The pain of God
The pain of God
There is a sixth way in which Christ’s sufferings are related to ours. It is the most important of the series. It is that the cross of Christ is the proof of God’s solidary love, that is, of his personal, loving solidarity with us in our pain. For the real sting of suffering is not misfortune itself, nor even the pain of it or the injustice of it, but the apparent God-forsakenness of it. Pain is endurable, but the seeming indifference of God is not. Sometimes we picture him lounging, perhaps dozing, in some celestial deck-chair, while the hungry millions starve to death. We think of him as an armchair spectator, almost gloating over the world’s suffering, and enjoying his own insulation from it. Philip Yancey has gone further and uttered the unutterable which we may have thought but to which we have never dared to give voice: ‘If God is truly in charge, somehow connected to all the world’s suffering, why is he so capricious, unfair? Is he the cosmic sadist who delights in watching us squirm?’28 Job had said something similar: God ‘mocks the despair of the innocent’ (9:23).
It is this terrible caricature of God which the cross smashes to smithereens. We are not to envisage him on a deck-chair, but on a cross. The God who allows us to suffer, once suffered himself in Christ, and continues to suffer with us and for us today. Since the cross was a once-for-all historical event, in which God in Christ bore our sins and died our death because of his love and justice, we must not think of it as expressing an eternal sin-bearing in the heart of God. What Scripture does give us warrant to say, however, is that God’s eternal holy love, which was uniquely exhibited in the sacrifice of the cross, continues to suffer with us in every situation in which it is called forth. But is it legitimate to speak of a suffering God? Are we not impeded from doing so by the traditional doctrine of the divine impassibility? The Latin adjective impassibilis means ‘incapable of suffering’ and therefore ‘devoid of emotion’. Its Greek equivalent apathēs was applied by the philosophers to God, whom they declared to be above pleasure and pain, since these would interrupt his tranquillity.
The early Greek Fathers of the church took over this notion somewhat uncritically. In consequence, their teaching about God sometimes sounds more Greek than Hebrew. It was also ambivalent. True, they knew that Jesus Christ the Incarnate Son suffered, but not God himself. Ignatius wrote to Polycarp, for example, of the God ‘who cannot suffer, who for our sakes accepted suffering’, that is, in Christ.29 Similarly, Irenaeus affirmed that by reason of the incarnation ‘the invisible was made visible, the incomprehensible comprehensible, and the impassible passible’.30 True again, they knew that the Old Testament authors wrote freely of the love, pity, anger, sorrow and jealousy of God. But they added that these were anthropomorphisms which are not to be taken literally, since the divine nature is unmoved by all emotions.31 Gregory Thaumaturgus in the third century even wrote that ‘in his suffering God shows his impassibility’.
These and other ancient church Fathers deserve our understanding. They were wanting above all to safeguard the truths that God is perfect (so that nothing can add to or subtract from him) and that God is changeless (so that nothing can disturb him).32 We today should still wish to maintain these truths. God cannot be influenced against his will from either outside or inside. He is never the unwilling victim either of actions which affect him from without or of emotions which upset him from within. As William Temple put it, ‘there is a highly technical sense in which God, as Christ revealed him, is “without passions”; for he is Creator and supreme, and is never “passive” in the sense of having things happen to him except with his consent; also he is constant, and free from gusts of feeling carrying him this way and that’. Nevertheless, Temple rightly went on to say that the term ‘impassible’ as used by most theologians really meant ‘incapable of suffering’, and that ‘in this sense its predication of God is almost wholly false’.33
