The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  What Dare We Make of Suffering?

  I recall reading some years ago of the death of the young son of William Sloan Coffin, in a horrible automobile accident in Boston. At some point, perhaps at the funeral, perhaps later in a sermon, the anguished father discussed his reaction to this terrible experience, saying that frequently people would attempt to comfort him with the Christian cliché, “It is God’s will.” Coffin thundered, “The hell it is. When my boy was killed, God was the first who cried.” If God can be sympathetic and empathetic, why can’t God prevent the source of those troubles that require human and divine sympathy? Suffering makes us ask hard questions of God, i.e., where were you when I needed you? Suffering also makes us ask hard questions of ourselves: What have I done to deserve this?

  If suffering is, as I suggest that it is, a thin place, indeed a place of proximity to the divine, such proximity has served to alienate many from God rather than draw them nearer. If God is indifferent to suffering—for example, if God really does not care about the manifest human sufferings in Bosnia, or in Rwanda, or in the AIDS wards of the local hospitals, or in the galloping Alzheimer’s disease of an old and once-bright friend or spouse—who cares for that kind of God?

  If God is merely sympathetic but impotent in the face of such difficulties, then again, of what value is the idea? Sympathy is cheap, and hence abundant. Divine sympathy is no more or less helpful than any other kind.

  If God is the source or cause of the suffering, and the suffering is an expression of God’s will, then is this not a malevolent, vengeful, even perverse God, who exercises ultimate power in a capricious, or even immoral, way?

  Indifferent, sympathetic, arbitrary—somehow God is usually called into our conversations about suffering, for the ultimate suffering is that suffering itself is meaningless and must be endured alone. Misery loves company, we are told. Well, there is more to it than that, for misery actually requires company. Just as it is really not possible to be happy alone, “the sound of one hand clapping” and all of that, so too it is not really possible to suffer alone. That is why we invoke God, even the godless among us, and that is why we are constantly looking for companionship in suffering, either to share or to blame or at times to do both.

  Suffering, we are taught very early on, is a part of life. As the Yankee adage has it, “What can’t be cured must be endured,” and most of us were brought up with an understanding of that concept. We were taught as well that suffering was redemptive or, at the very least, instructive. When we suffer, we are more apt to learn. Our mothers used to say that suffering was God’s way of getting our attention, and that there were lessons to be learned from suffering. We would be the better for it.

  Redemptive—dare we even say therapeutic?—suffering is that of which Paul speaks with a beguiling candor when, in writing his second letter to the Corinthians, he speaks of his “thorn in the flesh”: “And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated.”

  Paul was not a masochist delighting in this object lesson in humility and suffering, for he asked not once but three times to be rid of this trouble: “Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ ”

  Paul’s sufferings were not relieved, and he understood his weakness to be an opportunity to manifest the power of God: “I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong.” (II Corinthians 12:7–10)

  Many have speculated upon the nature of Paul’s affliction, his “thorn in the flesh,” and the speculations range everywhere from physical distemper and psychological disarray to homosexuality. Our purpose here is not to discuss the affliction but rather the response to it, and what it tells us about God and about Paul.

  We learn first that the thorn is sent to Paul in the form of a messenger from Satan. The source of his trouble, whatever it is, is not God. The moral of the affliction, however, is that he should not boast or brag—the affliction is an exercise in humility, the purpose of which is to give glory not to Paul but to Christ. This is not suffering for suffering’s sake; it is suffering for Christ’s sake so that Paul and all who see and learn from him might learn of the strength that Christ supplies. We learn as well that God’s role is not to relieve suffering or to spare us from it, but to enable us to bear and endure it so that even our suffering is redemptive for ourselves and others. Thus, God will not interfere despite the three appeals of the apostle. Why not? So that Paul will learn that he can rely upon Christ when he needs him, that is, in his weakness. The sufferings, the persecutions, the calamities, the insults and hardships, all of these are not ends in themselves but means to a greater end, the demonstration that Christ gets us through such things. The only way “out” of suffering is “through” it, and only Christ can get us through. Knowing this, Paul is now able to demonstrate this as an act of faith, not in the redemptive powers of suffering but in the redemptive powers of the redeemer to help him through his weaknesses. “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” In other words, when I can no longer rely upon myself to solve the problem or to overcome the weakness, when I acknowledge that in my weakness I cannot “go it alone,” then I am strengthened, empowered by the one who gives me strength. To be strong in this sense is to acknowledge the fact of my weakness and the source of my strength.

