The mystery of suffering

Participants to the Third International Conference in the U.K. 2007

Text of seminar given at the Int. Conference in Hayes Christian Conference Centre, Swanwick, United Kingdom at Thursday, June 7 2007

This lecture was also given at the conference in October 2006, Lake Junaluska, Region III .

The mystery of suffering

in the life of the believer

drs Robert van Essen, Warden

Introducing myself

Coming from a non-Christian background, my mother divorced when I was five years old. In the poor after-war days in the Netherlands, she had to earn a living for three young children as a daily woman cleaning houses and offices. A girl next door took me to the Bible Club Movement at Wednesday-afternoon and the two female evangelists became my spiritual mothers in the Lord. In the houseboat in an Amsterdam canal I learned about Jesus, loved to sing and found friends. I left when my mother (who remarried when I was eleven) moved to Eindhoven. Sixteen years old I worked as a clerk at an office. Then, seventeen years old, I became a male-nurse in a Psychiatric hospital. In those years I read ‘The cross and the switchblade’ (David Wilkerson) and knew I wanted to have a ministry among drug addicts. During my training in the hospital I wanted to learn more about the relationship between faith and medical care. One of the reasons was that I got to know a quite radical Pentecostal church, where was taught that demon possession was the cause of every illness. Forty one years ago a friend took me at Pentecost to a healing service of the Order of St. Luke and the next year I became a member. I was happy to find a more balanced and sacramental view on faith and wholeness there. After becoming a qualified nurse I married and started to work in a clinic for alcoholics and drug addicts. After two years I was asked to be in charge of an evangelical/Pentecostal Centre where drug addicts and alcoholics were helped to be released and rehabilitated. During those years I followed a theological course of the Dutch Reformed Church, so that I received permission to preach and teach on deliverance and healing. In 1973 till 1977 I was secretary of the Order of St. Luke. In 1977 I became a full time pastor and in 1980 I was asked to become the Chaplain of the OSL.

I have been teaching at a Bible College (1973 - 1984) for about ten years and at present teach at two theological courses for lay people. After ministering the church in Amsterdam for 16 years, I was called to Utrecht where I ministered for nine years. Since 2001 I am ministering a church in The Hague (part time). Besides that I am the chairman of an ecumenical working group ‘Church and Healing’. For about twenty years I am an editor of an evangelical theological quarterly, in which I write about healing and mission. Eleven years ago I wrote my thesis about ‘Healing for the city’ at the Free University in Amsterdam and received my doctorandus (master) degree in missiology.

Healing ministry in the Netherlands

‘Spiritual healing’ or ‘faith healing’ was considered a sectarian phenomenon in the traditional, Calvinistic and liberal churches until the 1960ties. In the fifties Herman Zaiss (faith healer from Germany) came with his message of healing to Amsterdam and T.L. Osborn preached in The Hague and Groningen. In the mainline churches pastors and theologians began to realize that the churches were confronted with an ‘outstanding account’ (F. Boerwinkel) of the church. In 1951 Mrs. E. Richards (U.K.) preached in one of the churches of the Hague and several reformed local pastors participated in the laying on of hands.

In 1946 a healing home - De Hezenberg - was founded by the rev. W.A. Plug who was inspired by the ministry of rev. J.C. Blumhardt (1805-1880) and the Möttlingen ministry in Germany. The first International Conference on healing was held there in 1953 and - in the presence of the rev. J.G. Banks - the Dutch Order of St. Luke was founded here.

Looking at the pioneers of the churches ministry of healing in the Netherlands you find that they approach God’s healing work from different angles:

The rev. Pieter van Leeuwen (1910- 1997) strongly argued that we have to obey the biblical mandate: ‘Heal the sick’! He considers this on a par with the work of the medical doctor and the nurse. Dr. P.A. Elderenbosch provides a strong liturgical and spiritual accent, when he pleads to provide spiritual retreats and prayer concerts for prospective ministers and a thorough teaching in liturgy and sacramental life. A special inheritance we thank to the rev. W.A. Plug, who was touched by ‘Jesus ist Sieger’ (Jesus is Victor) of Blumhardt and desired to see the manifestation of Christ’s resurrection power.

A very important contribution was given by the late rev. dr. Karel Kraan (1912-1982), who wrote his doctoral thesis in 1953 about ‘A Christian confrontation with Marx, Lenin and Stalin’. His involvement with the healing ministry dates back to his years in London (1949-1956) where he worked as a pastor and ‘discovered’ the healing ministry. As a chaplain of the Order of St. Luke he wrote standard works on healing, in which he advocated that God wants to heal the whole social order.

