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"Redemptive Suffering"

August 24, 2003 The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower

I want us to think this morning together about something very, very important for our spiritual lives, and that is the biblical teaching that suffering can be redemptive--that good can be brought out of bad things that happen to us.  I decided I wanted to speak on this with you when I read something in the Wall Street Journal recently.  It was an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal from about a week ago talking about the power outage in New York City, and New York state and, in fact, a great swath of the northeastern part of the United States.  You remember this--it was just a little bit over a week ago.  Power went out and the writer for the Wall Street Journal was struck by the fact that this was a very, very different power outage--or at least the response of New Yorkers, of the citizens of New York City--was very, very different from the last major power outage that they had had which was July 13, 1977. 

At that previous time, back in the seventies, there was rampant looting all over the city.  A thousand fires, most of them started by arsonists, were set, and a great, great damage and destruction of property.  The writer was saying, "Now it's so interesting--now here we are at this later point, 2003" and he gave reasons for why he thought New Yorkers responded en masse as a very different kind of citizenry.  He had several reasons and he sort of specified, you know, we didn't have runaway looting, and pillaging and destruction of property.  We didn't have lots and lots of people going out and starting fires.  What we had instead was New Yorkers going out of their way to help one another.  And he gave four reasons why he thought this was a different power failure.  I want to read his third reason because it's very, very interesting--something worth pondering.

He says, "Third, New Yorkers had experienced"--oh, and by the way, this is Kenneth Jackson.  I should give Kenneth credit here.  Kenneth Jackson said, "New Yorkers had experienced a real disaster on September 11th, 2001 and they knew that a power outage--especially one not caused by terrorists--was not likely to assume epic proportions.  They remembered and had often experienced the random acts of kindness that became so common in lower Manhattan after the attack in 2001."  Then he specifies some of the particular acts of kindness this time, a week-and-a-half ago, and then after that he sums up and he says, "New Yorkers this time around worked for the common good rather than their private gain."

Now, no one would ever want to say or imply that the terrorist attack on 9/11 should have happened because of all of the good that has come out of it.  Nevertheless, we do want to say it was an evil perpetrated against the United States and good has come out of it.  And New Yorkers are able to look at themselves and say, "We don't respond to power outages the way that we used to."  There is a response that keeps the common good in view rather than private whims and wishes. 

Now, that's an example of redemptive suffering.  That's an example of the fact that things that are wrong that come into our experience can be transformed and turned into an occasion to become a different kind of person, to react a different kind of way, so that suffering can have a transformative effect on us.  Now, I want to ask us to look carefully at different things that the Bible says about suffering to allow ourselves to be more alert for watching for ways in your life where the negative that you've experienced can become a positive. 

And I'm going to ask us to begin with Psalm 73.  We're going to look at what the Old Testament has to say about suffering and then we're going to ask, "Now what happens when you add the New Testament into that?"  So, "What does the Old Testament say about suffering?"  "What happens when you add the New Testament onto that?"  And then last of all--and this is going to be really fun--we're going to take a little minute and say, "Now what happens when you take world religions into the picture?"  So Old Testament, New Testament, world religions.  But we're going to start with Psalm 73.

Truly God is good to the upright,

      to those who are pure in heart.

But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled;

      my steps had nearly slipped.

For I was envious of the arrogant;

             I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

For they have no pain;

      their bodies are sound and sleek.

They are not in trouble as others are;

      they are not plagued like other people.

Therefore pride is their necklace;

      violence covers them like a garment.

Their eyes swell out with fatness;

      their hearts overflow with follies.

They scoff and speak with malice;

      loftily they threaten oppression.

They set their mouths against heaven,

      and their tongues range over the earth.

Therefore the people turn and praise them,

      and find no fault in them.

And they say, "How can God know? 

      Is there knowledge in the Most High?"

Such are the wicked;

      always at ease they increase in riches.

All in vain I have kept my heart clean

      and washed my hands in innocence.

For all day long I have been plagued,

      and am punished every morning.

If I had said, "I will talk on in this way,"

      I would have been untrue to the circle of your children.

But when I thought how to understand this,

      it seemed to me a wearisome task

until I went into the sanctuary of God;

      then I perceived their end.

Truly you set them in slippery places;

      you make them fall to ruin.

How they are destroyed in a moment,

      swept away literally by terrors!

They are like a dream when one awakes;

      on awaking, you despise their phantoms.

When my soul was embittered,

      when I was pricked in heart,

I was stupid and ignorant;

      I was like a brute beast towards you.

Nevertheless, I am continually with you;

      you hold my right hand.