It is true that Old Testament language is an accommodation to our human understanding, and that God is represented as experiencing human emotions. Yet, to acknowledge that his feelings are not human is not to deny that they are real. If they are only metaphorical, ‘then the only God left to us will be the infinite iceberg of metaphysics’.34 In contrast to this, we may be thankful to the Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel, who in his book The Prophets refers to their ‘pathetic theology’, because they portray a God of feeling. The frequent Old Testament ‘anthropopathisms’ (which ascribe human suffering to God) are not to be rejected as crude or primitive, he writes, but rather to be welcomed as crucial to our understanding of him: ‘the most exalted idea applied to God is not infinite wisdom, infinite power, but infinite concern’ (p.241). Thus, before the flood Yahweh was ‘grieved’ that he had made human beings, ‘and his heart was filled with pain’, and when his people were oppressed by foreigners during the time of the Judges, Yahweh ‘could bear Israel’s misery no longer’.35 Most striking of all are the occasions when through the prophets God expresses his ‘yearning’ and ‘compassion’ for his people and addresses Israel direct: ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love.... Can a mother forget the baby at her breast...? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!...How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel?...My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused.’36
If God’s full and final self-revelation was given in Jesus, moreover, then his feelings and sufferings are an authentic reflection of the feelings and sufferings of God himself. The Gospel writers attribute to him the whole range of human emotions, from love and compassion through anger and indignation to sorrow and joy. The stubbornness of human hearts caused him distress and anger. Outside Lazarus’ tomb, in the face of death, he both ‘wept’ with grief and ‘snorted’ with indignation. He wept again over Jerusalem, and uttered a lament over her blindness and obstinacy. And still today he is able ‘to sympathize with our weaknesses’, feeling with us in them.37
The best way to confront the traditional view of the impassibility of God, however, is to ask ‘what meaning there can be in a love which is not costly to the lover’.38 If love is self-giving, then it is inevitably vulnerable to pain, since it exposes itself to the possibility of rejection and insult. It is ‘the fundamental Christian assertion that God is love’, writes Jürgen Moltmann, ‘which in principle broke the spell of the Aristotelian doctrine of God’ (i.e. as ‘impassible’). ‘Were God incapable of suffering..., then he would also be incapable of love’, whereas ‘the one who is capable of love is also capable of suffering, for he also opens himself to the suffering which is involved in love’.39 That is surely why Bonhoeffer wrote from prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge, nine months before his execution: ‘only the Suffering God can help.’40
Worthy of special mention, as a doughty opponent of false views of the divine impassibility, is the Japanese Lutheran scholar Kazoh Kitamori. He wrote his remarkable book Theology of the Pain of God in 1945, not long after the first atomic bombs had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was inspired, he tells us, by Jeremiah 31:20, where God describes his heart as ‘yearning’ or ‘pained’ for Ephraim, even as ‘broken’. ‘The heart of the gospel was revealed to me as the “pain of God”,’ he writes (p.19). To begin with, God’s anger against sin gives him pain. ‘This wrath of God is absolute and firm. We may say that the recognition of God’s wrath is the beginning of wisdom.’ But God loves the very people with whom he is angry. So ‘the “pain” of God reflects his will to love the object of his wrath’. It is his love and his wrath which together produce his pain. For here, in Luther’s arresting phrase, is ‘God striving with God’. ‘The fact that this fighting God is not two different gods but the same God causes his pain’ (p.21). The pain of God is ‘a synthesis of his wrath and love’ (p.26) and is ‘his essence’ (p.47). It was supremely revealed in the cross. For ‘the “pain of God” results from the love of the One who intercepts and blocks his wrath towards us, the One who himself is smitten by his wrath’ (p.123). This is strikingly bold phraseology. It helps us to understand how God’s pain continues whenever his wrath and love, his justice and mercy, are in tension today.
Looking at the world during the second half of the twentieth century, there have probably been two outstandingly conspicuous examples of human suffering, the first being hunger and poverty on a global scale, and the second the Nazi holocaust of six million Jews. How does the cross speak to such evils as these?
