sense of healing relief. Many sicknesses are mentally conditioned and feed upon depressed mental states. Christian Science sounds a note of glorious optimism to these mental sufferers, telling them to lift up their heads, to look out of themselves, to get a vision of the Ultimate Good in which there is no pain or suffering. I have no doubt that this changed attitude from pessimism to optimism heals many.
As the reader has doubtlessly noticed, there is a very strong likeness between Christian Science and Hindu Vedantism. Both teach 65
that there is one Sole Reality, Vedanta calls it Atma, or Spirit; Christian Science calls it Mind; both teach that we are identified with that Spirit or Mind, that matter, pain, suffering, sin, and death belong to that world of Maya, or illusion; both teach that we are redeemed from all sin and suffering by knowledge, knowledge of our identity with the Eternal Mind or Spirit.
Both Vedantism and Christian Science have helped many, but have suffered the inevitable Nemesis of exaggeration. Vedantism in India, with its one Sole Reality, has coexisted with thirty-three million gods; with its denial of matter, suffering, and death, it has coexisted with the greatest material suffering and the highest death rate in the world at the present time. Christian Science has attempted to produce results of no pain, no sin, and no death. While this very attempt has brought release and healing to many, nevertheless it has brought into the movement a fringe of unreality. When the attempt is made to make life square with an impossible religious position, there is always the pressure to exaggerate the healings and minimize the failures, this, in spite of the evident sincerity of Christian Scientists. For it is an impossible position to wave all sickness, all suffering, all sin, all death out of existence as unrealities. If there is no such thing as suffering, then the cross of Christ is a travesty. We suspect any solution of the problem of suffering that leaves us with that result. No, the answer of Christian Science is a surface answer, and its steps are dogged by the inevitable Nemesis of superficiality. It is no chance that it has its greatest vogue among those person who are middle-age, comfortably well-off, where optimism is easy, and yet at the same time, where men and women are in need of assurance against the approaching dissolution of old age and death. But it is too superficial. In it there are no Wounds that will answer our wounds, no Death that will heal our deaths. A secular magazine had a cartoon on its front page, 66
VARIOUS WAYS OF FACING HUMAN SUFFERING
depicting two babies with boxing gloves on in the midst of a fray. The attention of one of one baby has been caught by two butterflies, flitting just above his head, and for the moment, he stands gazing at them, endangering himself to the blow, which his opponent is preparing to let fall on his unsuspecting nose. The little dog nearby, sees the impending tragedy, and with his tail between his legs, he winces as he waits for the inevitable blow to fall. Gazing at butterflies when the battle of life is on, is dangerous business. Any system that takes your attention off the grim facts of life, and creates a shallow optimism by calling attention to butterflies only, is doomed to be sent into an inevitable pessimism, as the blows of life fall. Christian Science and Vedantism create an initial optimism, as they gaze at the butterfly affirmations about life, but in the end, the blow falls and pessimisms result.
10. The Mistaken Attitude Among some Christians that Suffering is the Will of God and we are to Resign Ourselves to that Reality
This attitude of some Christians is scarcely to be distinguished from the attitude of Islam. The results are much the same, patience, resignation, and stagnation. This is not Jesus’ view of human suffering as we will discover in the next chapter.
67
4
THE CHRISTIAN WAY:
At Work in the Gospels
W hen we turn to the New Testament to find Jesus’ way of meeting suffering, two things strike us with surprise: First, that his way is so utterly different from others.
Second, that comparatively few in Christendom are really using it. We have let other streams of thought and outlook flow into the New Testament fountain, and we wonder why its taste is unsatisfactory, even bitter.
It reminds one of the Hindu youth who, when I asked him if he had a New Testament, gave the rather puzzling reply, “Yes, I have one somewhat.” On this problem of meeting pain most of us have a New Testament somewhat! I feel sure that if we really got hold of its spirit and method, it would transform us. So, we turn to it with breathless interest, for there are few of us who do not need light and guidance at this place.
Jesus, after dealing with the matter of the man born blind, stood in the Treasury, which was the Court of the Women, and said, “I am the light of the world.” At the place of money, gender, and of human suffering Jesus said he was the light of the world. These are really the 68
outstanding problems of life, and to be “light” here is to be light indeed. Is it true?
Let us note that Jesus incidentally rejected, in the course of a positive statement about human suffering, three common attitudes about it. The disciples asked Jesus in the presence of the man born blind, “Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind,” and the Master answered, “Neither has this man sinned nor his parents. But that the works of God should be made manifest in him and I must work the works of him that sent me.” Note that we have put a period after “parents,” so that instead of reading, “Neither has this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him,” we read as above. This is allowable, some scholars say. If so, then we find that Jesus definitely rejects the idea that personal or parental sin is always at the back of all physical calamities, such as congenital blindness. The burden that weighs on many that their physical calamities are the punishment of God is thereby lifted. Sickness is not necessarily the sign of God’s anger, or of his punishment. He also, according to this changed punctuation, refuses to accept the idea that God sends all suffering. The older punctuation implies that the disease is sent “that the works of God should be manifest in him.” This would lay the responsibility for the sickness directly on God. Jesus rejects that. He refuses to throw the blame on the man born blind, or on his parents, or on God. He waves aside these assumptions and says that the calamity is an opportunity
“to work the works of God” in him “while it is day.” Jesus lays emphasis on the fact that calamity is opportunity. This gives us a key to his solution, a key to which we must return later.
Again, in the account where the people told him how Pilate had mingled the blood of the Galileans with their sacrifices, Jesus replied,
“Think you that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans?
69
... I tell you, No. . . Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, were offenders above all the men that dwell in Jerusalem?
I tell you, No.” Here Jesus definitely says that the calamities that come from man (Pilate), and from the powers of nature (tower of Siloam falling), did not prove that the people who suffer from them were especially sinful. This takes away the self-righteous attitude of those who are free from calamities, when they view the calamities of others.
It may be, said Jesus, that you are no whit better than those upon whom this trouble came.
Again, in connection with John being put into prison, the account says, “After that John was delivered up, Jesus came . . . preaching the gospel of God.” Note: After the finest and truest of prophets had been put into prison and his witness silenced by an unjust king, Jesus came out preaching the good news about God! How can there be good news about a God who allows this sort of thing to happen? But that is exactly what Jesus did. He proclaimed good news, and he proclaimed it under those circumstances and about that God! This too gives us an inkling of his attitude.
In these three incidents Jesus definitely puts aside the idea that suffering is the result of the sin of a man in a previous birth (for how could his sin, except in a previous birth, cause him to be born blind?); and the idea that calamities which come from people like Pilate, and from the powers of nature, like the falling of the tower of Siloam, prove especial sinfulness, or, in fact, any sinfulness on the part of those who suffer them; and, lastly, Jesus rejects the idea that a man like John will be exempt from suffering, and that God isn’t good when it happens otherwise. He proclaimed the good news in the very face of the happening. Evidently, his faith in the goodness and love of God was not built on foundations such as these. His faith must have been laid very deep, for it stood these shocks, and stood them triumphantly.
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THE CHRISTIAN WAY
In the very center of the description in the twenty-first chapter of Luke, mentioned previously, concerning the nine roads from which suffering comes upon us, Jesus makes a declaration that throws a flood of light upon the whole problem and his attitude toward it: “It shall turn unto you for a testimony,” or, as it has been translated, “It shall turn out for you as an
opportunity for witnessing.” In
other words, Jesus says, you are
to take hold of these
Jesus implies that
calamities and turn them, i.e.,
the Christian has
use them for a testimony, you
learned the secret
are not to escape trouble, nor
of an alchemy by
merely to bear it as the will of
which the base
God; you are to use it. Jesus
metal of injustice
suggests that we are to take up
and consequent
pain, calamity, injustice, and
suffering can be
persecution, admit them into
turned into the gold
the purpose of our lives, and
of character and
make them contribute to
into the gold of the
higher ends, the ends for
purposes of the
which we really live. Jesus
kingdom of God.
implies that 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.
This presents to us a positive, active way of dealing with sorrow very different from the methods that really do not face up to life, but try to meet it by various subterfuges. There is an air of realism about the gospel, it refuses all shortcuts, all dodging of issues, all quackeries, 71
all make believe, and faces life fairly and squarely and overcomes it. In nothing is this more truly illustrated than in the gospel’s dealing with human suffering.
Jesus accepts the fact of human suffering. He does not explain it; much less does he explain it away. Had he undertaken to explain it; his gospel would have become a philosophy, in which case it would not have been a gospel. A philosophy undertakes to explain everything and then leaves everything as it was. Jesus undertook to explain little, but changed everything in sight. He did not bring a philosophy but a fact. The fact was his own method of meeting pain and injustice and transforming them into something higher. Out of this fact we gather up our philosophy. First fact, and then philosophy about the fact, that is the order. The Good News is not mere good views. It is the fact of sin and suffering being met and overcome and a way of life blazed out through them, this is the fact of the gospel.
When Jesus was hanging on the cross in dreadful suffering, someone tried to put a drug to his lips to deaden the pain. He refused it. He would take no dodging, no easy way out, no refusal to face the final issue, no opiates. He would match against the suffering and rejection of that hour, his inner courage of spirit, and turn the whole thing into a testimony. He would turn the world’s supreme tragedy into the world’s supreme testimony. And that he did.
When we turn to the Gospels, we find that almost everything beautiful there has come from something ugly. This principle of using things for a testimony is at work through the whole gospel from the beginning to the end.
Jesus goes into the wilderness “full of the Spirit,” and undergoes a terrific strain of temptation for forty days. At the end of the forty days he emerges “in the power of the Spirit.” Mere “fullness” had 72
THE CHRISTIAN WAY
turned to “power” under the storm and stress of temptation. The whole intention of the temptations was to weaken him, to break him.
In fact, they strengthened him, perfected him. He took these temptations up into the higher purposes of his life and made them contribute to his central aims. He turned temptation into a testimony.
He used evil to fit himself to destroy evil!
The temptation of Job opens with his being delivered over to Satan to be tried, and after the stripping of Job it ends with him possessing twice as much as
before. The temptation of Jesus
opens with his conflict with the
three subtle temptations, and
The Good News is
ends with his emerging from
not mere good
them full of the power of the
views. It is the
Spirit. The end was a character
fact of sin and
heightened in its spiritual
suffering being
perceptions and deepened in its
met and
capacity to share with others.
overcome and a
Evil had turned to good. The
way of life blazed
temptation which had been
out through
intended to muddle his program
them, this is the
had only clarified it.
fact of the
Jesus went straight from the
gospel.
wilderness to the little
synagogue at Nazareth to
announce his program, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor,...” Jesus could now announce that program because he himself was to be its illustration and embodiment. The temptation had made him more fit, and had made the program a more vital thing, for his own victorious 73
spirit now throbs through the words. The words had become flesh.