After the merger in 2004 of the Dutch Reformed, the Reformed - and the Evangelical Lutheran Churches, now known as the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, the Church published a new Service book. This was a historic occurrence, for under the headline ‘Blessings’ you find a liturgy for ‘the blessing and anointment of the sick’. As the Warden of the OSL I was asked to comment and contribute to this liturgy. So since 1953 it took more than fifty years to realize a goal of the Dutch OSL: bringing back the ministry of healing in the liturgy the church. Now we have to work and pray that it may become part of the life of the church, for there is still much ignorance and resistance among pastors and elders. The pioneer work of Pieter van Leeuwen (1) en Karel Kraan did not influence the academic theological reflection, but stayed for years in a narrow charismatic stream. About ten years ago we noticed a greater openness for the ministry of healing in the historic churches. I think there are three factors that caused this: 1. After the decades of horizontal theology there was a new interest for spirituality. 2. In practical theology there came a new consciousness for the role and function of rituals and symbols in pastoral and liturgical settings. 3. The secularization forced the leadership to look for new ways to reach the heart and minds of the people.

Learning from the past

In the early years of the introduction of the healing ministry harm was done by extreme statements of Zaiss, Osborn and Pentecostal brothers. Christians don’t need to be ill and if the patient was not healed, he did not have enough faith. In the churches’ ministry of healing and later on in the Pentecostal Movement (2),leaders took distance from this view. We should also admit that within the ministry of healing there is a tendency to be triumphant and we do not consider seriously enough the question why people are not healed. Tom Smail, a theologian who has great merit in reflection on charismatic theology, wrote: ‘Suffering en failure to heal are always a great problem for the Pentecostal model, which is exposed to constant temptation to a glib triumphalism that arouses in people expectations which it is only sometimes able to fulfill, with the sad result that many people are left in deep guilt because they did not have enough faith to be healed..’ (3)

In recent years in the Netherlands some evangelists with a ministry of healing, make me feel unhappy, for there is ample attention for the man/woman who is not delivered from suffering. I think of the chronic sick people, the lifelong handicapped or psychic traumatized. It is true, Jesus heals.... but most people we minister to shall have to learn that Christians do not receive a preferential treatment when it concerns miracles. In this dispensation wrestling with God really can be a token of his healing presence.

He did not create the world a chaos

It is the unanimous witness of Scripture that God’s intention for us is life in its fullness.

Suffering and life are not synonymous in Scripture, although this is a fact in the experience of many people. We should not deny that suffering is an every day experience for many.

We all know people in our neighborhood who are met with accident after accident. It seems that they are born for disaster. Words of comfort are being struck dumb in your mouth. ‘After black clouds clear weather’, just is not true then. After the clouds came thunderstorm, hail and after the hail a stroke of lightning. The tsunami (Christmas 2004) made us realize with great force how absurd reality is. A church in Sri Lanka, filled to capacity with people celebrating Christ’s coming to this world, was washed away. In the light of this you could fall for the temptation never again to speak one word about prayer and answers to prayer. And yet...yet we believe that this is not the world God intended. ‘He did not create it a chaos, he formed it to be inhabited’, says the prophet (Is. 45,18). The same word ‘tohu’ from Genesis 1, 2. In de Jewish-Christian view suffering does not belong to God’s good creation. From the perspective of creation and origin you must admit that suffering exists, but it exists as an unanswered question! (4) God intends the healed, freed existence of his creation: ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’(John10, 10) The powers of chaos don’t speak the final word: we design warning systems for a seaquake, build more stable houses, nurse the sick, help orphans and...pray that God may establish the work of our hands. This because we have the deep conviction that the Kingdom of God is ‘creation healed’. (5).

Moltmann writes in his most recent book: ‘Miraculous healings often occurred in the antique world. Therefore the healings of Jesus have been interpreted in the light of antique notions of the ‘divine man’ and by the standard of modern quack doctors. According to New Testament interpretations however we should view them in a different perspective: they belong to the coming of God’s Kingdom and his righteousness. When the eternal and living God comes to His creatures, the powers of perdition have to give ground. The Kingdom of the living God expels the bacteria of death and multiplies the germs of life. The Kingdom of God, present in the person of Jesus, does not only bring salvation in a religious meaning, but in a holistic way. It is experienced it becoming whole physically and spiritually. We experience the justifying righteousness of God bodily. (6)

You can’t explain away suffering

It is a theological mortal sin to try to find an explanation for the origin van evil and suffering. With a variation to Karl Marx: The theologians have explained reality, but God wants to heal her. Orthodox Christians too easily hark back to ‘the Fall’ and all suffering and the ‘broken condition of creation’ are carried back to Adam’s trespass. The temptation by the snake is explained back to a fall in the angelic world. In this myth-historic construction evil is ‘explained’ and in this way man seems to be more a victim than a wrong-doer. (If Adam had not....., if God had created angels who could not revolt against Him...). That’s my problem with the sympathetic book of Ron Dunn - ‘Will God heal me?’ - that side-steps the most difficult questions by referring to God’s sovereignty and the fall of man. (7)

In the Old Testament there is no philosophical speculation about the origin of evil. In numerous places in Scripture people suffer because others seek to kill them. It is the ‘enemy’ who has a down on you, who ransacking invades your country and burns your crop. It is the one who talks evil about you and swears falsely against you. People who take their starting point for every situation in ‘original sin’, it may be shocking that the believer in the Old Testament pleads his innocence (Job 16,17; 34,6; Ps. 73,13). And again and again the men and women of prayer find their refuge in God and call on the Eternal against the ones who threaten to affect their lives. For God is the ‘Helper’ (Ps. 46,5) of people in distress.