You guide me with your counsel,

      and afterward, you will receive me with honor.

Whom have I in heaven, but you?

      And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.

My flesh and my heart may fail,

      but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Indeed those who are far from you will perish;

      you put an end to those who are false to you.

But for me it is good to be near God;

      I have made the Lord God my refuge to tell of all your works.

Now this is a fascinating piece of Scripture.  It's an inspired piece of the book of Psalms.  And we don't want to say that it is any less inspired than anyplace else, but nevertheless, we are going to discover that there are things in the Old Testament that are not resolved within the Old Testament perspective and that require an entirely different resolution that only the New Testament can provide.  And that doesn't mean that this is not an inspired part of the Word of God.  It just means that the Old Testament raises certain issues that it can't settle.  That the Old Testament asks certain questions that it doesn't have the answer for. 

And here--the question of suffering--there's really not very much of an idea that suffering in this life can be transformed, can be turned to good.  Why not?  Well, because our author is sort of checking out the people around him and he sees people that are not afflicted like he is, that don't run into tough times like he does.  He sees people that just seem to be living on easy street and he calls them "arrogant."  And he calls them "wicked."  And he says, you know, "The wicked, the arrogant--they're proud because they never suffer.  They never have hard times come their way.  What about the people around them?  Well, the people around them applaud them, praise them, find no fault in them, and say, 'Well, God doesn't know.' "

So he's wrestling with this and growing bitter about the fact that when he looks at his own condition compared with others, it doesn't look fair.  It looks like there are proud and arrogant people that are better off.  They don't morally deserve to be better off, and yet they are.  He says, "You know, I was getting really upset about this until I entered the sanctuary of God and I realized God's going to get them!  It hasn't happened yet, but that's OK.  It doesn't matter because some day God is going to get them.  Some day God is going to set things right and all of those that were on easy street, well, in the next life there is going to be retribution.  There's going to be recompense.  There's going to be justice.  You know, things are going to be set right." 

Now, not the entire Old Covenant record reflects this.  And, in fact, it's not entirely true how he views the fact that God is going to get the wicked.  I tend to read this as if he's really kind of glad.  "You know, I'm really kind of glad that the people that are not suffering in this life--they're going to get it someday!"  Now, I might be wrong.  He might be unhappy with that, but at the very least we need to say it is not clearly spelled out that he is upset about justice in the afterlife befalling those that he thinks have had too easy a time of it in this life.  Can we agree it's really not clear that he's extremely unhappy about this dispensation of justice in the afterlife?

Well, what happens when we bring Jesus Christ into the picture?  Because this is part of the Word of God to us, and yet when we bring the New Testament perspective into correspondence with this, you know, we see something entirely different because the best that the Psalmist at this point can hope for is that after this life, things will be set right.  Well, what the New Testament teaches us is, "No, God is not making us wait until a next life sometime after history is over.  But instead, God entered into this life in the Person of His Son Jesus Christ, entered fully, and that Son Jesus Christ suffered on the cross for us--suffered on the cross in our place, took the sufferings of this life onto Himself.  And so suffering is dealt with not in heaven after we die, but no--suffering is dealt with on the plane of this life, on the plane of history, on the plane of present-day experience."

Now, because God, as it turns out, is more powerful than the sufferings of this life, when the sufferings of this life come onto Jesus on the cross, He absorbs them and transforms them  And all of us who are followers of Jesus now have reason to see that good can come out of bad.  Jesus died, was buried, but rose again.  And in that affliction that He underwent and in His triumph over that affliction, our sins were all washed away, were all set aside, were all canceled.  That gives Christians the eyes to sort of look and see if it isn't the case that God can transform other moments of suffering that take place in this life. 

Now, if we did not have the perspective that Jesus on the cross adds to us--if we didn't have that--we would be sort of left where the Psalmist is.  We'd sort of be, "OK, do I want to be bitter, bummed out, in a bad mood all the time?"  Or do I kind of want to gloat:  "They're going to get it!"  Well, take your pick.  Do you want to be unhappy in a bad way, or do you want to be happy in a bad way?  There really isn't--you know, if sufferings of this life are not transformed by God in this life, then there really aren't any other options.  You can be unhappy in a bad way or you can be gleefully happy about the punishment that the bad are going to receive. 

But one of the things that Jesus on the cross releases in us is an ability to look and see that God is in the business of transforming things in this life.  God is in the business of bringing good out of bad in this life so that we can hear about New Yorkers at the present time really acting like an entirely different citizenry than has previously been the case. 