  Writing to the Romans, Paul applies the theme of suffering as a communal and not just a personal virtue. The Christians are to rejoice in their hope of sharing the glory of God, of testifying of their peace with God through Christ, and of the grace in which they stand. As a result of this the Christians are also able to rejoice even in their sufferings, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” (Romans 5:3–5)

  When Paul, therefore, writes of suffering, he is not speaking abstractly either about himself or about the Christian community. His personal sufferings are real and painful, and although we do not know their precise nature, we know enough about Paul to know that these sufferings of mind and spirit were sufficient to cause him stress and trouble. He was not pretending to be afflicted as a kind of moral object lesson. We can identify with his anxiety, and indeed with his frustrations. We can “feel his pain,” as they say in today’s vernacular, and we know the very real sufferings of the people with whom he worked in the gospel. These too were not abstractions. We get an idea when the persecutions of the Christians are described in the book of Hebrews:

  Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and scourging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated—of whom the world was not worthy—wandering over deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. (Hebrews 11:35–38)

  Suffering, in the New Testament, is real. Paul, and everybody else writing there, wants us to understand this. There is no sympathy with the notion that pain is illusion, that suffering is merely an appearance, or even a deception. There is little room for optimism in the real-world circumstances of the New Testament, and optimism implies either that suffering is unreal or that we can get over it fairly quickly or that if we are very, very good we can avoid it altogether. How anyone can read the New Testament and remain an optimist in this world amazes me. The early Christians seemed to understand that suffering does not come despite one’s faith, but rather because of it. In this world virtue and suffering are not opposites, as we would find it so convenient
to believe; suffering is the consequence of, not the opposite of, virtue. This is the burden of that difficult verse in I Peter 3:17, which says, “For it is better to suffer for doing right, if that should be God’s will, than for doing wrong.”

  Suffering, therefore, is not an exception to the human condition, it is the human condition, and as such it is almost impossible to avoid; and since religion, as we have said, has to do with the human condition, and indeed with the enormous task of trying to make sense and meaning of it, religion by its very nature has an intimacy with suffering. That intimacy is the stuff of which our lives are composed.

  Sigmund Freud,3 no friend of religion, nevertheless gives us a comprehensive sense of suffering, and thus we are enabled to see the scope of religion’s intimate relations with it. Says Freud:

  We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do that without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally, from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.

  Morality, conflict, and ethics: These sources of our sufferings have always been the business of religion and of the Bible. How do we deal with the fact that inevitably we die, that our life before we die is conflicted and besieged, and that we find it difficult to get along with our fellow creatures? These are not Freudian categories; this is life itself.

  The Trouble with Paul

  Few women, blacks, homosexuals, or Jews are very fond of Paul, and it is easy to see why on the basis of the reading of the Pauline letters we have discussed in Part Two of this book. Each has a text or two to hold against him, for of all the figures of the New Testament, he is at once the most difficult to evade and the most difficult to embrace. For many he is an example of spiritual arrogance, who, even when he writes about not boasting, boasts that he is not boasting. He is mistrusted, and the basis of that mistrust goes back to scripture itself. In Acts 8, the chapter opens with Saul—the preconversion name of Paul—consenting to the death of the first Christian martyr, Stephen. After Stephen’s burial, the text says, “But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.” (Acts 8:3) We know that Paul was on his way to Damascus, “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord,” having asked for letters to the synagogues in Damascus that would empower him to arrest any Christian men or women and bring them bound for trial to Jerusalem. This was an ambitious and successful young zealot; he could have been a Hitler Youth, an upwardly mobile officer in Oliver Cromwell’s army, a Sandinista, even a young Republican. We know the sort, and they are not easily cured, and we are not easily charmed by them. After his conversion he preached of Jesus in the synagogue in Damascus, “and all who heard him were amazed and said, ‘Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem of those who called on this name? And he has come here for this purpose, to bring them bound before the chief priests.’ ” (Acts 9:21)

  We know the hesitation of those in Damascus who thought that they knew this Paul, and who were not altogether enthusiastic about his enthusiasm for them and their gospel, and yet without Paul there would be no Christian church, nor would there be a gospel for us. Without Paul we have very little that is authentically Christian, and thus the great irony, for many of us at least, and certainly for women, blacks, homosexuals, and Jews, is that the source of our liberation from this life, and our endurance and perseverance within this life, is the very Paul who has been used in various ways and in various times to oppress us. If suffering is the fate of life in this world, and for Christians in particular, then Paul is our tutor in suffering. The model of Christians holding on and out against overwhelming forces that seek to do them in, that “external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction,” according to Freud, is Paul. He teaches us what to do with our sufferings, and what they are for.