That sense of victorious vitality, transforming everything into its own purposes, runs through the unfolding account. Did the Pharisees complain that he ate with publicans and sinners in close association, implying that he was of doubtful character than those with whom he ate? He turns that criticism into the matchless parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. They flung this criticism upon him to break him, to discredit him in the eyes of the multitude, and he turns back this criticism into a revelation of the very heart of God.
God’s heart, he said, is like the shepherd’s heart, which would seek for that one lost sheep until he finds it; like that woman and her search for the lost coin, Jesus would sweep the universe until he finds that one lost soul, lost in the dust of degradation; he stands upon the hilltops of Eternity, looking down the roads of Time, waiting, yearningly waiting for the return of prodigals to his forgiving heart.
It was a nasty fling for these religious leaders to make insinuations that would rob a man of the one precious thing of his life, his good name, and yet Jesus takes hold of that fling, and turns it for a testimony and a revelation of the very heart of Divine Reality. They would make him poorer by robbing him of his good name-- he makes us richer in our very conceptions of God by that very act. He did not bear the criticism, he used it.
A lawyer stood up to “tempt” him. He would also discredit him in the eyes of the multitude-- but the end? We have now the wonderful parable of the good Samaritan, and humanity has now ringing in its ears the challenging, searching words, “You must not pass by on the other side, when human need lies by the roadside.” The inhumanity of the lawyer is turned and becomes a call and a command to show humanity to every man of every race. Jesus thus turns this malicious attempt into a testimony.
74
John the Baptist doubts Jesus and sends messengers to make further inquiries. To be doubted by your best friend, that is not easy.
But Jesus takes that doubt and that questioning and makes religion a new, vital thing. He tells the messengers of John that they are to return and tell John what they had seen and heard. “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, . . . and the poor have the gospel preached to them.” The messengers of John had asked for the credentials of Jesus. “My credentials,” said Jesus, “are not written in arguments; my arguments are these healed men.” His credentials were written in the healed bodies and in the healed souls of men. His arguments were not in manuscripts but in man. This brings religion down from the academic discussion of validities to the facing of vitalities. That which is vital is valid. Jesus was giving life; therefore, he could claim to be life’s Lord. When Elijah was standing on Mount Carmel, he said, “The God that answered by fire, let him be God.” Jesus changed this test: “The God that answered by healed men, let him be God.” What a cleansing breath this is to the musty atmosphere of religious discussion! But this clarification came out of a doubt, a doubt that hurt, the doubt of his friend, John.
One day a deeper doubt came and with it a deeper hurt. His very mother and kinsmen came to take him away, for they thought that be had lost his reason, that he was insane. One can stand almost anything from the outside if there is sympathy and understanding at home. But when the home misunderstands us, looks at us askance, greets us with coldness and suspicion, that is to be hurt indeed. The mother that bore him could bear with him no longer. So, they came to take him away. When Jesus heard that his mother and his brethren stood without desiring to speak to him, he waved his hand over the group about him and said, “Behold, my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and 75
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
sister, and mother.” Here we find him announcing a deeper brotherhood, based not on blood, but on doing the will of God. It was the conception of the family of God, with God as the Father and men and women of every race and every clime who did the will of God as brothers and sisters. But note the situation in which he announces this concept: A man at the moment of being thought insane announces a world brotherhood, a world brotherhood that would cure the insanities of our narrowness of race and blood, our clashes of tribe and clan and nation, and would make our world a fit place for all persons to live in. A
charge of insanity from his brothers
becomes a charge to the world to
Jesus turns the
live brotherly. Jesus turns the bitter
bitter suspicion
suspicion of his family into a
of his family into
revelation of and a testimony to a
a revelation of
larger family. Jesus did not bear this
and a testimony
familial rejection, he used it.
to a larger
Jesus told those about him that
family.
he was going to “perform cures
today and tomorrow” and “the
third day” that he would be
“perfected.” He called his crucifixion being perfected! The worst that can happen to a man, crucifixion, turns out to him the best that can happen — perfection!
Jesus stood upon the Mount of Transfiguration and talked with Moses and Elijah about his death, which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem. As they stood there the topic of conversation was the cross
– Jesus saw it in the dim distance, and he probably told Moses and Elijah that he would not ask to be excused, he would not step aside, but would go through with the whole thing. As they stood facing the 76
cross, his whole being became luminous. He was transfigured before them. Here was something new: Life became luminous as it faced its direst tragedy!
The disciples would be arguing in the way, as to which of them should be greatest. They tried to shine by the assertion of claim and the magnification of themselves. But Jesus takes them to the mount and lets them see that life does not shine save as it faces its cross. They were trying to shine by self-assertion, and Jesus showed them that they would only shine by self-sacrifice. As they lost themselves, they would find themselves again. He was losing himself, but—-the luminous light! They fell on their faces before it.
As Jesus went before them toward Jerusalem, certain that he was to meet his death, his “disciples were amazed,” amazed that a Man could go before them eager to meet that which human nature most shrinks from. Jesus stops only to heal, to teach, to inspire as he presses on his eager way. Peter tries to stop him, remonstrating that this shall never occur to him. But he tells Peter that he is a stumbling-block, and that he thinks as a man thinks and not as God thinks. Jesus thereby suggests that God thinks of and approves all this. What a God and what a representative Jesus is of him!
But in that moment a more bitter sorrow comes to Jesus. His disciples, whom he had prepared for this hour, and whom he had tried to infect with his spirit, now stop to quarrel over who should be first in the coming Kingdom. Quarreling over first places in the shadow of the cross of their Leader! This would surely break his spirit! But, no, Jesus turns even this for a testimony, for out of that quarrel comes to us the startling teaching that the greatest among us must be the servant of all. That one saying is enough to recast human society. And where did that teaching come from? A quarrel! Jesus used even the betrayal of his spirit to show forth a new spirit.
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A deeper betrayal, the betrayal of Judas, only brings forth a deeper tenderness and a more glorious manifestation of a love that was not conditioned by the deed of the betrayal. “Love is not love which alters, when it, alteration finds.” What Jesus had was love, for it did not alter when it found Judas altered from a disciple to a betrayer.
But even that betrayal would only help toward the final end, and that final end would be victory. And it was victory! For Jesus did not bear the cross, he used it. There at the cross was the deepest injustice ever done, and Jesus turns it all into a healing of injustice and sin. These men were at their worst, and through it, Jesus reveals God at his best.
There, at the cross, hate was bitterest, and there, at the cross, Love met it, and conquered it by taking it into his own heart and transforming it. The darkest hour of history becomes the lightest! The cross becomes a throne! The end, a new beginning!
78
THE CHRISTIAN WAY:
At Work Among the Early
Christians
Jesus seems at first sight to represent the passive tendencies toward life—withdrawal from the stings and hurts and entanglements of life. Did he not ask men not to be entangled with riches, to turn the other cheek when smitten, to go the second mile, to give the cloak also, to go forth as lambs in the midst of wolves, and to submit to the cross as he did? Jesus “seems” to meet life by withdrawal and submission. Yes, but only at first sight does he represent the passive attitude, for on second sight we find that Jesus represents the most amazingly active method of dealing with life.
Jesus withdraws from life only to advance further into life, he surrenders life only to get a better hold on it; he lets life do its worst, and then through it, shows the very best that God or man can demonstrate. Jesus takes on himself everything that speaks against the love of God, everything that makes the heart of man weep in desertion, every injustice that makes men cry out against the heavens, he takes all of this on himself at the cross, and through these very things shows the love of God.
79
But we are tempted to say “Yes, he did it; he met life when it was painfully cruel and transformed it, but that was his method; it cannot be ours.” But that is exactly what his method did become. He transferred this vitality to his followers. The Acts of the Apostles represent the continuation of the acts of Jesus, especially in relation to the meeting of suffering and difficulty. To them, oppositions became opportunities, sufferings became songs.
The Acts of the Apostles is an hilarious book. It opens up with men so overflowing with spiritual vitality, that other men looking on, said that they were drunk. They were, but with the new wine of the Kingdom; a wine that left no “morning after” effect. The thing that made them bubble with new joy was the consciousness that they had sufficient inward resources to meet outer life.
Let us lift up out of the account a few of the incidents that illustrate this way of meeting suffering and opposition. Peter and John were going up to the Temple when a man sitting at the Beautiful Gate asked for alms. They probably fumbled in their pockets for something to give him, but found themselves in that “deepest of hells, the hell of an empty purse.” Most of us would have let the incident stop right there, for what can you do if you haven’t money in a world like this?
We would have borne the pain of having nothing, a very acute pain to many. But these men did not stop there. Peter asked the man to look on them and then repeated the magnificent words, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have, I give thee. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Rise up and walk.” And the man did. These men did not bemoan their poverty, nor even bear it, they used it. They took up this poverty into the purpose of their lives and made it contribute to higher ends. The fact is that if they had had some money, they would have tossed him a coin, and that would have been the end of it, their adequacy on that level would have blocked a higher good. To 80
many the loss of property and money during “the depression” has been unmitigated calamity, they have known life on no higher level, hence there is no way out. To others it has been an opportunity to transmute these losses into higher gain. They are more fit to run life’s race because less corpulent. They have discovered that one’s wealth may be in the abundance of one’s possessions, or in the fewness of one’s wants. They have learned to cultivate simple tastes and have found to their surprise that they have more life as they have less things. To many things lying lame within them, higher tastes, spiritual aptitudes, they have said, “Rise up and walk.” And together with these they go into the temple of larger living.
If it seems remote to look at these disciples for examples, since they were chosen for a religious vocation, let us look at Stephen, a layman. As he sat before the Sanhedrin, they lied about him, twisted his words and attitudes, not an easy thing to bear. The fact is that Stephen did not bear this experience before the Sanhedrin, he used it!
Every lie that fell upon him became light. “The people saw in his face the face of an angel.” The more they lied about him the more Stephen shone. When they took him out and buried him beneath a shower of stones, in his dying prayer he prayed that this sin might not be laid to their charge. That prayer struck the conscience of a young man named Saul, bruised it, and finally led him to the feet of Christ on the Damascus road. They lied about Stephen, and he turned lies into light; they stoned him, and he turned the stoning into a testimony of unquenchable forgiveness, and in doing so, won to Christ the man who became the greatest Christian of the centuries. In misrepresentation and in death Stephen was stronger than his circumstances, and used them to further the Kingdom.