You say, "Now, why would that be?"  Why would that be?  Well, it's because you know, a power outage once everybody is sure this is not terrorist-induced, everyone goes, "Hey, we lost the electricity.  Big deal.  That's not that important." 

You know, when you and I encounter the power failures and the miniature disasters in this life, when we run into those and we haven't had--and forgive me for putting it this way--but when we haven't had (or it's been too long since we had) a major ordeal that we had to go through, then the little irritations come along and we're mad, and we're frustrated, and we honk our horn, and we, you know, swear at people and we behave poorly.  We have what you could call an "RCA."  Rotten Christian Attitude.  And, really, God knows just about the only way to get that RCA out of us is to let us go through something big, something major, so that the little irritations of life thereafter will all be put in perspective and we'll be able to say, "Hey, you know what?  This is no big deal."

Let me tell you, in January of 1994 I had a heart attack.  I was in the hospital.  While I was in the hospital, I had another heart attack.  And at the end of all of that my cardiologist came in and said (and I'll tell you the details some other time), but my cardiologist came in and said, "You really gave us a run for our money," which I wasn't sure what he was saying in technical doctor-language, but I was pretty sure that in technical doctor-language he was saying, "You almost died."  "We almost lost you."  Now, you want to know what?  Since then things that used to bug me don't bug me like they used to.  Things that used to loom huge to me--like, "I can't believe that I got another stoplight!"  You know what I mean?  Now you come up and you go, "Hey.  It's another stoplight.  It's not a heart attack.  Between another stoplight and another heart attack, I'll take another stoplight!"

But, I'll tell you, I mean the change in my attitude is not one that I could have ever engendered in myself.  It's something that God could only have provided for by taking me through something that really led me right up to death's door.  And it's only by the mercy of God that I have lived on after that.

Now, what we're saying is that the first-century Christians found in Jesus Christ a transformative stance toward life that they hadn't found in the Judaism that they were raised in.  That in the New Covenant, there are advantages that are not clearly there in the Old Covenant.  And we can say, "Well, they might be there implicit, but they were not there spelled-out like they were in Jesus Christ."  Which is to say that though Christians have been for 2,000 years--Christians have been unbelievably cruel to Jews, and there's no excuse for that.  We're not talking about the anti-semitism that the Christian church has been guilty of.  But we are saying, you know, we don't want to go in the Christian-persecuting-the-Jews route--we never should have and we don't want to foster that today--nevertheless, we do want to say there are blessings provided in Jesus that the Jews did not experience.  Now then, let's just say that right at the heart of everything that what Christianity provides us with is some kind of a notion of "Jesus is better than Moses."  That the blessings of God made available in Jesus Christ are superior to the blessings that were available under the Old Covenant. 

And we want to get very, very clear in that because I promise you when world religions are brought into the picture at the present time, what from some corners is advanced is the view that no religion can pride itself in being superior to any other religion--that all roads lead to God equally, the Jews have their way, Christians their way, Hindus their way, etc.  I just want to, in closing, call your attention to the fact that that leaves us with no right to say there could be a better attitude toward suffering than we find in Psalm 73.  Do you understand?  We forfeit the ability to say, "The stance that says, 'God's gonna get 'em and I'm really glad' "--we forfeit the right to say that there's a better way to look at sufferings in this life than that.  Do you understand what I'm saying?  What I'm saying is if every religion is equal to every other, then we can't even understand what we have in Jesus Christ because everything that we know about Jesus is couched for us in a framework that says, "God prepared the world through the Old Covenant and then gave in complete measure what all of that preparation was for in Jesus Christ.  And Jesus Christ is our new and better way."

I want to invite you, if you are someone that envies people that don't have it as tough as it seems like you have, if you're someone who sort of puzzled "why do the bad things that happened to you happen to you the way that they do," if you've ever had to wrestle with the issue that our Psalmist is wrestling with, I want to invite you to look again at Jesus Christ.  Look again at Jesus dying on the cross for you.  Remember again that that ultimate problem of suffering is not one that God sort of reserves the resolution for to some point after this life.  But, no, God in Jesus brought the answer right into this realm.  He did it in Jesus.  And with anything and everything that happens to us, He can do it to us.  He did it to me with my heart attack.  He can do it with you.

Let's pray.  Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you, Lord, for your Word which is our light in darkness.  Lord, we thank you for those places where we see questions being raised in various sharp ways.  And we thank you, Lord, that for every one of those, you have an answer.  And the answer is Jesus.  Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower

Interim Pastor

Faith Presbyterian Church

Minnetonka, Minnesota

[Transcribed from an audiotape of the worship service on August 24, 2003.]