Where Pain Points

Last week, there was a bus accident in New Braunfels that killed thirteen people, senior adults at First Baptist New Braunfels, which has many ties to my own church in Texas. Such a sudden, devastating, senseless loss causes us to cry, sometimes to scream, and nearly always to question – why? Why must these things be?

Why?

For millennia, Christians have struggled with the problem of suffering in a world controlled by an all-powerful, all-loving god. There are no easy answers – I’m not even sure what can be considered an “answer” when the question isn’t a question; it’s a prolonged scream of pain. In one sense, the experience of pain is just a brute fact about the universe; it can’t be explained, it must only be lived through. But I would like to, if I may, point out a few things that Christianity can offer when we’re in pain, that atheism cannot. Because we’ve got the argument backwards. Pain may make us want to turn away from God, but in truth, it points straight toward him.

Dignity

First and foremost, Christianity gives pain dignity. Because pain – real pain, the rending, tearing kind that you don’t just get over – comes, beyond everything else, with a conviction: “this thing should not be.” That’s why we scream “why,” at the sky or the universe or God or ourselves. Something in us rebels against pain and suffering, refuses to make “death part of life” when it comes down to it. And that something in us is right. Pain, physical and emotional, exists to tell us that something is not right, that something is broken and needs fixing.

Christianity validates this; it says that the world is broken, that we deserve and ought to demand more, that there was something that really did matter that really has been taken away. Atheism, on the other hand, only sees what is, not what ought to be; it has no context from which to draw greater meaning. In the world of atheism, a traffic accident is just a rearrangement of matter; a death is just a fact of biology, a transfer of energy. Demanding “why” would be like suing the mailman because he couldn’t fix your plumbing.

Significance

Secondly, Christianity gives suffering significance. It says that God is an all-loving God, but that is not all he is. Because love must always start with respect, he doesn’t fix everything, regulate everything, so that we’re nothing but mannequins ruled by fate. No, God gave us a frightening amount of power, the power to shape the future of not only ourselves, but the entire world, and the power to choose choices with everlasting significance.

That’s why the Old Testament calls us “gods” – because of this fearsome power we have, this power to choose. And this power has very frightening consequences, but everyone who’s seen a movie knows that you can’t love someone without giving them the right to choose their own path. And that path, if it’s to mean anything, includes consequences. In atheism, we’re just biological systems responding to stimuli. We don’t have choice; life is absurd. And so suffering is absurd as well.

Hope

Thirdly, Christianity gives suffering hope. In Christianity, evil is not a real thing; it is the absence of a thing, the perversion of a thing. It is a very particular version of the idea that “what is, is good” – because what is not good, never really was; it was only a negation or rejection in nature. It could never hold existence in itself. In Christianity, evil and death are the punchline (I mean it, there’s actually a taunt); they look big and scary now, but at the end, they can’t compare to the sheer enormity and power of Goodness.

Now, this doesn’t mean the suffering we have now means any less – a valley isn’t made smaller by being next to a mountain – but once we reach the top of the mountain, we’ll realize how comparatively small it always was. Under atheism, however, this is the best we can hope for. The world will always be full of frustration, disappointments, and human nature. No amount of science will ever change that; something much more radical is needed. The world doesn’t need to be mended; it needs to be reborn. And no effort of man can do that, because 1) we’re not that good, and 2) we ourselves must also be reborn.

Communion

Finally, and fittingly as we approach Easter, Christianity offers suffering communion. Why do we call taking the bread and wine “communion”? Because it connects us with the suffering of the cross. People like to say that the apostle Paul started Christianity, because he did a lot of writing. But writing, theory, isn’t enough to sustain a way of life, isn’t enough to sustain people. Christianity was born out of suffering and death – the suffering and death of God. Every tear you shed, every prick of pain you feel, God has felt, ten times worse, because he knows what you’re missing, and he cares about you more than you care about yourself. We suffer. And he suffers with us.

Jesus, too, wept – even knowing he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, he wept, because that doesn’t make the pain go away; it’s just there. Jesus, too, cried out “why?!” in agony. And Jesus, too, died. No other religion has ever come close to suggesting that God himself could come down, live out our suffering, and scream out “why?!” with the rest of us, even though whatever answer there is, he already knew. It doesn’t matter sometimes. Sometimes we just cry. And that’s okay.

A World Without Pain

Yesterday, I finally got around to watching The Giver. I read the book in middle school, so I remembered most of it, but it was still incredibly moving. This society had decided that they disliked pain so much, they would neutralize it, neutralize all emotion, get rid of anything worth caring about, so that they wouldn’t have to lose it. Except that by doing that, they lost it anyway – they just made themselves too unfeeling to care, so unfeeling that they could kill children without batting an eye.

The main character aches for the beauty these people miss out on, but it is the pain that makes him decide to act. Because without pain, we don’t know what matters. It must be terrible to witness the death of a child – but far worse to witness such a horror, and feel nothing. Under atheism, this dystopian society is right ab0ut killing; it’s no different from crushing a beetle, just the ending of an organism. But we know better; we know that ‘death’ means more than the stop of a heartbeat or a brainwave. We are worth more. And we know that because of pain.

cemetery licensed under CC BY 2.0