It is reckoned that one thousand million people today, because they lack the basic necessities of life, may rightly be described as ‘destitute’. Many of them eke out a pitiful existence in the slums and shanty towns of Africa and Asia, the barriadas of Spanish Latin America and the favelas of Brazil. The penury of the people, the overcrowding in their ramshackle shelters, the lack of elementary sanitation, the virtual nakedness of the children, the hunger, disease, unemployment and absence of education – all this adds up to a horrific tally of human need. It is not surprising that such slums are hotbeds of bitterness and resentment; the wonder is that the sheer inhumanity and injustice of it all does not breed an even more virulent anger. Rolf Italiaander imagines a poor man from one of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, who climbs laboriously up to the colossal statue of Christ, 2,310 feet high, which towers above Rio, ‘the Christ of Corcovado’. The poor man speaks to the statue:
I have climbed up to you, Christ, from the filthy, confined quarters down there... to put before you, most respectfully, these considerations: there are 900,000 of us down there in the slums of that splendid city.... And you, Christ,...do you remain here at Corcovado surrounded by divine glory? Go down there into the favelas. Come with me into the favelas and live with us down there. Don’t stay away from us; live among us and give us new faith in you and in the Father. Amen.41
What would Christ say in response to such an entreaty? Would he not say ‘I did come down to live among you, and I live among you still’?
This is, in fact, how some Latin American theologians are presenting the cross today. In his Christology at the Crossroads, for example, Professor Jon Sobrino of El Salvador develops a protest both against a purely academic theology which fails to take appropriate action and against the traditional, mournful ‘mystique’ of the cross which is too passive and individualistic. Instead, he seeks to relate the cross to the modern world and its social injustice. Was God himself, he asks, ‘untouched by the historical cross because he is essentially untouchable?’ (p.190). No, no. ‘God himself, the Father, was on the cross of Jesus.’ In addition, ‘God is to be found on the crosses of the oppressed’ (p.201). Provided that Professor Sobrino is not denying the fundamental, atoning purpose of the cross, I do not think we should resist what he is affirming. Here is his summary: ‘On the cross of Jesus God himself is crucified. The Father suffers the death of the Son and takes upon himself the pain and suffering of history.’ And in this ultimate solidarity with human beings God ‘reveals himself as the God of love’ (pp.224, 371).
What, then, about the holocaust? ‘After Auschwitz’, said Richard Rubinstein, ‘it is impossible to believe in God.’ One Sunday afternoon, in a sub-camp of Buchenwald, a group of learned Jews decided to put God on trial for neglecting his chosen people. Witnesses were produced for both prosecution and defence, but the case for the prosecution was overwhelming. The judges were Rabbis. They found the accused guilty and solemnly condemned him.42 It is understandable. The sheer bestiality of the camps and the gas chambers, and the failure of God to intervene on behalf of his ancient people, in spite of their frequent and fervent prayers, have shaken many people’s faith. I have already said that I do not think the way to interpret Auschwitz and its aftermath is in terms of death and resurrection. Is there, then, another way? I think Elie (Eliezer) Wiesel can help us. Born a Hungarian Jew, he became an internationally acclaimed author, and he has given us in his book Night a deeply moving account of his boyhood experiences in the death camps of Auschwitz, Buna and Buchenwald. He was not quite fifteen when the Gestapo arrived to deport all Jews from Sighet in the spring of 1944. They travelled by train for three days, eighty in each cattle wagon. On arrival at Auschwitz, the men and women were segregated, and Elie never saw his mother or sister again. ‘Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke (sc. of the crematorium)....Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith for ever....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul, and turned my dreams to dust ....’ (p.45). A bit later he wrote: ‘Some talked of God, of his mysterious ways, of the sins of the Jewish people, and of their future deliverance. But I had ceased to pray. How I sympathised with Job! I did not deny God’s existence, but I doubted his absolute justice’ (p.57).
Perhaps the most horrifying experience of all was when the guards first tortured and then hanged a young boy, ‘a child with a refined and beautiful face’, a ‘sad-eyed angel’. Just before the hanging Elie heard someone behind him whisper, ‘Where is God? Where is he?’ Thousands of prisoners were forced to watch the hanging (it took the boy half an hour to die) and then to march past, looking him full in the face. Behind him Elie heard the same voice ask, ‘Where is God now?’ ‘And I heard a voice within me answer him: “Where is he? Here he is – he is hanging here on this gallows....”’ (pp.75–77). His words were truer than he knew, for he was not a Christian. Indeed, in every fibre of his being he rebelled against God for allowing people to be tortured, butchered, gassed and burned. ‘I was alone – terribly alone in a world without God and without man. Without love or mercy’ (p.79). Could he have said that if in Jesus he had seen God on the gallows?