When persecution arose after the stoning of Stephen, the disciples were scattered by the fury of that persecution. But the result, “They 81
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the word.”
They were smitten by the hammer of unjust power, but the anvil upon which they lay was the anvil of God’s purposes, and every blow that smote them, threw the sparks that scattered the fire. At the very same time they themselves were being smitten into shape to become keener instruments of the Divine Will. Inwardly, they became more fit and outwardly more effective. What can you do with a thing like that?
You smite it and you scatter it.
Paul and Silas sat in an inner prison at midnight with feet and hands in stocks and their backs bleeding from cruel lashes. What had they done to deserve that
punishment? Nothing, except that
they loved humanity so much that
They did not
they could not refrain from sharing
bear suffering,
with humanity the best they had. That
or try to
best was Christ. But this was the
escape it, they
result. So, did they sit there and
used it!
complain that religion would not
work, that God had let them down,
that there was no justice in the
universe, and that they were a sorry spectacle for their allegiance to it all. Did they do that? No, no, “At midnight Paul and Silas sang.”
Sang! Did song ever come out of the heart of deeper injustice and did it thereby ever have deeper meaning? They went higher and higher in their notes of praise, until they struck such high notes that God had to bring in the earthquake for a bass! Before morning the jailer was converted, the foundation of a Christian church was laid, and later on the man who was so deeply wronged in a Philippian jail wrote a letter to that church, a letter which today adorns our New Testament and enriches our spirits as we read it. They did not bear suffering, or try to escape it, they used it!
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The disciples were frustrated as they attempted to go into Asia, that frustration became the salvation of Europe. Balked at one place, they broke out in another. They turned their very frustrations into fruitfulness.
Taken before unjust tribunals to be tried, the disciples found there an opportunity to preach their gospel to royalty. Chained to soldiers, they spread through the Roman army the good news of a glorious freedom. Taken before Caesar to be tried, they led some of Caesar’s household into the household of God.
Let us take one more incident out of the many of the New Testament, an incident that comes home to each of us at some time or another. Paul had a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet him. From this description, it would seem that it was some physical infirmity that had come as a result of some wrong done to him, it was indeed a messenger of Satan to buffet him. It was an infirmity rooted in injustice, therefore, doubly hard to bear. Surely in a case of this kind God would heal the infirmity, cancel the injustice and let Paul get on with his work. Three times Paul requested God for its removal, and was refused. God seemed hard and indifferent. Injustice from man, plus infirmity in himself, plus indifference in God could equal a collapsed spirit. At least by all ordinary calculations it should. But it didn’t for Paul! After the third request God said to Paul, “No, I will not heal you from this infirmity, but I will do something better. I will give you power to use it. My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” Paul, catching the significance of the offer, rose up and said, “Then, if that be the case, I will glory in my infirmities, for when I am weak, then am I strong.” Blocked on the level of being healed, Paul saw the possibility of an opportunity on a higher level, namely, the level of using one’s infirmities for the purposes of higher effectiveness.
83
That leads us straight face to face with the question of physical healing. It is obvious from the above account, that God does sometimes heal. Paul expected it. I think that we have a right to expect it. Some of us know enough of it in experience, so undoubtedly real that we cannot look on it as other than fact. We recognize that God heals in numerous ways, through nutrition, through medicines, through surgery, through mental suggestion, and through exercise. We cannot look on these as anything but divine methods. But over and above and beyond all that, there is the direct touch of the healing power of God upon the physical frame, that cannot be brought under the category of any of these. While this is true, we must also recognize that God does not always heal. It is in these exceptions that so many lose faith. It is in trying to prove that there are no exceptions, that a great deal of unreality and make-believe spring up and discredit the fact of divine healing. If we should recognize that sometimes God does heal and that sometimes he doesn’t, and that the refusal to heal is in the interests of a higher good, then we can accept the refusal as being as much the gift of God as the healing. In fact, the refusal may mean a higher compliment than the healing, for in that instance God must refuse us on the basis that we can be trusted to use even infirmity. It is the compliment of his faith in our spiritual strength.
Those who are hurt at this point would have kept their faith and kept it more gloriously if they had seen the fact that God offers not one unalterable, fixed method of healing, but alternatives. The alternatives are these; either God will heal us from the infirmity or else he will give us power to use the infirmity. In either case it is a way out of the difficulty. When people ask me to pray that they may be healed, I always reply that I will, provided that in case God should refuse, they will not lose their faith in him. For I feel that it is more important that we keep our faith, than that we keep our health. With the faith intact even though healing is denied, we are ready for the 84
alternative, namely, that we can employ the infirmity in the purposes of a higher good.
When a storm strikes an eagle, he sets his wings in such a way that the air currents send him above the storm by their very fury. The set of the wings does it. The Christian is not spared the pains and sorrows and sicknesses that come upon other people, but he is given an inner set of the spirit by which he rises above these calamities, by the very fury of the calamities themselves.
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6
THE CHRISTIAN WAY:
At Work Today
I n the case of Jesus and the early Christians, there is something new and refreshing at work. First of all, there is displayed an absolute mental and spiritual honesty. There are no mental tricks to be played with suffering, however spiritual it may all seem to be.
The gospel teaches honesty and forthrightness. There is little explaining and no explaining away. There is no concealing with its surface suggestions, there is no blinking of the stark facts, such as Christian Science proposes; there is no exaggerated statement of our being one with the Divine and therefore incapable of pain or suffering, such as Vedanta teaches; there is no paralyzing submission, such as Islam counsels; and there are no awful pessimisms, such as Buddhism leads us into, with its virtual denial of life itself, none of these are offered by the gospel. The New Testament offers a frank, open-eyed looking at life and letting life speak its direst word, and then taking hold of life at that point and turning the whole thing into victory.
There is at work here what one would call victorious vitality.
Unless religion can manifest itself as victorious vitality it will be 86
discarded, for everything from the lowest cell to the highest man is stretching up its arms after completion, after perfection, after more life. If religion stands as a denial of that process and a reversal of its aspiration, if it shows weariness and deserts the whole thing and asks men to get rid of the pains of life by various desertions and subterfuges, then it is doomed. It may linger on as an anesthetic to make easier the passing of a doomed people, but only as such. Its vitality will be gone.
But if this that Jesus offers is religion, then it stands amid that process of yearning after fuller life and expresses that yearning at its highest. Religion is a cry for life, for life in its highest qualitative terms. It is therefore far removed from any “escape mentality.” Jesus was against anything that banked the native fires of life. We deny, therefore, that what he taught is what Schopenhauer called, “the denial of the will to live.” It is, in fact, the will to live in its highest form. It expresses a yearning after a quality of life, as well as a quantity of life. It wants more life, and more life of a certain quality, not less. The answer to the problems of life is adequate life, not less life.
Someone asked a man in Manchester, England, why he drank liquor. He replied, “Because it is the shortest way out of Manchester.”
He had no courage to face Manchester, hence the shortest way out was by way of a bottle. In one swift hour Manchester, with its problems and pains was gone. He was free. But the difficulty with that remedy was that in the morning, when the effects of the liquor had worn off, Manchester was back again. And he had less vitality to face it, than the night before. All taking of drugs, all drinking of liquor, all taking to religious devotion and outlook that means a denial of life, are a failure of nerve.
The Communists of Russia say that “religion is the opiate of the 87
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
people.” When one looks at the type of religion they were facing in Russia in the Russian Orthodox Church, we are compelled to agree that there is some truth in what they say. It was an opiate, because it would not allow men to think, and because it stood back of the inhuman Czarist regime. Instead of standing with the people as they struggled for human rights, the religious leaders stood with prestige and privilege. But this type of religion they faced was far removed from the religion of Jesus and as contradictory to it as was the minister in India who, at a time of upset, administered communion to his European flock with a
loaded revolver on the
communion table, the loaded
The religion of
revolver said one thing and the
Jesus ... displays
Communion Table said
such an amazing
another. The Russian
vitality that there is
Orthodox Church may have
no other word to
been an opiate to the people,
use of it except
but the religion of Jesus is not.
victorious vitality.
Dr. John Dewey, lecturing
before a class of students,
drew a line on a blackboard
and on one side put all those systems of outlook and method that teach Control, and on the other side those that teach Acquiescence.
On the Control side, he put Science, and on the Acquiescence side, he put Religion. To be fair he should have put “Some Religion.” He might even have written “Some forms of Christianity.” But certainly, he could not fairly have put the religion of Jesus. For it displays such an amazing vitality that there is no other word to use of it except victorious vitality. It gives one power to lay hold on the raw materials of life, good, bad, indifferent, just, unjust, pleasurable, painful, and to 88
take them up into the life stream and assimilate them and use them.
Plants and animals and men can survive as they assimilate things from their environment, which have an affinity with them.
They are dependent on affinities; if they are lacking, they die. But the Christian survives not only on affinities, but on oppositions, on infirmities, on pain, on crosses. He is, therefore, the hardiest of “hardy annuals;” rather, he is an evergreen. He therefore belongs to what James calls “the tough-minded” rather than to “the tender-minded.”
The Christian is the most pessimistic of men in that he views life through a cross, and the most optimistic in that he believes that behind every cross lies an Easter morning. In fact, he proceeds to turn his Calvary’s into Easter mornings.
Lest we seem to be overstating the case before making it, let us look at this principle of victorious vitality at work, for it is not embalmed in the centuries, but is emblazoned in many a life now. It works wherever it is worked, and to the degree that it is worked. We shall take incidents from many cultures, from many differing types of Christian, from many ages, and from many differing sets of circumstances, to see if we can find from this widespread application, a possible universal principle at work.
I think I shall give the place of honor to a disabled woman in China. I stood one day speaking on this subject, and this woman occupied one of the front seats. Her disability was such that she could not see over the back of the bench. All the time I was speaking, there was a prayer in my heart that this woman would receive my message.
But I found that I had wasted my sympathy, for she became a message to me! At the close a woman missionary came to me to introduce me to one of her teachers and she led me to this woman who had been in the front row for my talk. The woman must have seen the look of 89
surprise in my face, for she said, “Yes, one of my teachers, and, moreover, one of the best I have ever had. In fact, she is the greatest spiritual power in this school, and has led more people to God than any other person in this city.”
