re: Pain and Suffering

[samawat]

Last night I was watching a World War 2 documentary about the Nuremburg trials. I was pretty horrified seeing--though not for the first time--the pictures of the starving prisoners in the Nazzi camps. The absolutely atrocious suffering of the political and religious prisoners really saddened me, but it also brought to mind the answer to suffering that we have.

It doesn't matter if you're talking about Jewish/gypsy/ oppositionists people in the Holocaust who suffered the violent torment of their imprisonment or about children who became orphans in the tsunamis, or Palestinians who lost family members in Israeli attacks, or Americans who lost someone in the WTC in 2001 attacks. The answering for pain and suffering--particularly physical pain--is the same: it's Jesus, the God-become-man who experienced all kinds of pain right along with his human creation when he came to earth.

When I was watching the show last night I kept asking myself where is the answer to this cruel pain? And then I remembered Jesus, who experienced the physical pain of being nailed to the cross, pain in his hands and his feet, and died of suffocation. He experienced pain right along with the naked and starving Jewish woman who was gasping for air--he went through it with her! He went through the physical pain of the cross so that he could experience the suffering of the Iraqi prisoners who had their fingernails ripped out by Saddam Hussein and their bodies burned with cigarette butts. He did it so that he could go through the loneliness and agony of being away from his father in heaven and in a place he didn't belong with people he didn't belong with so that he could identify with us.

Without God suffering and dying, there is no answer for suffering and death: it is a cruel and meaningless torment that God would be distant and removed from. He not only watches from heaven and cries when we hurt--physically and emotionally--he actually suffered the humiliation, injustice, and outright blasphemy of lowering himself to the level of a fragile human body, then letting us--his own creation--slap at him and spit at him: he did it all to identify with our hurt.

He is the answer to pain and suffering, and the only answer. God has suffered with you, and he longs to end the war between us and him. He did it by becoming the One and Only sacrifice of atonement for our wickedness, evil, and perversion.

He is "King, God, and Sacrifice" to quote the Christmas song.