With murders increasing in America and military slaughter of civilians in Ukraine, this year’s Good Friday services called us to faith and hope in a world filled with cruelty, killing and destruction. Together with Jesus on his cross, many of us may have asked, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?” Jesus wasn’t acting, he felt like that. And amidst the events of today’s world, so may we.
“Sin can wreck marriages and also ruin life-long relationships among siblings. At the same time, the death of a parent or sibling often pulls the remaining family members together.”
But the psalm Jesus quoted on the cross, Psalm 22, has an A part and B part. In the A part the psalmist begs for his “wretched life” to be saved but is overcome by his suffering and feels forsaken. The B part has the psalmist realizing God has not “turned his face away from him,” and he says that his “descendants shall serve him (God)” and proclaim “the justice he has shown.” This is somehow justice because we all will “go down into the dust,” but “to him my soul shall live.” This is then a psalm of faith. In our greatest suffering, God is with us. Although others may persecute us and kill us, God does not forsake us, and he will keep our soul with him forever. Jesus’ just reward is his resurrection, and that will also be ours.
Michael Gerson, who in my opinion is one of the better commentators in the Baton Rouge Advocate’s opinion section, had a wonderful column on the suffering of Ukraine on April 21. Such suffering there today reminded him of an account by the Jewish writer, Elie Wiesel, himself a Holocaust survivor at Auschwitz, of the execution by hanging of two Jewish men and a boy in the extermination camp. The two men being heavy died rather quickly. The boy, who was thin and light, took a half hour to die. His death struggle caused a man standing behind Wiesel to cry out, “Where is God?” As the struggle went on so long, he cried out again, “Where is God now?” This time another voice answered, “Here he is – he is hanging here on this gallows.”
This Jewish story, for Gerson, has a Christian resonance. Jesus too was the victim of a slow execution. “And if God was somehow uniquely present in this person, it was God who subjected himself to a full dose of human malice.” Christianity, Gerson says, responds to the problem of human evil, not with a philosophy but with a person. “It offers the fellowship of suffering.” Our God is a God who through his son Jesus suffers with us. And his resurrection offers a “homecoming on the far side of death. An assurance that the violent will not inherit the earth.”
Gerson’s conclusion is downright eloquent. I wish I had had it before I gave my Easter homily. While making a very strong moral case for helping Ukraine, he sees such action as part of the message of the cross and the empty tomb. “God is on the side of the boy on the gallows and the man on the cross. Even amid horror (Russian forces taking lives randomly, expanding the scope and scale of their murder) some vital purpose is making itself known. Against all my doubts, I choose to believe in a God with scars.”
Another writer whose spirituality I enjoy reading is Father Richard Rohr. On April 5 he too discussed the mystery of God allowing his own divine son not only to share our humanity but specifically to share our suffering. Why? Because “suffering has this strange and marvelous ability to pull us into oneness.”
Human sin always divides us, causing much personal pain. Sin can wreck marriages and also ruin life-long relationships among siblings. At the same time, the death of a parent or sibling often pulls the remaining family members together. On a much larger level, even war has the effect of uniting a people against a common enemy who is attacking them. Valiant Ukrainians are witness to this. A pandemic is by definition a world-wide disease. The COVID-19 pandemic has given us a feeling that we are all in this together, regardless, of race, nationally or religious belief. Every language on earth has words to describe disease and pain. These sufferings give us a common bond.
Father Rohr warns that “until we find the communal meaning and significance of the suffering of all life, we will continue to retreat into our individual, small worlds in our misguided quest for personal safety and sanity. A crucified God is the dramatic symbol of the one suffering that God fully enters into with us, not just for us, as we were mostly taught to think, but in solidarity with us. The good news is we do not have to hold that suffering alone. In fact, we cannot hold it alone.”
We can’t escape suffering, but because of our faith, we face it united to God and to each other.
Father Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at johnny carville@gmail.com.