I was interested and urged her to go on. She told me how as a child she had been dropped by careless hands and her back broken, and how for many years after that she was a bad-tempered young woman lashing with the sharpness of her tongue against her fate and her environment. And no wonder, for she seemed to have a good case for bad temper, and revolt against a universe that would let a thing like that happen, when she had done nothing to merit it. But one day, she let Christ into her embittered soul and lo, all was changed. To the astonishment of everyone, she decided to be a teacher. When Christ comes into the heart, it is amazing to see how life takes on a seriousness of purpose. It begins to push the clods from off its head, as it responds to the urge toward the light, toward blossoms and fruitfulness. This woman felt that urge and became a teacher, but when she was sent to a village to take charge of a school, there was almost a riot by the villagers, who supposed her disability to be an ill omen. But the missionary insisted that they try her, promising that if they did not like her as a teacher, she would take her back. The villagers reluctantly agreed. When after several years the missionary came to take her away to a larger school, there was almost a riot again; these villagers insisted that they had never had such a teacher, for she radiated the love and power of God. She had taken her disabled body and had made it the instrument of a regnant spirit. The last I saw of her was as she pushed the little bamboo stool in front of her, as she worked her way across the room. That stool served as her crutches, and it was upon that stool that she sat to teach, and it is upon that stool that she sits, as Christ each day crowns her with a crown of life.
90
It is her throne. The symbol of her infirmity becomes the place of her crowning.
Let us turn from this account of one to whom personally a wrong had been done, to an incident where a wrong is done to those whom we love, —- sometimes harder to bear than the first. It is comparatively easy to forgive an injury to ourselves, but when it is done to those whom we truly love, the sting goes deeper and it is hard to eradicate. A missionary family, consisting of father and mother and three children, were all murdered in what was known as the Vegetarian Riots in China. Four of the other children escaped, after seeing the rest of the family murdered. They met again and decided what their revenge would be; they would all go and get the best training possible and then return to China, and give their lives in service for those who had murdered the rest of the family. They did so. All of them returned to China and have spent years of fruitful, loving service to the land that had been so unjust to the rest of the family. One of these brothers won to Christ Dr. James Yen, affectionately called “Jimmy Yen,” the father of the Mass Education Movement in China, a movement through which literally hundreds of thousands are being taught to read. Alongside of the five graves in Foochow, are two others, graves of the daughters of a widowed mother in Australia. They too had been murdered at the same time.
When the news came to the widowed mother that her daughters had been murdered, her response was that, as she had no other daughters to give, she herself would go. So, at sixty-two years of age she sold off all that she had, went to the place where her children had been murdered, learned the language, set up a school, gave twenty years of service, and dying at the age of eighty-two, was buried beside her daughters. These five survivors concerned in this deep injustice and cruel wrong did not bear their pain, they harnessed it and made it 91
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
serve. Instead of being dragged to the chariot wheel of fell circumstance, they mounted the chariot, seized the reins and drove it to their own destination. And a glorious destination it was!
Sometimes unjust suffering hits us personally, sometimes those whom we love, and sometimes our work. A doctor in China had built up an efficient hospital through years of toil and self-sacrifice. When the Communist wing of the Nationalist army swept northward, they looted his hospital and left
it the shell of what it had
been. All the work of years
A doctor’s work was
went down in a crash. Not
destroyed by selfish
an easy thing to forgive!
and brutal soldiers, but
But, undaunted, he
instead of
followed the army and
complaining at the
attended to its sick and
lack of interest that
wounded. When General
God has in his
Chang Kai Shek, who was
children... he turned it
in charge of the army, saw
for a testimony.
this, he asked his wife,
“What makes this foreign
doctor tend to the sick and
wounded, when these very
men destroyed his hospital?” His wife, who was a Christian, replied,
“It is Christianity.” Said General Chang, very thoughtfully, “Then, I must be a Christian.” This was one of the three influences that made the General, then President of China, decide to become a Christian at a time when the Anti-Christian Movement was sweeping China. This undoubtedly, as his wife assured me, turned the tide against the Anti-Christian Movement and helped to bring about the present [1933]
very favorable attitude of China toward Christianity. The Anti-92
Christian Movement has spent itself. China has decided not to be anti-Christian, but she has not yet decided to be Christian. She is in the moment of the Great Hesitation. The situation is in the hands of the Christian Church to do with it what it will.1
A doctor’s work was destroyed by selfish and brutal soldiers, but instead of complaining at the lack of interest that God has in his children and their work for him, instead of merely bowing and bearing it, the doctor turned it for a testimony, and through this calamity helped to open the greatest evangelistic opportunity in the world at the present time. That looted hospital has been reconditioned and the doctor is doing splendid service, but he undoubtedly did more by the way he met this calamity than he could have done if life had not called on him to go through the pain of seeing everything go down in a crash. The revelation of a spirit in a moment of time probably did as much, or more, to set up a light before men than a whole lifetime of untroubled service.
General Feng Yu Shiang has been in eclipse as a Christian for some time. He had been hit hard, so he told me, by the events of the last few years, especially by the imperialistic attitude of some outside nations. He has nearly gone under. But one thing, he told me, has held him strong. One of Feng’s relatives killed Doctor Logan, a missionary doctor, who was attending this relative as his patient. It seemed an unrelieved tragedy. But Mrs. Logan, a trained nurse, took charge of the patient who had killed her husband and nursed him back to health. Logan’s son was in America studying, and when Feng heard that he was working his way through college, he gathered together two thousand dollars and sent the money to the son to help him with 1 The situation has now changed quite dramatically and what appeared favorable to Christianiy in China during Jones’ writing of this book is no longer the same.
Editor.
93
his educational expenses. The family, however, felt that they could not keep it, so they returned it, thanking the General very heartily, but saying that they felt the son must work his way through college with his own hands. “Now,” said Feng, as we stood on the side of the sacred mountain of Taishan and looked out across the valley, “that is real Christianity. That has hold of me very deeply.” General Feng held my hand a long time as we stood there, and as I looked into his rugged, honest face, I felt that he would one day come back again to a living Christian faith, and that if he did, he would be stronger than ever, for he has in him the raw materials of being a really great Christian. If he does come back, the spirit of that wife and son, who turned their experience into a testimony, what seemed like an unalloyed tragedy, will lead the way. But if he doesn’t come back, if the whole thing seems unrelieved failure, nevertheless the spirit itself which they have shown is the victory. Whether another rises from the dead through it or not, that spirit is deathless, it cannot fail. Whether General Feng is lifted by it or not, the rest of us are.
Here are the two greatest military men of China, Generals Chang and Feng, conquered by the turned cheek. What military force could not do; an invincible love did. The Christian is called on to use subtle forces that make military power seem impotent and absurd. As someone has said, “To strike back when struck arouses the combative instinct in your antagonist, to run away when struck, arouses the hunting instinct in the pursuer, but to turn the other cheek arouses the deeply tender instincts in him.” Along this line lies victory.
Simon, the Cyrenian, came out of the country one day little dreaming of the tragedy into which he would be thrust by circumstances. But he found himself being taken hold of by violent hands, and a cross thrust upon his shoulders. “Him they compelled to bear the cross.” The tragedy had a sharp point in it for Simon, in view 94
of the fact that the Roman soldiers would not lay hands on one of their own countrymen, for that would have been a degradation to him; nor would they lay hold of a Jew, for that would have been a possible point of offense to an already embittered nation, so they laid hold on an African, the “weakest” member of society, who had no way of retaliation, and made him bear the cross that other shoulders would have refused. A personal humiliation, combined with a racial wrong, must have cut deep into the soul of Simon. But as he trudged up the hill that day, he learned life’s deepest lesson, for he saw Jesus turning the whole bitter shame into a triumph of love. As in a flash, he too caught the way to deal with this tragedy, and turned the whole thing into something else that transformed it and him, so much so that he passed it on to his sons, Alexander and Rufus. These sons became sufficiently prominent in the early church to be mentioned in the Gospels in such a way, that it was taken for granted that they were well known. The tragedy was transformed, and so were Simon and his sons.
Life often deals with us as it dealt with Simon; we walk out into a cloudless day, the birds are singing as we went our way “from the country,” all life seems full of hope and promise. Then suddenly, we find ourselves in the midst of tragedy; circumstances lay on us a heavy cross, and we are compelled to trudge up some lone Calvary bearing a cross of unchosen pain. But if life deals with us as it did with Simon, we can deal with life as Simon did. That cross threw him in company with Jesus, and that brief moment with Jesus gave him power to transform a racial wrong into the righting of a race, beginning with himself and his sons. His racial heredity was responsible for his bearing an unwanted cross, but he uses it to begin a new heredity. He becomes the first of the great African race to begin the long march up from slavery to freedom. The cross that he bore became the banner that goes before them, the symbol alike of their shame and their glory.
95
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
In their upward march they have set their sorrows to songs, and out of the heart of pain, have sung “the Negro spirituals,” the most triumphant music the world has ever produced. “Nobody knows the trouble I see, Glory, Hallelujah!” The people who can begin their song the way that song begins and end it the way it ends are headed for glory, both here and hereafter. When the Burma Gospel Team of students came to India singing “Negro spirituals,” I said to myself,
“These high-brow Indians will not take this sort of spiritual singing.”
They took it! It swept India by storm. Everyone can understand and appreciate a triumphant spirit, no
matter in what words it clothes its
Everyone can
song.
understand and
A friend of mine, riding
appreciate a
horseback through a sparsely
triumphant spirit,
populated portion of Virginia,
no matter in
came suddenly into a clearing in
what words it
which stood a cabin with an
clothes its song.
African-American woman in the
doorway. The friend called out
greeting, asking who lived there.
The reply came happily back, “Nobody but me and Jesus.” That woman standing in the doorway of her lonely cabin, bereft of all her loved ones, but with a light on her face never seen on land or sea, and with the words, “Me and Jesus,” upon her lips, is a queen, no matter what her circumstances may say. She belongs to that succession of Simon, who toil up the hill with crosses of racial and personal wrong laid on their shoulders, but singing, “Nobody knows the trouble I see,” and ending with an Easter morning note of “Glory, Hallelujah!”
In Peking there is a beautiful temple, solidly and massively built over the tomb of a prime minister of one of the Manchu emperors.
96
They say that this tomb and this temple were built over the body of the prime minister to keep down his spirit, to prevent its rising to the throne. Many an institution, such as slavery, has been built over the spirit of man to keep it from rising to the throne of human dignity and freedom. But the former slaves are everywhere singing their way out of tombs to thrones of freedom. When I first heard Hawaiian music, there was such a plaintiveness in it that I turned to a friend and said, “That is tears set to music.” I did not know then that this music was invented by the lepers of Hawaii. When I learned that, then I knew why it was that it touches us so deeply. It is deep answering deep.