Broadly outlined we find in the Psalms, Prophets and in Job - where people cry out from distress and suffering - that God takes sides with the ones who are praying for help. Even the man who knows that he has to thank himself for his need - for instance the penitent psalm 51 of David - cries to God because he knows (trusts, has faith) that in the end God will not fail him. God is a merciful God and his mercy - even if the individual sufferer has sinned - is always greater than our sins. The deep keynote of Scripture is that the specific gravity of grace is greater than that of sin!

Speaking about sin brings me to the theologian Dick Stap - he is chronic sick - who recently wrote an interesting book about the ‘spirituality of not getting well again’ (8). He protests against the connection of sin and sickness, for it places the chronic/invalid patient in a position where he is vulnerable the rest of his life. If sickness is sin, and all humanity has fallen into sin because of the fall in paradise, why is it only a minority that has to bear the curse of sin? (9) A theology from the viewpoint of healing means that as a patient I exist in a broken spirituality. The question is, how can a sick person see his life and existence of value, against all odds. Therefore he dares to write, that the wish to become well again, can become a sin. For it obstructs me of realizing my present state: I have to deal realistically with the fact that I have to live with my handicap. When I wait endlessly for a miracle, precious time goes by and I don’t utilize it. Who has no horse, may ride on a staff. Every day I must recognize who I have become mentally and physically in the process of my illness. And with this acquired insight I exist before God’s countenance in the venture of my own dignity. (10)For a person suffering incurable sickness, it is liberating to understand this sickness as a form of not-knowing. It is knowing yourself in God’s hand and the coming true of the promise of Job 19, 26, 27 who sang: ‘After my skin is destroyed, then in my flesh shall I see God, Whom I, even I, shall see on my side. My eyes shall see, and not as a stranger.’(11)

The question ‘why?’

Believers and non-believers alike are asking the question why just he should be met by a disaster or illness. In the world of the Old Testament - in Israel and outside - suffering is experienced as a rupture(12) in the relationship between God and man. In times of suffering people ask: ’What has happened? Have I committed a wrong?’ This means that in our hearts is a deeply rooted surmise that suffering does not belong to the purpose of life. There is a notion that God wants the good for his people. When you experience suffering and pain, you have obviously deserved it. ‘What have I done wrong?’

This scheme of punishment and reward we find elaborate in the book of Proverbs. People experience/look for a pattern in life according which things are honestly allotted. And one must say that sometimes we feel it works that way! When we obey the golden rule and we are kind for our fellow-men, the good is called up. While doing evil can bring about a spiral of evil.

So in Proverbs we hear wisdom of life - wisdom gained by life experience (in Hebrew ‘chokma’).

When things are allotted this way, then we have the feeling that the world is like it should be. That’s also the way of thinking of the friends of Job. ‘If they hearken and serve him, they complete their days in prosperity, and their years in pleasantness.’ (Job 36:11).

In his standard work ‘Healing and Christianity’ Morton Kelsey terms this the ‘Deuteronomic’ view on sickness and health. (13)

We find this in terse wordings in Deut. 32, 39 ‘See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand’. In Scripture we read some well known stories with this theme. We may think of the Lord striking Egypt with plagues that hit men and cattle. We also read about Miriam who was made leprous by the Lord (Num. 12,10) In a Dutch Calvinistic creed we find similar words when speaking about God’s providence: ‘The almighty and everywhere present power of God; (a) whereby, as it were by his hand, he upholds and governs heaven, earth, and all creatures; so that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea, and all things come, not by chance, but by his fatherly hand. ‘Health and sickness, riches and poverty come by his fatherly hand’.

Take note that God, in this Calvinistic creed, is not characterized as an arbitrary tyrant. Sickness is ‘judgement’ here and healing has to be obtained in the way of conversion to God. Did not He say: ‘If you will diligently hearken to the voice of the LORD your God, and do that which is right in his eyes, and give heed to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases upon you which I put upon the Egyptians; for I am the LORD, your healer.’(Ex. 15, 26). Healing has to be searched for in the way of repentance and turning to God. Sin causes sickness.

