I remember that day very well. My brothers and I are watching TV, the phone ringing, my mother receiving the news that she’d been dreading ever since she’d heard the midday bulletin. That my father was on that plane, and he was gone.
In the days that followed I apparently, so my mum tells me, walked up to her and said to her, “why did God let dad’s plane crash?” Which is weird because we were not a religious home. I’d never been inside a church before I was 16. But somehow I knew the right question to ask “why God?” And I share this with you not to get your sympathy, not to establish my right to talk on such a topic. Simply to illustrate the universality of the question – even a nine year old secular kid in Sydney with no religion in his life, confronted with this knows to ask “why God?”
Many, I think, feel that faced with suffering, faithful people are only allowed to echo the words of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” But the presence of Psalm 22 immediately before reminds us that crying out “God why?” can be just as much an expression of faith as “the Lord is my shepherd.”
Psalm 22 is an invitation to bring all our anguish to the Almighty. It’s also a promise that God himself knows our pain, which is why it’s the Psalm Jesus chose to echo on the cross: “At three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?)” [Matthew 27:46] This is not a cry of self doubt. It’s God’s own entering into our pain. God’s own entering into anguish with us. This God can comfort the oppressed. Not just because he is all knowing, but because he’s experienced what we experience.
One of the great atheists of the 20th century, Stan’s already mentioned him, saw this point. Albert Camus, often writing of the futility and silence of the universe, in his essay The Rebel said, “if Christianity were true, which of course it’s not, it would be the answer to all our dilemmas.” He wrote, “Christ came to solve two major problems, evil and death… His solution consisted, first, in experiencing them. The man-God suffers, too – with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him, since he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha is so important in the history of man only because, in its shadow, the divinity abandoned its traditional privileges and drank to the last drop, despair included, the agony of death.” [you can find the full translated essay here]
By John Dickson
Disenchanted Age
Want to hear the rest of the episode?
Check out episode 140: “Disenchanted Age”