Leper asylums are usually depressing places, but I once came away from one with my heart singing. There was a person with leprosy there who had been a Christian worker, but was stricken in the prime of life with the dread disease. His fingers had all been eradicated by the disease except the stump of his right-hand index finger. That was all that was left. But in the stump of that finger, he grasped the bow of a violin and played most exquisitely and triumphantly. I inwardly saluted him. He commanded my spirit. Did I say he “was” a Christian worker, nay, he “is” a Christian worker, and the spirit that can use the stump of a leprous finger to grasp the bow of a violin, is doing more Christian service than many an unscarred ministry. That leper was
“framing out of three sounds, not a fourth sound, but a star.” And that star was guiding us.
In the city of Rangoon was a bright, vivacious European college girl who became a teacher. Life seemed to hold beautiful promise for her, but before her sun had climbed to its zenith it became suddenly darkened by the blackest of clouds. She discovered that she had contracted leprosy. She tried to hide the dread fact, but it could not be done. She was taken away for treatment. After some time, she came 97
back symptom-free. She began her teaching again. But the disease had only been stayed; it was still there and began to be active again. She felt instinctively that if she went back for treatment again, it would all be over. She tried to smother it and tell herself that it was not there, but to no avail. One day she deliberately left her classroom, walked out the two miles to the leper asylum, hesitated a long time before the gates, knowing that if they closed on her this time, it would be almost certainly for good and all. With a prayer on her lips she went in. On the axis of that prayer, life turned from resentment and bitterness to victory. Blocked from teaching on the outside, she turned to teaching the lepers and more, she arranged them into a choir and taught them to sing. And in doing so, her own heart caught a strange new music it had never known before. She is radiant. Did I say she was teaching those lepers? Nay, she is teaching us all. Every picture must have its dark background to set off the foreground, so she used the shadows of this affliction as the background upon which she paints a luminous spirit. When we learn to teach others at this place, we are really teaching, for we are not imparting information but transformation.
These are dramatic phases of the Victory. But they are not, thereby, more real than some of the silent ones, unheralded and unseen. The unseen crosses that press in upon the spirit are often more poignant, than those that cut into the flesh. Of all those who suffer in silence, the most silent must be those who go through life without finding a mate. The human spirit is made for companionship and feels lost and unhappy until it finds its counterpart. But what of those who never find?
I remember one such, who seemed to be the very epitome of gracious womanhood. She had every instinct for motherhood, and what a mother she would have been! But she, who would have made such a wonderful mate, was denied a mate, and she who would have 98
been a model mother, was denied motherhood. The sight of a babe upon another woman’s breast sent a pain through her soul, like the piercing of Mary’s sword. She bore this unseen cross in silence during the years. They were not lonely years, for they were filled with beautiful service to others. But there was always the gnawing. One day as she listened to an address describing the birth of a human spirit from darkness and shadows to new light and life, she saw a vision and heard a call. She would give herself to the bringing forth of spiritual children, nursing them into character and fruitfulness. She, who was denied motherhood on one level, could give herself to motherhood on another. No pain and travail would be too terrible to bring forth these spiritual children into the world. The gnawing, regretful pain has gone and a creative pain, a pain that is really joy set to a higher key, has taken its place. Regret has turned to recreation. She is a happy mother, mothering the souls of the lowly and finding a mate in human need, married to misery, yet blissfully happy. She is using her denials and turning them into doors.
Psychology is teaching us the possibility of the sublimation of instincts, rather than their suppression. They tell us that the sexual instinct can be turned into creative forms of art and poetry and service. This is all to the good, and as such we welcome it. But psychology, dealing with less than the highest, is not able to put the sublime into its sublimations. It teaches sublimation, but must wait on religion to put content into it. Jesus takes all balked instincts and sets them to glorious tasks in the new Kingdom. There these instincts are free, because free now to express themselves in their highest forms.
Pugnacity becomes persistence in standing for the right, fear becomes reverence for God and human personality, sexuality becomes creative tenderness in service, self-love becomes a larger love of selves, gregariousness becomes human brotherhood.
99
Nothing is thrown away. It is all turned to higher forms.
“Christianity is the only religion that throws nothing away,” including frustration and pain and suffering. Jesus said to his disciples, “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” He redeems not only human souls, but also the fragments that remain when life goes to pieces under the blows of suffering and sorrow and frustration.
In the parable of the wedding feast of the king’s son, those who were invited refused on one pretext or another. Then the king sent out and called in the halt and the lame and the blind and filled his feast.
Christianity uses its very oppositions to fulfill its own program. The specially privileged were first invited, but when they refused, the servants were sent out to get “as many as you can find.” By the refusal of the specially privileged, the invitation broke out into democratic universality and thus fulfilled its essential nature, fulfilled it by a frustration!
The gospel is a gospel of “in spite of.” People take it not because it is an easy, but a victorious, way to live. If someone is looking to the gospel to be a way “on account of,” he or she will probably be puzzled and disappointed; but if she is looking to it as a way “in spite of,” then she will find that she has laid hold on adequate vitality.
100
THE CHRISTIAN WAY IS
VICTORY
W e have seen that Jesus presents to us the possibility of an active dealing with sorrow, in deep contrast to the usual passive method. The verse usually quoted by the proponents of the passive method is the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane, “Not my will, but thine be done.” That, they say, is the high-water mark of religion in general and of prayer in particular.
The usual connotation of “Thy will be done” is “Thy will be borne,”
a passive acquiescence. Heiler quotes the prayer of a Native American who lost his three tobacco pipes, a greater loss is inconceivable to an Indian, and in his distress turned to the Great Spirit, saying, “O great God, thou who seest everything, and upholdest everything, grant, I pray thee, that I may find what I seek.” Then, after expressing his desire, he leaves the fulfillment of the prayer to the Great Spirit, ending in these words, “and yet let thy will be done.” Heiler, commenting, says: “Here the petition ends in submission. The highest and finest prayer which the history of religion knows, comes from the lips of a pious Native American.”
101
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
I once went into the Garden of Gethsemane, there to spend the night in prayer, centering my whole meditation on what I thought was the heart and substance of the Gethsemane event, “Not my will, but thine be done.” I expected to come away chastened, submissive, surrendered. But in those silent hours, I found my thought shifting to the words of Jesus to the sleepy disciples, “Arise, let us be going,” let us be going to meet the betrayal, the rejection, the accusations, the spittle, the cross. The will of God was to be done, not by acquiescence, but by activity, it
was to be done by taking hold
of the whole miserable
business and turning it into a
The will of God was
triumph of the love of God.
to be done, not by
That was what it meant by the
acquiescence, but
will of God being done, that
by activity, it was to
will was active, redemptive,
be done by taking
breaking through in love to
hold of the whole
men, in spite of their cruelty
miserable business
and hate. “Arise, let us be
and turning it into a
going,” to meet the whole
triumph of the love
thing is the key to the words,
of God.
“Thy will be done.” I came
away from Gethsemane, not
depressed into submission, as I
thought I would be, but with a battle-cry sounding in my heart.
Gethsemane meant to me no longer a sigh and a tear and a submission, but the call to arise and be going to meet everything, even the very worst that can happen to us, and to turn it into a testimony of the love of God. We can see Jesus in Gethsemane no longer as the Victim of the will of God, but the Victor through that will.
102
From that moment on Jesus assumed command of every situation. He healed the ear of the man who came to arrest him. He pronounced the doom of every kingdom, founded on blood and fear, in the words, “They that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”
By the terror of his silence he made Pilate tremble on his throne, —
the Accused judged the judge, and with him his whole empire. Jesus would not accept the tears of the weeping multitude, he told them to weep for themselves and for their children. He dispensed paradise to a dying thief on a nearby cross, and commended his murderers to the mercy and forgiveness of God. At the end he cried, “It is finished,”
the will of God had been done, — done in spite of the hate of men, yes, through it, and that will was redemptive love.
We repeat, then, that this is victorious vitality. It is the art of living dangerously. A Hindu student, after reading Nietzsche’s book on living dangerously, came to his orthodox father and said: “I have been impressed with the necessity of living dangerously. I want to practice it. Please get me a motor cycle.” To him to live dangerously was to dodge traffic on a motor cycle, but this is to live dangerously in a very harum-scarum, surface sort of way. Western life is tinged with that kind of attempt to live dangerously. Jesus would call us to sound the depths of life and to live dangerously there, to grapple with the great issues of life and to show life through them.
Heiler is right when he says that “prophetic religion is an irresistible will to live, an uncontrollable impulse toward expression, mastery, and exaltation of the sense of living.” The faith of Jesus is like the plant that lays hold of the muck and filth of things, and transforms them into exquisite color and form in the beauty of the flower. It has within its depths a quenchless “Hope, till hope creates, from its own wreck, the thing it contemplates.”
103
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
Some types of Christianity have often tried to sustain character and joy out of the contemplation of the rewards of heaven. Now, there is no doubt that the Gospels do teach compensations, beyond this life, in heaven. But its emphasis does not lie there. It produces its character and its joy out of and amid conditions here and now.
Therefore, the type of character it produces when fully in operation, has rosy cheeks and tingling blood from the facing of biting winds. A character produced out of heaven, contemplating compensations, is anemic and pale, lacking robust life, very like the flower in the cellar living in anemic contemplation
of the sunshine above. No,
Christianity bids us make
Prayer should
heaven out of our hells.
take us out of our
I once saw a man spreading
dark corners, and
his prayer mat in a dark corner
help us to turn our
under a stairway and prostrating
infirmities into
himself in prayer there with his
ladders that
face to the floor. The stairway
reach to heaven
led to the sunlight and the open
here and now.
vista above. But his face was to
the ground, contemplating the
joys that Allah would grant him
in heaven. I wanted to take him by the hand, to lead him out of the dark corner up the open stairway to the sunlight above, and let him face life with God there. Prayer should take us out of our dark corners, and help us to turn our infirmities into ladders that reach to heaven here and now. The faith of Jesus is the highest expression of the will to live. But it is not a will to live with a set jaw and a drawn countenance and a strained attitude toward life. It is a restful will to live, for its will is possessed by Life, and there is a quiet confidence within, that shows no fear of life or anything that it can do.
104
THE CHRISTIAN WAY IS VICTORY
A student said he always went to chapel service at the university when a certain man was to speak, “for,” said he, “he stands up there with a quiet confidence and deals with the great issues of life like a Christian who holds four aces in his hand.” The student was expressing in very modern terms the fact of confidence, that the Christian has sufficient resources to meet life no matter how hard the game of life is played against him.
