Patience in Unknowing
Week of Monday September 27, 2004
Lectionary Readings (Revised Common Lectionary, Year C)
Lamentations 1:1–6
Lamentations 3:19–26 or Psalm 137
Habakkuk 1:1–4, 2:1–4
Psalm 37:1–9
2 Timothy 1:1–4
Luke 17:5–10
My wife has a second grader in her class whose father was electrocuted while repairing the family television. In her art work she still draws pictures of her dad. At her weekly Bible study, Ellen bluntly described the tragic death of her husband: "Tim and I had a car wreck; they brought me home and took him to the mortuary." Down the street our neighbor with pre-school triplets struggled as a single mom after her husband left her; now she has brain cancer. Iraq is a disaster getting worse, and in Beslan, Russia terrorists wired bombs to the gymnasium basketball nets, blew up 335 people, and shot those who tried to flee.
Most Christians believe that God is perfectly good and that He would want to do something about all the evil in the world. We also believe that He is fully powerful and surely able to do something about suffering. Still, horrific evils exist. This raises important intellectual questions: does Christianity make sense given all the evil in the world? It also raises deeply personal questions, and that is where the lectionary focuses this week: how does my own life make sense in a world full of unrelieved suffering?
Over two thousand years ago the Biblical writers wrestled with a cluster of profoundly disturbing questions. Why do the wicked prosper? Why does God sometimes seem so distant, so silent, so far from answering our cries for help? The prophet Habakkuk (c. 600 BC) eloquently expressed these troublesome thoughts:
How long, O Lord, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, "Violence!"
but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrong?
Destruction and violence are before me;
there is strife, and conflict abounds.
Therefore the law is paralyzed,
and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
so that justice is perverted. (1:1–4)
Habakkuk protests that God is deaf to his prayers, and passive despite his pleas for divine intervention. In particular, writing at the height of Babylon's power, Habakkuk struggled to understand how God could use a pagan nation to destroy His elect Israel: "Why then do you tolerate the treacherous? Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves?" (Habakkuk 1:13).
One of the things I love about the Scriptures is that their pages are wet with the tears of human pain and suffering, just like our own lives. Rather than gloss over, soft pedal, or sugar coat the hell and heartache we sometimes experience, the Biblical authors vent their emotions with brutal honesty. They do not skate around an awkward topic. One entire book of the Bible tries to wrap its heart around the theologically unthinkable—that Babylon vanquished God's elect people, Israel. The book is simply called Lamentations. Similarly, the Psalmist considers the same catastrophe, Israel's exile to Babylon, and begins with the anguish of a person displaced to a foreign country: "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept/ when we remembered Zion./ There on the poplars/ we hung our harps,/ for there our captors asked us for songs,/ our tormentors demanded songs of joy;/ they said, 'Sing for us one of the songs of Zion!'" Then his rage boils over: "O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,/ happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us—/ he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks!" (Psalm 137). The first five passages of Scripture from the lectionary reveal a startling lexicon of grief: weeping, torment, disbelief, vindictiveness, envy, anxiety, wrath, bitterness, tears, betrayal, affliction, distress, desertion, desolation, weakness, violence, and the silence of God who appears not to save.
By venting their frustration, perplexity, and pain, the Biblical writers grant us permission to do the same. There is no expectation for us to repress our questions, or to answer them prematurely with artificial optimism or superficial cliches.
Habakkuk and his fellow protesters also remind us that we do not have to understand everything, or solve every problem. Some of the suffering we experience in life is inscrutable, some of it admits no solution, no matter how much time, money, effort, prayer, or therapy we throw at it. I recently had a conversation (one of many) with a pastor whose teenager just came out as gay. Clearly, my friend is deeply anguished between conservative opinions which would burden his child with guilt, shame, and self-hatred, and his reflexive, parental longing to embrace and love her, without qualification, for who and what she is. I could only remark to my friend, "well, I add this to the long and growing list of many things I don't understand." After I hung up the phone I remembered a passage from Augustine (354–430) who advised that sometimes "the secrets of heaven and earth still remain hidden from us" and therefore we must "rest patiently in unknowing."1 If venting our emotions is okay, so is honestly confessing and making peace with our ignorance.
Finally, Habakkuk writes that "the righteous will live by faith" (2:4), and a significant aspect of faith is waiting. In the face of pain, suffering, and injustice, God assures Habakkuk that despite appearances, He is working, and so he should wait. In a second text for this week, Jeremiah writes the same thing (Lamentations 3:22–26):
Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed,
for His compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, "The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for Him."The Lord is good to those whose hope is in Him,
to the one who seeks Him;
it is good to wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.
Likewise, the Psalmist for this week, who three times warns against fretting, and instead advises us to "wait patiently" for the Lord (Psalm 37:1, 7–8).
Merely waiting does not sound very spiritual or revolutionary, but it can have a mighty effect. A few years after moving to Fuller Seminary, professor Lewis Smedes fell into a deep depression that "made a hash of my relationship with God, and pushed me into a dark night of the soul. My experience was, from start to finish...a hellish sense that God had abandoned me." He was alienated from his colleagues, his family, his own self, and felt like a tremendous hypocrite. "I did not know where God was during this time. I only 'knew' that wherever he was, he was not with me. But I was wrong. He was with me because he was in Doris and Doris was with me. What did she do? She did nothing. Nothing but wait. And wait. And wait. God came back to me on the strength of her power to wait for me. Never before had I known the saving power of waiting."2
Smedes vented his emotions. He embraced his ignorance. He and his wife Doris also waited, and eventually testified how "God came back to me at the very moment that I had reached ground zero in my hopelessness."3
[1] Augustine, Enchiridion, V 16.
[2] Lewis Smedes, My God and I (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 131–132.
[3] Ibid, p. 132.
