Many of my best conversations about matters of faith seem to happen in the pub after male voice choir practice on a Sunday night. I say “best conversations”, but that doesn’t always mean easy ones. So last week a member of our choir said something along the lines of - “If religion were true then surely the things you pray for would happen, wouldn’t they? So I’ve been praying for peace for years now, and it hasn’t happened! Why doesn’t God knock a few heads together and get things moving? How come he lets bad things happen to good people?”
Let me be honest here, and admit that I didn’t have much of an answer ready. The guy who asked the question, one of our baritones, isn’t a churchgoer, so far as I know, but neither is he anti the faith, and I’m sure he was telling the truth when he said he’d been praying for peace. His question was certainly challenging, but it was asked from a position of genuine struggle; he was trying to match faith to the realities of the world at a time when all news seems to be bad news, in a way that might make sense for him. And of course his questions weren’t exactly new ones. As our two readings today bear out, people have been asking questions like that for as far back in history as you care to go.
Why do bad things happen? It’s not an easy question. At least when you think about war, oppression, tyranny or discrimination, there are human beings we can point at and blame. But we know we’re also living in a world that experiences tragic chance events: last weekend, tornados were doing immense damage across the United States, the weekend before, tropical cyclones were destroying whole villages in Mozambique and southern Tanzania. There’s always something. If, for example, an undersea volcano should cause an earthquake which then sparks off a tsunami which wrecks my little coastal village, taking the lives of those of my friends and family who don’t get to escape in time, how is that their fault? Or mine? How is that a just punishment for human sin? What sins are they, and who exactly is at fault?
The difficult but only conclusion to draw is that in this world bad things happen. Some of those bad things do happen to bad people, who you might think deserved all they got, but what about the collateral damage of the relative innocents who just happened to be in the wrong place? Some bad things happen because bad people cause them to, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, now three years old. Other warlords are also available, sadly. But knowing who to point the finger of blame at doesn’t take away the pain and misery and heartache their actions cause, to people who had no desire for war, to the children being rushed into hospital in Gaza on my news the other day.
So, to return to my conversation in the pub, as a Christian and a minister, how can I explain all this? Well, I suppose I can start by saying something about human freedom. We don’t live in zoo cages, we live in a world whose people are free to make good choices or bad ones, and in particular to say yes to God or turn away from him, and it does seem that in such a world there are going to be times when the unjust prosper and the just and innocent suffer. The apostle John wrote: “God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.” The apostle Paul wrote: “If I have no love, then I’m just a sounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” Love is at the heart of what faith is about, and we have to be free to love, it can’t be programmed into us. If God made me incapable of not loving him, I’d be some kind of automaton or robot, I wouldn’t be a free human being.
So that’s the theoretical answer, the doctrinal answer, and I believe it to be true, and yet there are times when it just isn’t enough: like when I see someone get hurt, or when I’m being hurt myself. Our first reading came from Paul’s letter to folk who were expecting persecution, who knew they were likely to be hurt. So he used lessons from Jewish history to encourage them to keep firm and not fall away; in the end, he tells them, God won’t abandon those who keep faith with him, so hang on in there.
My baritone friend in the pub might well have described that as nothing more than “Pie in the sky” - it wouldn’t, I think, have been enough for him. But faith is about believing the promise, even if that’s not what it feels like here and now. Not everyone manages to do it; some of the people Paul was writing to didn’t manage to do it. Not everyone stayed strong when the church faced opposition and persecution - there were some who abandoned the faith. Would I have been one of them? I really don’t know - I hope not, and I’ve been hugely inspired by the stories of faith that spring up in the dark and desperate and painful places of our world. Of faith tested to the utmost and not found wanting. I hope I could share that faith; I pray that I would.
Let’s look at what Jesus was saying in our Gospel reading. He was being questioned about some of his fellow countrymen who’d been put to death by the Romans, and others who’d been the victims of accident, of the collapse of a tower. And we see him refuse to say what probably other religious people might have said, that those who died must have deserved their fate. Instead, he insists that they were no more deserving of their fate than anyone else.
It can be an easy way out, to say something along the lines of, “Well, I expect he got what was coming to him.” But Jesus doesn’t say that. What he does say, though, is quite a difficult bit of teaching - that in reality, each one of us has got it coming to us. No-one is so good, so saintly, so blameless that they can by their own efforts be free from the inevitable penalty of human sin. All of us fall, and not one of us can save him or herself. So all our human life is lived in the shadow of accident, illness, tragedy, cruelty and war. Even the strongest and most saintly of us will in the end run out of years. In Isaiah chapter 53 we find this verse, which we can also hear sung in Messiah: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” While Paul wrote to the Church in Rome that “The wages of sin is death.”
So one response to that question last Sunday might have been to say that there are no innocents. Everyone is stained with sin. As an explanation of things, it’s not a very happy one, in fact left as it is it’s a recipe for despair. But to repeat that quote from Isaiah, “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” And to continue the quote from Romans chapter 6, “but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
In a world that seems unfair, that is unfair, and that is full of suffering and pain, Christ who himself suffered, who was himself treated unfairly and unjustly, becomes our king and our saviour. He and he alone can lift us from despair; he journeys to the cross in order to make himself our only hope.
I am trying hard to live a good Lent, to turn round the things in my own life might that get in the way of discipleship. But try as I may to do the right thing, I keep slipping back, letting myself down, letting God down. “Light came into the world,” said Jesus to Nicodemus in John chapter 3, “but people preferred the darkness.” The good news is that however much we shun the light, we are still loved by God. We cannot save ourselves, not by any number of good deeds or righteous acts, and yet the promise of salvation is true and real. We live in a world marred by tragedy and mired in sin, but beyond the suffering and pain, and even hiding within it, there is also love.
Each small act of human kindness tells the powers of evil that they can never win. Light is always stronger than darkness, and love is always stronger than evil. Our God is a generous and gracious God, who loves us even when we make ourselves unlovable. We see his love in the one man without sin, on whom all our sins were laid. And if we turn to him, if we turn back to the light of God’s love, we discover that human tragedy, however dreadful, can never have the last word: for his love always will.
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