To those who think that Jesus taught the denial of the will to live we answer that the phrase “he that loseth his life shall find it,”
contradicts this idea, for here
Jesus asserted that the “self ” or
“life” is found. The renunciation
The Christian has
of the self leads to the
sufficient
realization of the self. We let go
resources to
the smaller self to gain a larger
meet life no
self. It “results in the
matter how hard
absolutizing of the self. It is a
the game of life
sublimation of the will to live.”
is played against
As Paulsen says, “Every self-
him.
sacrifice is at the same time self-
preservation, namely,
preservation of the ideal self.”
We are suppressed on one level of life, in order to express ourselves on a higher level. We accept a law to gain a liberty, a liberty through that very law.
This was beautifully expressed in a Christmas letter written to me by a disabled person. “How can I be free? Law there is, and I must reckon with it and its penalties. Am I not bound to obey law? As I ponder the question, Tagore’s story of the string comes to mind and gives me light. A violin string lies on the table. It is under no 105
constraint. We might think it free. But is this mute thing free? Put the string in its place in the violin. It is bound. When set in motion, it gives out dull sounds. But draw it tighter. Stretch it up to key. Let it be swept by Kreisler’s bow. Now it is free. It sings.”
“Jesus stretched his life upon the cross and swept it with his love, God, the Song!”
The man who wrote those lines was himself being stretched daily on a cross of pain, but his being too was swept by the love of God, and some of us who heard the music pause gratefully and say, “God, the Song!”
A writer who had suffered a great deal, was heard by a friend to pray for release from the suffering. The friend put his hand lovingly on his shoulder and said, “If that prayer is answered, it will spoil your English style.” The friend knew that no man could write as he did except out of the heart of pain. Someone who heard a great vocalist sing remarked, “What a wonderful voice she would have, if something would break her heart!” She needed what we all need, namely, a Hand that will draw our heart-strings tighter to get the best music out of us.
One of the finest types of missionaries lived and labored in the South of India, and amid the multitude of things, which fell to his lot to do, was to tear down a leper’s house. While on furlough he developed leprosy. At first, he was stunned, his faith tottered and came near falling. Why had God allowed this to come upon him? To him who was in the prime of life and dedicated to a missionary task that needed him? But his faith righted itself, and he saw through the gloom. He got hold of what is the spiritual counterpart of the invention called an “All-weather sextant,” an invention by which the sun can be seen by the mariner no matter what clouds or mists may 106
hide it. He took this spiritual “All-weather sextant” and saw God’s face through the clouds. Isolated from man, God seemed nearer.
Friends visited him in his isolation to learn from him the way to live.
For he had found the way to live, “in spite of.” But one friend came from India with pity in his heart, and showed by the tone of his voice that he was pitying him. The man with leprosy stopped him: “You are feeling sorry for me, and you must not do it. I have never known deeper joy in my life. These walls are radiant with the love of God.”
God did not heal him of his leprosy, but God did something better: he healed others through him, healed them at the place where we most need healing, in our spirits.
In one of our Round Table Conferences, a very fine Christian gave the following as his view of what religion meant to him in experience: “I have found that if you follow Christ, three things will happen to you: First, you will be delivered from all fears. Second, you will be absurdly happy. Third, you will have trouble.” It seemed an anticlimax to say that the final thing is that you will have trouble, but I am persuaded that he is right. You cannot be delivered from all fears, nor can you be absurdly happy, unless you have learned to accept trouble and use it. It is of no use to tell people not to be afraid, for they know there is something to be afraid of. Even if they know that there is nothing to be afraid of, they have inner fears that cannot be controlled by good counsel. A Hindu student said to a friend of mine, “My mind tells me that there is nothing in that idol to be afraid of, but my heart is very afraid.” There were unreasoning fears that were deep down. The only way to get rid of those fears is to be convinced that if the worst happens, it can be turned into the best.
The leper had been delivered from all his fears, because the worst had happened, but life, the real life within, was intact. It is “absurd” to be as happy as a person felled by leprosy, but the gospel teaches that glorious absurdity.
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CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
Among a group of students who came from Burma to India as a Gospel team, or Group Fellowship, was one whom they called “The Buffalo.” He was as strong as a buffalo, hence the name. Along with this strength he had a very quick temper, a dangerous combination.
The last thing he did before he was converted was to break with one blow, three ribs of a man who angered him. This Group had finished their five months’ tour of the colleges in India, and as I sat with them, I asked them what was the outstanding, the happiest moment of the tour. We went around the circle and each told of the happiest moment, and when it came to the
turn of “The Buffalo” he said in a
simple, straightforward way: “One
Jesus strikes the
night a student followed us out of
deepest note in
the meeting and as I sat in the
life. Our modern
motor car, he came deliberately up
churches do not
to me and spat in my face. Now,
strike that note.
before this tremendous thing
called conversion happened to me,
I would not have hesitated a
second in knocking him down. But the strange thing is that I did not even feel like doing it, and, moreover, I look back on that as the happiest moment of the whole tour.” It was said without triteness or boasting. He was reporting a fact. Now, it is “absurd” to be happy when one spits in your face, and yet that is exactly what the gospel offers.
One of the Church Fathers could say to his opponents concerning the sufferings of the early Christians: “Every man who witnesses this great endurance is struck with some misgiving. He is set on fire to look into it to find the cause of it. When he has learned the truth, at once, he follows it himself.” “Follows it himself,” it is
“absurd” to follow a thing that causes suffering, and yet we know 108
instinctively that Jesus strikes the deepest note in life. Our modern churches do not strike that note. They appeal to comfort and wonder why the churches are empty. They have swept out of the Protestant churches the crucifixes, and have put in cushions. Then they wonder why the cushions are not used. Jesus appeals to the heroic, and millions would die for him today.
A proud Manchu woman resisted all Christian appeals although her husband had become Christian. Persecution broke out against the Christians and she had to flee along with her husband to the mountains. There they suffered untold hardships. In the midst of it, she decided to become a Christian. “Any religion that is persecuted this way must be true,” was the way she put it. She became a wonderful follower of Christ, driven to his side by the wounds she found there.
It is “absurd” for people to sing, when they are falling to their death, but that is exactly what the Christians did when the great persecution broke out against them in Madagascar. They were hung over a cliff by a rope and told, that if they did not recant, the rope would be cut. They refused to recant and the rope was cut, and again and again they were heard singing, as they fell through the air to their death.
Dean Inge says that “Joy as a moral quality is a Christian invention.” This is true because into the Christian joy was put a moral quality that made it different. It was joy which represented a moral conquest. The moral conquest gave it a moral quality.
This kind of joy is different from amusement. The latter is from the outside in, while the former is from the inside out. Happy people do not need to be amused. They have springs within them. In a moment of disillusionment, I wrote these lines: 109
“At the heart of every earthly thing,
There is a sting, there is a sting.”
But now I have learned to write in answer:
“When every earthly thing
Leaves its bitter sting,
My heart has learned to sing!”
When one can write the first, he is Buddhist in his attitude; when he can write the second, he is learning to be Christian.
Much of the modern attempt to find joy through amusement reminds us of the old lady who took some children to a circus, and when one child, through the strangeness of the various happenings, began to cry, she grabbed the child by the back of the neck and shook him, saying, “I brought you here to enjoy yourself, now enjoy yourself,—-do you understand?” And she shook him again, to give emphasis to her demand that the child enjoy himself. Many moderns are shaking their poor, starved, weeping souls and trying thereby to make them enjoy themselves! When a man has to say to his soul, “Eat, drink, and be merry,” as the rich man did, then we know that he is not merry. Modern hedonism has brought a sad, disillusioned world into being.
Joy is written in the constitution of things, in the very constitution of our faces. They tell us that it takes sixty-four muscles of the face to frown, but only fourteen to smile, —then why overwork your face! God has thrown the emphasis on the side of joy, by making the human face take the line of least resistance when it takes the side of joy. But the face that has joy in the New Testament 110
sense, has no cheap joy. There is in it no make-believe or “made-joy.”
Justice Chandavakar, a very noble Hindu, once said of Keshab Chunder Sen, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, that he had “a New Testament face.” One Hindu says of another Hindu that he has “a New Testament face.” Whatever it was that made up the New Testament face, certainly it was obvious that it could not be identified with professionalism. Keshab, though not a Christian by profession, had looked at Christ until he had caught something of his joy. Just what is “a New Testament face”? It is a face where the lines have turned to light, where grief has learned to smile through its tears, and where in spite of everything, there is the sense of victory.
Jesus said, “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be fulfilled.” Here we find two joys meeting each other. The one is “my joy,” a joy from the outside; the other, “your joy,” a joy from the inside. I say this joy of Jesus is from the outside, and yet it is so inward and intimate that it too, can be said to be from within. The divine joy meets the human joy: the one from above fills, and the other from below is fulfilled. They are made for each other, and the human soul in finding this joy finds its very life.
Ordinarily, the mystic would say that the divine joy is everything and the human joy is nothing. The Barthians for once, would agree with the mystics. But in Jesus’ statement both are preserved. The human is not swamped in God, but is fulfilled in him. Since both are preserved, it shows that we are made for his joy, and when we find it, we find our own fulfilled. The New Testament face is a face that is supernaturally natural.
Barry tells us that “there is always throughout Greek literature a haunting sense of melancholy, a sense of frustration and unfulfillment.” They protested that they believed in the joy of life, but it was never fulfilled, for they could never see any ultimate reason for 111
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
joy. No man can be ultimately joyful unless he feels that his joy is an ultimate joy. “The Greeks expressed a glorious confidence in man, but gave no ground for believing in man.” They had not seen a man as “a man for whom Christ died.”
Some doctors were about to operate on a poor patient and one of them thoughtlessly remarked, “Bring on the worthless creature,”
thinking the patient to be unconscious. But the patient, a learned man, though now in straitened circumstances, replied, “Do you call him
‘worthless,’ a man for whom
Christ died?” The worth of
a man is now deepened by
The Christian
the worth of the One who
founding his joy on a
died for him. We therefore
cross, and finding it
believe in man because we
through a cross, is
believe in the Man, and so,
sure that in that
our joy has meaning, since
cross he is striking
touched by his joy. The
the deepest note
Greeks knew nothing of the
that life can strike.
kind of joy of One who
standing in the shadow of
his cross could say, “My joy.”
Our joy is founded on that
joy which has stood the shocks, and still sings. No man can sing unless he feels that his song is sounding the depths of the universe. The Christian founding his joy on a cross, and finding it through a cross, is sure that in that cross he is striking the deepest note that life can strike. It is the bass note of his song; and if, having struck that lowest note, he then goes on to strike the highest notes of joy, we know that without that lowest note the highest could not be struck. But together, they bring out the harmony of the whole.
