UNMERITED SUFFERING

 UNMERITED SUFFERING

The collapse of a condominium building on June 24 in Surfside, Florida, which could end up resulting in over 100 confirmed deaths, was a shock to the nation.  As with all such events, the news coverage was exhaustive.  At first, it was centered on the rescue of victims, but it soon became apparent that the brave rescuers were not going to find many survivors in the rubble.  Reporters then started speculating on the possible causes of the collapse.  Meanwhile, the nation mourns for the victims and their families, and we join our prayers to theirs.

            One can’t help but wonder why such a thing should happen to those victims, whose only crime was to be sleeping in their beds at the moment of the collapse.  It makes no sense.  In another tragedy which gained national coverage a mother was killed by a stray bullet in Annapolis, MD outside the hotel where she and her family were staying.  They were there to celebrate with her son who in a couple of days was to be inducted into the Naval Academy.  After his mom’s murder the son tweeted out the question that confronts all of us in our lives, at one time or another:  Why? 

Can we blame God for these evils?  Thinking rationally, we know that God is not at fault.  The building collapsed, apparently, due to faulty construction – the result of human, not divine, error.  It was the shooters that killed the proud mother of an Annapolis inductee, not God.  And yet, God could have prevented these evils.  We know that He is all just and all powerful.  Did He decide that the victims deserved to die?        

            There are passages in the Old Testament that seem to claim that all misfortune is the direct result of personal sin.  However, the Book of Job is dedicated to contradicting this error.  It presents Job as a man who feared God.  Despite his righteousness, disaster suddenly fell upon him and his family.  He first lost his property and then his children.  Finally, he was afflicted with painful sores.  Job’s friends come to console him, but when Job claims his innocence, they argue that since God is just, Job surely must have committed grave sins and merited his suffering.  This is faulty reasoning, and eventually God exonerates Job in front of his friends and restores Job’s health and prosperity, making him twice as rich as he used to be and blessing him with seven sons and three daughters.  Before he restores him, however, God reminds Job of his humble condition, for in his anguish Job had challenged God to appear to him and defend his ways.  Who is Job to question God?  Yet, in his mercy, God responds.    

            “Who is this who darkens counsel with words of ignorance?  Gird up your loins, now, like a man; I will question you, and you tell me the answers!  Where were you when I founded the earth?  Tell me, if you have understanding.  Who determined its size?  Surely you know?  Who stretched out the measuring line for it?” (Job 38:1-6).  Job acknowledges his inability to answer, and makes a profession of faith: “I know that you can do all things, and no purpose of yours can be hindered…I have spoken but did not understand; things too marvelous for me, which I did not know…By hearsay I had heard of you, but now my eye has seen you.  Therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:1-6).

            Our faith gives orientation to our thinking about unmerited suffering, even if it does not satisfy our desire for complete understanding.  As Christians we know that evil and suffering entered into the world when Adam sinned against God.  Pope Saint John Paul II explains in his encyclical “On the Christian Meaning of Suffering” that “Evil remains bound to sin and death. And even if we must use great caution in judging man's suffering as a consequence of concrete sins (this is shown precisely by the example of the just man Job), nevertheless suffering cannot be divorced from the sin of the beginnings, from what Saint John calls ‘the sin of the world’ (John 1:29).  Though it is not licit to apply here the narrow criterion of direct dependance (as Job's three friends did), it is equally true that one cannot reject the criterion that, at the basis of human suffering, there is a complex involvement with sin.”  Pain and suffering exist because we live in a world which has been corrupted by man’s rebellion against God.  The preternatural state of perfection in which the world was created was lost when Adam ate of the forbidden fruit.

 Christ addresses the question of innocent suffering when he is told about the slaughter of some Galileans by Pilate’s soldiers.  “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?  By no means!  But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!  Or those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them – do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem?  By no means!  But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!” (Luke 13:1-5).   Jesus does not clear up the mystery of the suffering of the innocent, but uses the occasion to call his listeners to life, which is a call to repentance. 

The experience of evil is meant to move us to seek union with God, who himself experienced suffering as we do, only with an infinitely greater intensity.  Job’s sufferings opened him to God’s revelation, so that he no longer knew God only by “hearsay” but by personal encounter.  Jesus had a personal encounter with suffering so that we might have a personal encounter with him.  I believe that this truth is more consoling and fruitful, and more necessary for us, than the solving of a mystery.  Christ entered our world of suffering to be one with us in it.  When we suffer, we join him in his Passion.  “For if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him” (Romans 6:8).       

 FATHER SCOTT