Well, here’s a fun choice for a preacher: I can talk about the agony of Job or the agony of divorce. Any preferences? These are tough readings. I could try to soften their impact. I could point out that Job is an ancient fable from a people whose understanding of God and suffering was still developing. Or I could explain that in Jesus’ time, divorce was exclusively the prerogative of men. Husbands could dismiss their wives easily and unjustly, with potentially catastrophic results for the women who were abandoned — something Jesus clearly did not approve of.
But while that’s true, I’m not going to focus on that. Instead, I feel the Spirit leading me to delve more deeply into the reality that underlies both of these readings, namely the intractable difficulty of life. Bad things happen, they just do — randomly, unfairly, and frequently. And they happen to everyone. No one is exempt from disease, accident, and misfortune. And it’s not just that terrible things happen to people, but people often do terrible things, to themselves and to others. In Men’s Bible Study, we sometimes make reference to Francis Spufford’s definition of sin, summed up in the acronym HPTFTU, the “human propensity to f*** things up,” which appears to be an inveterate tendency shared by all. Even when we don’t mean to, we can still mess up and hurt ourselves, our relationships, and our world. So whether we are talking about a good man being afflicted with loathsome sores all over his body or a woman being coldly dismissed by her husband through divorce or a pandemic or any other calamity that can befall us, there’s plenty of suffering to go around. And even though God doesn’t directly cause these bad things to happen, God obviously allows them to happen. In fact, since this is God’s creation, we can even agree with the spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle when he asserts that “life is designed for things to go wrong.” Because they certainly do.
What are we to do with this? Well, the Gospel today tells us what not to do with it: at all costs, we need to avoid hardness of heart. Not an easy task. In the midst of anguish and difficulty, it would be easy to throw up our hands and give into despair. Or we could become angry and embittered. Or we could numb ourselves, forget everything, and just focus on our own pleasures. But all of these would involve hardening our hearts, closing down emotionally and refusing to engage compassionately with the world around us. And the results of that are not pretty. When those Pharisees — all of them men — confront Jesus and try to defend their cruelty by invoking the law of Moses which allows them to discard a wife so easily, Jesus says it’s because of your hardness of heart that Moses wrote this commandment for you.
But here’s what God promises through the prophet Ezekiel: A new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). What does that look like? It looks like Jesus. He’s around suffering all.the.time, but his heart is never hardened. He has compassion on the sick and the outcast; he weeps at the grave of Lazarus. For him, every misfortune, whether it’s caused by some random act of nature or by human sin, is an opportunity to add more love to this world. Even when he is dying on the cross, Jesus shows love by forgiving his executioners and offering paradise to the man hanging next to him.
I don’t know why life is designed for things to go wrong, but I do believe it is possible that God creates the universe the way it is precisely to enlarge the experience of love. This is not a message I would offer in most pastoral situations, like at the bedside of someone who is gravely ill or in my office with someone in distress. When we are hurting, we want it to end; when we encounter suffering, our job is to provide relief and comfort. But here in worship, when we have an opportunity to see the big picture and to remember who we are in Christ, then I think it is both honest and necessary to affirm that hardship can and should foster greater love. I have seen this played out countless times, as families rally around sick relatives and as this parish community responds to the needs of our own members and the world around us. We don’t want suffering and death to happen to us or the people closest to us, and yet it is so often those very things which remind us of what truly matters and which call forth from us astonishing amounts of love, kindness, and compassion.
The key is maintaining an open and supple heart. There are many ways of doing that, I suppose, but for me, the one great way is to follow Jesus and practice the presence of God in moments of pain, practice seeing the love of God breaking through even in moments of agony. I see that love in the tears of people who grieve and it helps my heart not to shut down. When someone enrages me, the one thing that keeps my heart open is trying to view that person the way Christ does, to see the pain or the fear which makes them act the way they do. I catch myself wanting to shut down so often, but just asking myself the simple question, “How does God’s love want to express itself through me in this situation?” helps me stay open and vulnerable, not hardened and condemning. This is the way of Jesus: it takes courage, and we will often fail, but even attempting it softens our hearts so that love can abound. And there is just no end to what God’s love can accomplish through open and receptive hearts.
There was a poem found by the body of a dead child in the Ravensbrück concentration camp which beautifully expresses what I am trying to say, so I will end with it. In a hellish place where one could expect all hearts to be hardened, this poem was an open-hearted prayer:
O Lord, remember not only the men and women
Of good will, but also those of ill will.
But do not remember all the suffering
they inflicted on us;
Remember the fruits we have bought,
thanks to
This suffering — our comradeship,
Our loyalty, our humility, our courage,
Our generosity, our greatness of heart
Which has grown out of all this, and when
They come to judgment let all the fruits
Which we have borne be their forgiveness.
Amen.[1]
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