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The Chinese have an inscription over the glorious Jade Fountain in Peking, “Under Heaven, the First Spring.” As earthly springs go, I suppose it is the most wonderful that the world possesses. But as I gazed into its crystal depths, I said to my friend, “This is glorious, but the Christian has discovered the real, ‘Under Heaven, the First Spring,’ for he that drinks of these waters shall thirst again, but he that drinks of the waters that Christ shall give to him shall never thirst; but the waters that Christ shall give to him shall become in him a well of water, springing up unto everlasting life.” That is “the First Spring,” for it has its source in a hill called Calvary. It is joy out of suffering. At Shanhaikwan, where the Great Wall meets the sea, there is an inscription over the gate, “Under Heaven, the First Gate.” The Manchu emperors who put the inscription over the Spring and the inscription over the Gate are gone, the palace of the Jade Fountain is in the hands of others, and the First Gate is in the hands of the Japanese, thus do earthly “firsts” all let us down, but this joy that Jesus gives has the feel of the eternal in it, it springs up unto everlasting life.
The Christian has, therefore, what Von Hugel called “an overflowing interior plenitude.” He knows what J. A. Symonds is talking about when he says that his concentration and unification enable him “to hire sunshine for leaden hours,” and “to engender a mood of mind, sufficient for the purposes of living.” The Christian knows this, and more, for what he has found is not a “mood of mind,” but inward resources of the spirit, an overflowing interior plenitude, that has its source in the Divine. Inner life becomes sufficient to match outer life. Buddha taught Asia the calm of surrender, Jesus taught the world the calm of conquest.
The one said, “Peace,” the other said, “Excelsior.” The one was the peace of the reduction of personality, and the other was the peace 113
of a developing, perfecting, adequate personality. Josiah Royce defined faith as “the soul’s insight or discovery of some reality, that enables a man to stand anything that can happen to him in the universe.” These words echo the New Testament words, “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even your faith.” But just as we should not believe in “faith-healing,” but Divine healing by faith, so we must not believe that faith heals mental and spiritual suffering, but, rather, that it links us to the resources of the Divine Life that heals us. Nothing now can make us afraid; we are one with that Life. Its purposes are our purposes, its power our power, its safety our safety.
I once said to a student, that no man was safe until he could stand anything that could happen to him. He looked startled and then replied, “Then, not many of us are safe, are we?” Not many, but the Christian, who has learned this secret, is!
The turn came, in one of our Round Table Conferences, for a very noble High Churchman to speak. He was a man in whom we all had confidence, a man of radiant faith and self-sacrifice. This is what he said: “Religion means to me three things: victory, victory, victory.”
He could not have summed it up better. For the religion of Jesus does mean these three things, victory over sin, victory over self, victory over suffering. It is in the fitness of things that Jesus cried out, “In the world you have tribulation, but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” This is cheer indeed, a cheer that has faced all the facts of life, good, bad, and indifferent, and has let those facts say their worst, and then in the face of it all bursts into laughter, a joyous, glorious, victorious laughter, a hallelujah chorus out of unhallowed conditions.
There is a bird in India called “the brain-fever bird.” In the terribly hot days and nights when the thermometer rises, its shrill notes rise with it. It cries out, “Brain-fever, BRAIN-FEVER, BRAIN-FEVER.” It is enough to drive one mad to listen to it. It 114
was on the point of getting on my nerves one day, when I forever overcame it by making it sing a new song, for I interpreted its song as
“Hallelujah, HALLELUJAH, HALLELUJAH!” When life shouts to you with its shrill “Brain-fever” notes, we can put them through the victory of our spirit and turn them back as “Hallelujahs.”
We sum up the substance of this chapter in the words of another,
“We are at home in the universe, and in principle and in the main, feeble and timid creatures as we are, there is nothing anywhere in the world or without that can make us afraid. In other words, we are at peace, at rest. Not that we do not have to fight, but now, the battle itself is the victory. We are certain in our minds. We are convinced of the good, and that it is one with the supreme power.”
Very Low Churchman as I am, I use the words of my High Churchman brother as my own: “Religion means to me: VICTORY, VICTORY, VICTORY!”
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8
THE CHOICE — RELIGION
WITH OR WITHOUT A
CROSS
T wo periods came in Jesus’ life when he was deeply tempted to face the sorrow and sin of the world in a way, other than the one, he took. The one was during the temptation in the wilderness and the other was at the coming of the Greeks. At those two crises there came before him practically all the methods and ways by which men meet these tragic facts of sin and suffering. He rejected them all save one, and through that one became the Light of the World. As we look at these rejected ways, we will recognize many of the ways used, by ancient and modern people, to find a way out of suffering. He knew that they would lead to dead ends, as we are slowly but surely finding out by tragic experience.
At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry John the Baptist was calling a nation to repentance. As the thunderous words of the Baptist fell upon the heart of a nation it was moved to repentance. There exists to this day in Mesopotamia a group of people, eight thousand in number, who call themselves “Disciples of John the Baptist.” They 116
never became Christians, but are a direct survival of the revival of the Baptist. It must have been a powerful spiritual awakening. People came in a repenting stream to take the baptism of repentance at his hands. Into that line Jesus entered to take that baptism of repentance.
The account says that “when all the people were baptized, Jesus also was baptized.” He who knew no sin was taking his place in a line of repentant sinners as one of them. It was identification with humanity at the lowest place. He gave up what is hardest of all to give up, namely, one’s good name. Before him in the line was probably a harlot, behind him a thief. He seemed one of them, and was counted a sinner.
There must have come a strong reaction against this attitude, for he was inwardly driven into the wilderness to fight it out. He would get away from humanity to see what attitude he should take toward us.
What was the issue over which he fought? Was it whether he was the Son of God? I think not. Had he not heard at the baptismal waters,
“Thou art my beloved Son”? No, the question seems to have been this. Being the Son of God, would he also be the Son of man, if being the Son of man meant identification with man such as he had taken? To be the Son of man would mean that he would take on himself all that falls on the sons of man. Was that the way? For forty days Jesus deeply brooded and meditated and fought. So deeply was he absorbed, that he forgot about physical hunger. But at the end of the forty days he hungered. He must go back now to feed his weakened body.
“No,” said the tempter, “you need not go back. Stay out here.
Why go back to men? Feed yourself on miracle, apart. You are the Son of God. That is enough. You need not be the Son of man.”
That is the first great temptation of spiritual religion, it is to withdraw, to feed oneself apart, to be exalted by spiritual communion so that the tragedies and pains of life do not touch one, to be a son of 117
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
God, to rejoice in that fact, to feed on it. This is the temptation to which mysticism is liable. When religion falls into it, then it becomes an opiate, for, drugged with devotion and wrapped in its exalted states, it puts its devotees to sleep concerning the sin and suffering of the world. It is essentially “an escape mentality.” It would solve the problems of sin and suffering by its own isolation. But this will not work. Wherever it is tried, whether in the professor’s study of the West, or in the forests of India, or in the convents and monasteries of Christendom, it brings its
Nemesis, it inevitably leads to
pessimism. The attempt to
The attempt to
escape the gloom of the world
escape the gloom
brings on an inner gloom of
of the world brings
spirit. The way out of
on an inner gloom
suffering is not to attempt to
of spirit. The way
escape it. Jesus refused this
out of suffering is
way.
not to attempt to
escape it. Jesus
Then the tempter
refused this way.
suggested: “If you must go
back, if you will be the Son of
man, then do not take the
attitude you took as you
began. Don’t stand alongside of man in this humiliating fashion, stand on the pinnacle of the Temple; be exalted, lifted above man. Be the sign and symbol of religion, as you stand and be gazed at, and worshiped; be the chosen of God, honored and respected. In that way you will give prestige and position to the cause of the kingdom of God. God will not let you, the Son of God, stand alongside of degraded man, for even if you throw yourself down, God’s angels will bear you back up again. Your place is up there, not down here with these wretched multitudes.”
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The second temptation is to stand up above, aloof, superior, to look down on the multitudes as they sin and suffer, to see their lives only from afar, for you consider yourself superior to all these things.
It is the temptation of the Stoic, the “superior man,” the Brahman, the cultivated gentleman, the Pope-attitude of mind that stands lifted on pinnacles of position and birth and belief and class. We descend to man but only as “Lady Bountiful,” only to give our blessing and benediction, only to discharge “noblesse oblige,” only to show how God specially cares for us in that he sends his angels to carry us back to our exalted positions. We never quite get to people. The fact is that when we adopt this attitude, we feel that we belong above other people, and are not really a part of them. It all meant that Jesus would not be the Son of man. He would escape the sufferings of men by insulation. But this too would be “an escape mentality,” however lofty it might seem to be. Jesus rejected it.
Then came the subtle third temptation which was this: “If you are determined to be the Son of man, then be the Son of man; if you are to be one with man, then take his methods and spirit; win by being a hail-fellow-well-met, let nothing be between, merge your spirit as well as your sympathy and interest, go the full way.” To fall down and worship Satan meant to take the attitude of those who obey him. This temptation is to use the methods of man in order to gain man, to gain the world and its kingdom by using worldly methods.
But Jesus refused this temptation as well. Jesus would be the Son of man. He would let everything that falls on men fall on him. But there would be this exception, in deepest spirit he would be different.
Jesus would be like them and yet unlike them. He would be the Son of man, but he would also be the Son of God. He knew that only as he was inwardly different could he change men. But in everything else he would be like them.
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CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
Lawrence of Arabia says that “no man would lead the Arabs except he ate the rank’s food, wore their clothes, lived level with them, and yet appeared better in himself.” Jesus would take his place alongside of humanity, would meet everything that we meet, would call on no power for his moral and spiritual battle that is not at our disposal, would face life as a real man, and yet would carry within himself something that is different. It is in that “difference” that our hopes lie. For we need someone
who is like us to be our Example,
but we need someone unlike us to
We need
be our Redeemer. If he were only
someone who is
like us, he could be only our
like us to be our
Example. If he would be only
Example, but we
unlike us, he could be only our
need someone
Redeemer. But we need both,
unlike us to be
Example and Redeemer. Jesus in
our Redeemer.
these temptations fought out the
question of how to be both, and
won.
But he knew that the choice that he had made would mean his ultimate identification with man on the cross. He had been baptized between sinners; he would be crucified between thieves. The problem of sin and suffering could only be met by an honest facing of the problem; there would be no escaping, no subterfuges, no make-believes, no short-cuts, no drugs. It would be solved, not escaped.
And, it would be solved by standing with man from within, not by bending over man from without and touching him with tongs as it were.
He then put his feet upon the way that he knew would ultimately lead to a cross.
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But there came the moment of another great pull to get him to take another way. It was at the moment of the coming of the Greeks.
