The cross or the Christ on it?
There’s so much sin and pain and loss in the world that in his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner insisted there was only one question really worth talking about and that was why bad things happened to good people. I don’t think that’s correct but I certainly understand why he’d say such a thing. The issue of "undeserved suffering" is what atheists, agnostics and sceptics have been hammering on since they came into being. Of course, long before these arrived, believers were going on about the same issue (glance at the psalmists and prophets).
How can there be a good God with so much bad in the world? Hmmm. How can there be no God with Jesus Christ in the world? Yes, but what if there is a God and he is spiteful and cruel—like Zeus or one of these other mythical beings? You mean a God that created someone better than himself—Jesus Christ? Wouldn’t that be a turn up for the books—the creature is better than the Creator? I’m not offering Jesus Christ as a purely rational argument that God is and that he is good, but forty years ago Antony Flew said that the religious question wouldn’t be worth bothering with if it were not for "that one life lived" [Jesus]. We’ve always believed the same thing—haven’t we? Jesus Christ is not the conclusion of a syllogism; he isn’t a rational argument or a tradition. He is an historical reality, an experience and, simply by virtue of his being, he is the most profound reason possible for believing that this life is worth living.
His very presence in the world bathed our human existence with meaning and hope. From "the land of the Trinity" he journeyed and became one of us. Not merely like us but one of us. Taking his place in the stream of human life with all its pain and all its sin, he enabled and continues to enable us to believe that the whole Story of the world is not its sin and despair and its pain. His sinless, cheerful and assured life of hope says that our trust, though coupled with our many questions, is well grounded—"Believe in God, believe also in me." (Taking the verbs in John 14:1 to be imperatives—continue to believe.) But if people wish to profess that their unbelieving and unyielding despair rises out of their brilliance and rationality they need to explain Jesus Christ. Someone came into our world 2,000 years ago and since then we can’t look at a tree (or anything else, including suffering) without thinking of him (Chesterton).
The poets and all that have a heart understand the point I’m making. Charlie Chaplin wrote a beautiful song extolling human love. He called it, Love This is my Song. One of the lines in it says, "The world cannot be wrong if in this world there’s you." Chaplin knew what the pain of the world was but he also had an abiding sense that along with wrong and loss there was love and that gave meaning to a world we would have scrapped if it had been loveless.
So looking at the cross reminds us of the world’s great wrong but looking at the One on the cross reminds us of something else.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.