Friday of the Sixth Week of Easter

“You Cannot Bear It Now”

To place today’s Gospel passage from John 16 in some context, the Last Supper is almost at its end and Jesus has been telling the disciples many difficult things and their hearts are deeply troubled. He has also just told them that there are many more things he wants to tell them but that they cannot bear to hear them now. The disciples have also just bemoaned the fact that they cannot understand him. John will then end chapter 16 with the Lord telling them that they are all about to abandon him. So, there is deep sorrow and foreboding among the Apostles as well as a terrible looming pain that they will all have to endure. And so, to comfort them, he promises that after the pain and sorrow, they will receive a joy that no one can take away from them, like the joy of her newborn makes a mother forget the pain of her labor.

This may be a good opportunity for us to speak of what philosophy and theology often call the problem of pain. It may colloquially be expressed as, why do bad things happen to good people? It is often seen as a sub category of the broader topic called the problem of evil. Pain and evil are not things that can be easily understood, especially when we think of them as existing in God’s creation, which Genesis 1:31 confirms as being “very good.” Yet despite that goodness, their presence in creation certainly cannot be easily denied. Many questions about this arise, not least of which are, where does it come from and how did it get here?

But I would challenge us to go beyond the mere questioning that our human intellect naturally engages in, the desire to know that very much seems to define what being human is, to a deeper level of the human that is beneath mind, the realm of the spiritual. It seems to me that only a spiritual approach has any hope of coping with this great problem. To seek a spiritual solution, however, is to very much surrender any desire to “figure it out.” It is to very much enter into the dark valley of the shadow of death of the twenty-third Psalm. But that is also a place, according to Psalm 23, where we will fear no evil. A seeming paradox.

That darkness as it relates to the spiritual (to God, finally), is alluded to in various places in scripture. In Genesis 1:2 it tells us that before creation, all was darkness. That was where God dwelt. Then there is the dark pillar of cloud in Exodus. Exodus 20:21 describes the thick darkness where God was that Moses drew near to. And John tells us both in the gospel and the first letter attributed to him, that no one has ever seen God, implying the impenetrable darkness that forever surrounds God.

Yet at the same time, Jesus declares, “I am the light of the world,” and that no one who follows him will ever walk in darkness. But it is not so much that in Christ, God will answer all our questions so much as in Christ we cease asking those questions, or more appropriately, cease demanding answers. That is what faith is, as Hebrews says, the “conviction of things unseen.” We stop asking why and begin to simply accept without attempting to understand or change anything.

I often tell the story of when I was a novice working at Goldwater Hospital which used to be on Roosevelt Island next to Manhattan. It was one of the City’s chronic care hospitals. People generally went into Goldwater and did not come out. All the nurses there told me that I must meet Mary. They took me to her one day, for she was deep in the warrens and maze that was Goldwater. She was a young woman of about 33 who lay in a specialized bed filled with thousands of small, plastic pellets kept floating on a current of warmed air. Mary was paralyzed from her neck down and she had been lying in that bed when I met her for some twelve years. Yet she met me beaming with a smile that was impossible to forget. She was filled with joy and peace that you knew immediately and afterward was utterly genuine and complete. It radiated like a bright light. Mary did not ask why God had done this to her. She did not ask why of any sort. She completely accepted her condition without any self-pity, blame, anger, resentment or fear. If Mary could meet her seemingly great tragedy this way, why do we have so much difficulty with ours that we must admit do not rise to her level? That, finally, is the question I ponder for myself.