This incident is largely lost to Christendom. We usually take out of it the text, “Sirs, we would see Jesus,” and leave it at that. But this is one of the most fateful moments in the life of Jesus. It is a moment comparable in importance with the wilderness temptation. In many ways, it was more subtle and difficult than the wilderness experience, for the wilderness represents the temptation of the beginning of one’s career, but this coming of the Greeks represents the temptation of mid-career. In mid-career there is the temptation to compromise, to let down on sharp insistences, to take an easier way.
At the coming of the Greeks we see into the depths of a great soul crisis. What was it that made him say, “Now is my soul disquieted”? The whole account has in it something far more than we could expect from the mere coming of the Greeks for an interview.
Moffatt in his translation rescues the account for us.
Now there were some Greeks among those who had come up to worship at the festival; they came to Philip of Bethsaida in Galilee and appealed to him, saying, “Sir, we want to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. And Jesus answered, “The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified. Truly, truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears rich fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who cares not for his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, let him follow me, and where I am, there shall my servant be also: if anyone serves me, my Father will honor him. My soul is now disquieted. What am I to say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? Nay, it is something else that has brought me to this 121
hour: I will say, ‘Father, glorify thy name.’” Then came a voice from heaven, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.”
When they heard the sound, the people standing by said it thundered; others said, “An angel spoke to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice did not come for my sake, but for yours. Now is this world to be judged; now the Prince of this world will be expelled. But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” (By this he indicated the kind of death he was to die.) (John 12. 20-34).1
It is probable that the Greeks came as an embassy to suggest that Jesus leave the Jews and come to the Greeks. This is not farfetched, for tradition tells us that the Prince of Edessa did send an embassy to Jesus, asking him to come to Edessa. These Greeks probably saw the storm that was gathering about his head; they perceived that he would end in disaster if he went on among the Jews, they would kill him. It is probable that they came, therefore, to invite him to get out of the whole situation, to come to Athens, where men’s minds were broad and liberal, where the teaching such as Jesus offered would be appreciated, and where he could live long as an honored and respected teacher. Why go to Jerusalem, where disaster awaits? Step out and come to Athens instead.
This is the issue between Athens and Jerusalem: Athens with its bright, surface interest in everything, but sounding no depths, and Jerusalem with its cross. Which way would Religion, as personified in Jesus, go? Would it go to Athens to escape suffering or would it go to Jerusalem to face suffering? It was the battle of the good and the best: 1 James Moffatt, The Holy Bible: A New Translation. Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York. Used by permission.
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the good without a cross, the best with one. All systems, all men line up on one side or the other of that issue. They will take the Athens method of dealing with sorrow, the method that attempts to explain it, or explain it away by words, by mental suggestions, by Pollyanna views of life, by hypnotisms of ideas, by subterfuges both mental and spiritual, by etherealizing one away from the facts, by soporific; or, they will take the Jerusalem way, the way of going straight toward the worst that life can say or do, the way of letting the storm strike one, the way of accepting Calvary.
Jesus saw the issue very clearly, so we hear him soliloquizing,
“Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it dies, it beareth much fruit.” The Greeks had probably suggested that Jesus could live a long and fruitful life among them. Why throw it away now? This was his answer: Life comes through giving of life, fruitfulness through falling into the ground and dying. Jesus would live not by the hourglass, but by the heartbeat.
Many of us have chosen the Athens way; we are abiding by ourselves alone, using only human resources, finding life shallow and fruitless; refusing to pay the ultimate price of giving ourselves, we find ourselves paying the price of the deadness of life itself.
Again, we hear Jesus: “He that loveth his life (as these are asking me to do) shall lose it, but he that loseth it (as I see I must do) shall find it again.” The Greeks were asking him to love his life and save it, and thus save others; they were asking him to bless without bleeding.
But Jesus knew it could not be done.
However, the struggle is great, for this cross that looms before him is no make believe. Again, we hear the inward battle: “Now is my soul disquieted.” And well it might be! But some of us are not disquieted at all at this point. We fall in with the spirit of the age which would say, “Accept Athens as opportunity, shun Jerusalem as 123
CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING
calamity.” So, we accept its spirit and share its shallowness. But a growing number are disquieted at this issue. They have the feeling that if they miss this, they miss life.
Again, we hear Jesus say: “What shall I say? Father, save me from this hour?” Would he ask to be excused, to be let off from paying the supreme price? Some of us are asking just that. We are asking to be saved from this hour. It is true that we still call God “Father” at the very moment of asking to be
excused, we are still religious,
still holding certain allegiances,
but making the supreme
Life comes through
refusal of ourselves. We ask to
giving of life,
be saved “from,” not for this
fruitfulness through
hour. But Jesus answers in a
falling into the
decisive way: “Nay, it is
ground and dying.
something else that has
Jesus would live not
brought me to this hour. All
by the hourglass,
the ages have matched me
but by the
against this hour, all the
heartbeat.
yearnings of men and women
have brought me face to face
with this moment. I cannot fail
now, for if I did, I would fail them.” It is a great moment in a person’s life when he can say “Nay” to all lesser roads, to all easy ways, to all compromises, to all temptations to go to Athens. But it is a greater moment when he can see through the depths of things and realize that there has been “something else,” some divine providence that has brought him to this moment, that he is now merging his will with an Almighty Will, and that Will is sacrificially redemptive.
Now we hear the great decision made by Jesus: “I will say, Father, 124
glorify your name. Do not think of what it will cost me, only glorify your name.” Jesus gave God a blank check; blank save that it was signed with his own blood. The ages hung on this moment, and he did not fail them. It is life’s greatest moment when we hand to God that blank check signed in our own blood, joyfully asking God to call on us for all we have, including ourselves. It is the moment of the Great Renunciation, for him and for us.
However, that is followed by the Great Annunciation. Listen:
“After that, came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both gloried it, and will glorify it again.” The moment he made the final response then heaven spoke. Many of us who are living under silent heavens would find them vocal with the voice of God, if we should choose the Jerusalem way. God would speak to us out of the pages of Holy Writ, out of the voice of providence, and within the depths of our own spirits, if we chose his way with a final decisiveness. Life would then take on meaning, purpose, plan.
It was interesting to see how the by-standers took all this. Some said, “It thundered.” To them it was just the impersonal voice of nature with no meaning to it. This interpretation is that of materialistic naturalism. When we hear God speaking to us in answer to our supreme dedication, they say, “It thundered.” When we go through a soul-transforming crisis, and emerge from it as regenerated beings, they solemnly declare, “Adolescent phenomena, it thundered.”
When we come home from some group in which we have caught a life-changing vision of Christ, they say, “Mob-psychology, it thundered.” When we feel the pain and misery and sin of the world and dedicate ourselves to its healing, they declare, “Gender-manifestation, it thundered.” When God’s hand is laid on us in physical healing, their reply is, “Mental suggestion, it thundered.”
When we find ourselves lifted out of ourselves by prayer, and when 125
we rejoice in transformations wrought, we are told, “Auto-suggestion, it thundered.” Those are the attitudes and interpretations of one group of bystanders.
There is another group of by-standers with its own interpretation:
“An angel spoke to him.” To them, it was something more than the voice of nature, and something less than the voice of God; it was the voice of an angel. People of this type are more spiritually inclined, but are not deeply engaged. They are spiritualistic rather than spiritual. They are more interested in “phenomena,” in psychic manifestations, in dark rooms rather than in the dark places of sin and need of the earth; in communications from the dead rather than communicating the Good News to the living. The attitude lacks moral depth.
I am not prepared to say that the dead do not speak to the living, I keep an open mind, awaiting further evidence. But even if they do, I do not think that it produces the healthiest type of religion or character to concentrate on getting connection with the dead, especially if it weakens our connection with the problems of the living.
Both groups are “by-standers” – “those that stood by said.”
Anyone who stands upon the edges of life as a by-stander is bound to give a shallow interpretation to life. It is only those who have faced the alternatives of Jerusalem or Athens, and have chosen Jerusalem, who can really interpret life. They are in life. They know what the cross means, for they can feel it cutting into their shoulders; they know what suffering means, for they are being crucified on a cross of a chosen pain. However, they also know what life means, for they feel throbbing, bursting, singing life coursing through every fiber of their beings. They know life from within! They are no by-standers.
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As a result of this momentous choice, Jesus saw that three things would happen: First, the judgment of this world. “Now is the judgment of this world.” What had the choosing of a cross have to do with the judgment of this world? At first sight, they seem unconnected, but at second glance, we find them intimately connected. The cross is the judgment seat of this world. It is there that men are really judged. I must confess I feel no inward trembling, when I picture God’s throne on the last day, but this Man upon the cross judges me, condemns me, and sends me to my knees. Jesus’ spirit of facing the world’s sin and suffering, makes my spirit tremble within me like an electric needle in a storm. Here at the cross, his love judges my hate, his all-inclusiveness judges my narrowness; his self-sacrifice judges my selfishness. The by-standers had said, “It thundered,” and at the moment, that choice of a cross becomes the thunder that reverberates through our guilty spirits and makes us afraid. He was right when he said, “Now is this world to be judged.”
Second, the expulsion of the power of evil from this world:
“Now is the prince of this world to be expelled.” Jesus would expel sin and suffering from the world by taking them into his own heart, and there smothering them to death. Jesus would expel the prince of this worId, not by breaking his head, but by letting the prince of this world break his heart. Jesus would expel suffering by taking suffering, would expel sin by becoming sin.
Third, Jesus would manifest supreme power in choosing this cross. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth (on a cross), will draw all men unto myself.” Here was to be manifested a new type of power, the power of overcoming evil with good, hate by love, and the world by a cross. It was the power of turning the other cheek, of going the second mile, of giving the cloak also, of drawing persons in by dying for them.
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The choice was made. He would thank the Athens group, but refuse their offer. Jesus would choose the people who were rejecting him. There was no other way, for Jerusalem and the hill called Calvary lay between him and the Easter-morning Victory. He could not teach men to sing who bear crosses, unless he allowed his own voice to be hushed on a cross.
The penetrating words of How Can I Sing? – written by an anonymous poet are true:
“I want to sing lyrics, lyrics,
Mad as a brook in spring;
I want to shout the music
Of flushed adventuring.
“But how can I sing lyrics,
I, who have seen today
The stoop of factory women,
And children kept from play?
“And on an open hilltop
Where the cloak of the sky is wide,
Have seen a tree of terror
Where a black man died?
“I want to sing lyrics, lyrics,
But these have hushed my song;
I am mute at the world’s great sadness,
And stark at the world’s great wrong.”