Never morning wore to evening, but some heart did break

Alright, I’m going to jump around a bit here, and maybe if we are lucky there will be some kind of conclusion at the end.

I have been thinking about suffering, the depravity of man, and the fallenness of this world a lot lately. If you stop and look around it is hard to avoid these depressing topics. I still can’t get some of the images of the earthquake in Haiti that I have seen in the news out of my head…the mothers sobbing over the pictures of their lost children, the children without parents, and the bulldozer that is literally burying hundreds of unidentified bodies. It is so tragic.

As you can imagine I have also been fixated with the earthquake in Chile. Seeing houses floating out to sea in the town where I spent a weekend retreat, or seeing looters ransacking the one supermarket where I would go to get my peanut butter fix. It is heartbreaking to see the interviews of the people living right on the coast that literally lost all of their earthly possessions, and many of them losing their families.

Three of the last movies I’ve seen [SPOILER ALERT!!!!], Cidade de Deus (City of God), Machuca, and Sin Nombre all showed either the brutal death of children or some sort of utterly depressing circumstance, and gave brutally honest examples of life in this fallen world. By the way, I highly recommend these movies; they are probably some of the best movies I have seen in awhile, and they aren’t just depressing movies… I think there is a lot to be learned from them.
This list could go on and on, but we’ll stop it at that.

I’ve had a hard time (as I think most all humans do) with considering evil in the world. By the grace of God I have not experienced any of these horrific tragedies, but you don’t need to look too far to realize that these kinds of sufferings are very common place in this world. I’m not going to try to give a complete answer to the problem of evil, but I’d like to point out something that Fyodor Doestoevsky illustrates in his book Crime and Punishment. Fyodor Dostoevsky is a master of delving into the depths of human depravity, suffering, and despair, but I also see in his writing a tremendous faith in God, and if I might be so bold to also say, a tremendous faith in the power of Jesus Christ to overcome the depravity and suffering of the world.

The scene I wish to describe to you is a conversation that takes place between Sonia and Raskolnikov. Sonia is a girl that is forced into prostitution to support her family and her drunken father who takes money from her mom and her younger siblings to accommodate his drinking binges. I can’t do the scene justice, so I would highly recommend reading it on your own sometime. But in the scene Raskolnikov has Sonia read the story of Lazarus, and because of the events and the circumstances in the story, it really hit me that the story of Lazarus goes a long way in explaining the problem of evil, or at least in addressing it. Now I realize that I might be reading into the story of Lazarus a little too much, but this thought has stuck with me ever since I read Crime and Punishment. The following is definitely not any kind of Biblical exegesis, rather it is my musings on this powerful passage. The story is taken from John 11:1-45. Sonia reads verses 17 – 45 (she may cut out a few verses). The thing that struck me the most is Mary and Martha’s question to Jesus. They both (at separate times) say, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” I see this as the question of the problem of evil… Sonia saying, “Lord, if you had been here, I would not have to prostitute myself to feed my starving siblings.” It is interesting to see how Jesus responds. I don’t know what to make of this, so maybe some of you could help me out, and I will try to look into this more on my own too. Martha also says to Jesus, “But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” And Jesus replies by saying “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” So I think I can understand this. Jesus is saying that even through all this suffering, even through the death of her brother, the more important thing is that Jesus has power over death. He is the resurrection and the life. Awesome!
Now Jesus responds differently to Mary, but she also approaches him slightly differently.

Mary does not end her statement to Jesus with any statement of her believing that even though her brother has died, whatever Jesus asks from God, God will give him, and Jesus does not explicitly affirm her that he is the resurrection and the life, rather he weeps. Now I have heard very smart, very godly people say that he is weeping because they are not believing in him, they don’t understand who he is, why he came, but I don’t know if it is that simple…(not that that is simple). I mean what was Jesus’ larger response to suffering? He became a human and took on the most suffering imaginable in not only dying on a cross as a completely innocent person, but having the wrath of God poured out on him for the world’s sins. So He can completely sympathize with humanity in any suffering that they encounter. So I just think about his weeping over Lazarus’ death and his weeping over Mary and the other Jew’s response and wonder if this isn’t also an expression of his compassion, sympathy, and empathy for the suffering of humanity. And it’s interesting to see the Jew’s response to his weeping. Some are amazed, “See how he loved them”, and others are skeptical “could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?” Or to put it in another way, “if there is an all-powerful and loving God, then why does evil exists”. They are asking about the problem of evil…. Which I think the answer to the problem of evil is tied up in both of Jesus’ responses. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live…” and Jesus weeping for the pain, the loss, the suffering that is common place in the human race.

And since April is the national poetry month, I will end this altogether too long of a blog post with a few stanzas from one of my favorite poems, “Never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break.”