There is good biblical evidence that God not only suffered in Christ, but that God in Christ suffers with his people still. Is it not written of God, during the early days of Israel’s bitter bondage in Egypt, not just that he saw their plight and ‘heard their groaning’, but that ‘in all their distress he too was distressed’? Did Jesus not ask Saul of Tarsus why he was persecuting him, thus disclosing his solidarity with his church? It is wonderful that we may share in Christ’s sufferings; it is more wonderful still that he shares in ours. Truly his name is ‘Emmanuel’, ‘God with us’. But his ‘sympathy’ is not limited to his suffering with his covenant people. Did Jesus not say that in ministering to the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner, we would be ministering to him, indicating that he identified himself with all needy and suffering people?43
I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross’. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. ‘The cross of Christ...is God’s only self-justification in such a world’ as ours.44
The playlet entitled ‘The Long Silence’ says it all:
At the end of time, billions of people were scattered on a great plain before God’s throne.
Most shrank back from the brilliant light before them. But some groups near the front talked heatedly – not with cringing shame, but with belligerence.
‘Can God judge us? How can he know about suffering?’ snapped a pert young brunette. She ripped open a sleeve to reveal a tattooed number from a Nazi concentration camp.‘We endured terror...beatings...torture...death!’
In another group a Negro boy lowered his collar. ‘What about this?’ he demanded, showing an ugly rope burn. ‘Lynched...for no crime but being black!’
In another crowd, a pregnant schoolgirl with sullen eyes. ‘Why should I suffer’ she murmured, ‘It wasn’t my fault.’
Far out across the plain there were hundreds of such groups. Each had a complaint against God for the evil and suffering he permitted in his world. How lucky God was to live in heaven where all was sweetness and light, where there was no weeping or fear, no hunger or hatred. What did God know of all that man had been forced to endure in this world? For God leads a pretty sheltered life, they said.
So each of these groups sent forth their leader, chosen because he had suffered the most. A Jew, a Negro, a person from Hiroshima, a horribly deformed arthritic, a thalidomide child. In the centre of the plain they consulted with each other. At last they were ready to present their case. It was rather clever.
Before God could be qualified to be their judge, he must endure what they had endured. Their decision was that God should be sentenced to live on earth – as a man!
‘Let him be born a Jew. Let the legitimacy of his birth be doubted. Give him a work so difficult that even his family will think him out of his mind when he tries to do it. Let him be betrayed by his closest friends. Let him face false charges, be tried by a prejudiced jury and convicted by a cowardly judge. Let him be tortured.
‘At the last, let him see what it means to be terribly alone. Then let him die. Let him die so that there can be no doubt that he died. Let there be a great host of witnesses to verify it.’
As each leader announced his portion of the sentence, loud murmurs of approval went up from the throng of people assembled.
And when the last had finished pronouncing sentence, there was a long silence. No-one uttered another word. No-one moved. For suddenly all knew that God had already served his sentence.
Edward Shillito, shattered by the carnage of the First World War, found comfort in the fact that Jesus was able to show his disciples the scars of his crucifixion. It inspired him to write his poem ‘Jesus of the Scars’:
If we have never sought, we seek thee now;
Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;
We must have sight of thorn-marks on thy brow,
We must have thee, O Jesus of the scars.
The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;
In all the universe we have no place.
Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?
Lord Jesus, by thy scars we know thy grace.
If, when the doors are shut, thou drawest near,
Only reveal those hands, that side of thine;
We know today what wounds are, have no fear;
Show us thy scars, we know the countersign.
The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak;
They rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.45