  Paul teaches us that we are not ruled by our bodies, nor are we prisoners of the flesh. We are not simply material people in a material world. “You are not of the flesh,” he writes the Romans, “but of the spirit.” We belong therefore to an unconquerable realm, to a place that is immune to the ultimate assaults and ravages of this life. To be liberated from the idea of bondage to the body is to be freed from the fear of death. This is why Paul can laugh at death and say, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” Death’s power is in our fear of it. Death’s dominion is exercised not after the grave but before the grave. In death no one need fear death; we will know it for what it is, and for what it is not. It is before death that death reigns. Death will take our bodies, and so before we die we live in terror that our bodies will be destroyed. As we grow old and sick we realize that we are waging a losing war against death; death, we say, will win.

  There is a profound paradox at work of which Paul is fully aware, however, and that is that death does its work on us before we die. Death holds us hostage to the idea of death and the loss of all that we know and value, and only in life can death rule in such a way. If in life we are attached to more than the mere form and vessel of life, the body, and if we do recognize that the body is merely the temple of the spirit, the dwelling place of that God who is in us, when we really believe that because of this, death is not to be feared and the body not to be worshiped, then we have been given life after death without having to die. Death is real. We do not dispute that. The body is real; it is no mere phantom or illusion. We do not dispute that. The spirit is also real, in fact, more real than death or the body, each of which, when it has done its work, disappears. The spirit lives on, passing through the frontier, the thin place, the border, into a realm that we can speak of only as beyond the grave. It is nothing less than this concept with which Paul arms us to overcome the very world that would in his name do us in. As the old gospel hymn goes: “Faith is the victory that overcomes the world.”

  There has been much to overcome in this world for those who have been driven to its margins. I am often asked why it is, considering their experiences, that woman, blacks, and homosexuals still cleave to the church and still fight for the Bible and the right to see themselves in it. The evangelists of the Nation of Islam say this to black people all the time, asking if we realize that the Bible is a white man’s book, that it was given to our ancestors to oppress them and make them docile, and that even today it requires that we perform mental gymnastics in order not to see ourselves as the inferior slave children of the banished son of Noah. What black man, woman, or child with any integrity, any sense of self-worth and a lick of intelligence, would read a book and stay in a church whose fundamental assumptions were racist and imperialist? The evidence, they argue, is not ancient; it is as contemporary as the nearest white church; and, they argue, “Who needs all that?”

  Secular women make much the same case for women, and wonder why women even care to be included in the patriarchal churches of Christendom, whose gospel not only excludes them but defines them as God’s afterthought and of no intrinsic worth. How well I remember that before she left, on the Sunday of her exodus from The Memorial Church, Mary Daly had invited women from the Divinity School to read as the scripture lessons for that morning all of the Pauline anti-woman passages they could find in the New Testament. Needless to say, they did not have to look very hard, and as the passages were read many laughed, others hissed, and as one conservative woman said to me years later, in retrospect of that occasion, “We were condemned out of our own book.” Many women did take the message and left the church, never to return. I think, however, that more remained than left, and if any group can be said to have fought for the Bible, it is those women who remained and were determined to be included in that from which they had been excluded.

  The so-called inclusive language debate, which has exercised so
many for so long, is, in my view, but a tiny sign of a much larger, more interesting, and more significant issue of discovering what is, and has always been, in the tradition that liberates principle in such a way that we are not tied to practice and precedent. Woman have had to read Paul and to take Paul very seriously, and to distinguish between the situational and the normative in Paul, and to use the one to combat the other as they lay claim to the gospel that Paul yet proclaims to them. Rewriting hymn texts is not the issue; rereading and rediscovering the gospel in the Bible is. Language, contrary to certain theories of literary criticism, does not define reality, and to be bound to language is in some sense much like being bound to the body and realm of the material. Reality for the Christian is the realm of the spirit, and only there is there sufficient freedom to cope with the lack of freedom in the realm which the world calls reality. That confidence, that strength, is very much of the same substance as that which allows us to live life before death without the fear of death.