An appeal to God

As long as adulterers get venereal diseases and smokers lung cancer, most people are not upset. We only find it difficult when fate is dishonest: never smoked and yet lung cancer, HIV infected after a chaste life! Two decades ago rabbi Kushner’s (1935) book ‘When bad things happen to good people’ was amazingly popular among Christians in the Netherlands. Apparently is does bother us less when bad things happen to bad people. Bad things happening to good people, that’s unfair. As early as in the Old Testament world it appeared too simple to look at life from the cause and effect perspective. Evildoers are often prosperous. Their eyes swell out with fatness, their hearts overflow with follies. (See Ps. 73). And at the same time the righteous dies before his time and during his life he is hit by hunger, sickness and crop failure. Is this way the ‘order’ we expect to be present in this world, is cruelly broken. In the book of Job we find the strongest protest against this state of affairs. In the prophets the questions concerning suffering are explored more deeply. Kelsey sees next to the ‘deutoronomic’ line the ‘prophetic’ one. (14)

The prophets emphasize that God wants ‘shalom’: the healing of men and world. I refer to the history of Elia, who brings back from the dead the son of the widow of Zarephat. Elisha does the same to the son of the Shunammitte. Nowhere is any suggestion that the death of the boys was a punishment from God. But the prophets cry to Him in great faith that He is stronger than death. In a sense they say: ‘This is not reality as it should be!’ In both situations they appeal to God and after that, stretching out over the boy, they share their body heat and breath. In these stories we have a foreshadowing of the way in which Jesus revolts against disease and death. We also have the beautiful story of Naämans healing. His Jewish slave says that her master should not be leprous, for there is a prophet in Israel!

Kelsey remarks that the book of Job is a protest against the Deuteronomic view on the genesis of suffering and sickness. (15) I should like to shade that by stating that the writer does not protest against the testimony that life and death are in the hand of God, but he opposes the casuistry that is derived from that testimony. ‘You are sick, so God punishes you’. ‘You have been born blind, so your elders must have sinned.’ Jesus rejects these simplistic judgments. He speaks and acts in the prophetic line that lights up in Isaiah when he proclaims the year of jubilee: the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the lame shall leap like a deer. For Jesus is the Sotèr, the Savior who heals (16)

Sharing in God’s suffering

Apart from suffering caused by sickness and death, we read in the prophets about suffering for the sake of the NAME of God. Sometimes the suffering of believers - I think of Jeremiah and Isaiah - is in it’s deepest sense the suffering of God. This man is suffering and in his suffering God suffers.

When Jeremiah suffers because of Israel’s unwillingness to repent, God is suffering. The deepest expression of God’s suffering is revealed in Isaiah’s ‘songs of the servant of the Lord’.

It is not only the suffering of an individual here, for in Isaiah the ‘Servant of the Lord’ is first of all the whole people of Israel. The suffering of the people as ‘God’s servant’ is God suffering.

Israel suffers because of his mission to be God’s servant and in that suffering and the confrontation with enmity, the prophet experiences that the people is the vicar of God and suffers on behalf of Him. ‘Yes, for your sake we are killed all day long. We are regarded as sheep for the slaughter’ (Ps. 44,22). The enmity against God, the resistance against His will, all falls on His people. See Ps. 69,7 ‘Because for your sake, I have borne reproach. Shame has covered my face.‘ Within the ministry of healing several scholars have put forward that ‘suffering’ in the New Testament refers to the imitation of Christ and should not be seen as suffering from sickness. (17)

Does suffering purify the believer?

Few shall want to deny that suffering may indeed have a purifying result. Sometimes I hear people say that, retrospectively, they are thankful for the tribulations they had to endure. Without that suffering you had not grown as a human being and your faith was not strengthened. It is with reason that the apostle Paul writes: “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him’. But the apostle does not say that Gód works everything - He works in everything. Despite these consolation, I think it is too fast and to merciless - and too pigheaded - to embrace the evil that God did not want - the ‘tohoe’ that was rejected by God - as meaningful and the will of God.

I think that Job was right when he refused to agree with his friends who had placed suffering in their theodicy (advocates of God). Surely, we know that suffering can purify, but I also know people who lost their faith in suffering. And we really jump to conclusions when we state that such a person was not a ‘genuine’ believer. Suffering can purify, but it can also take away the last sense of meaning. Much suffering is experienced as non-sense. When you are healthy, you go to your job with a functioning body, enjoy the sunshine, have a chat with people you meet. Things make sense. But a bedridden chronically sufferer waits for his nurse. He is dependant and wonders if he can have extra morphine against the pain. Struck by suffering it’s difficult to make ‘sense’ of things. You have to discover it for your individual situation and the sunshine outside probably does not help. If life has become a whirlpool of pain and confusion, how can you maintain that suffering purifies? Does sickness make sense, does it have a meaning?

Therefore we return for a moment to the book of Job. It is a cry of anger, a sharp complaint against the breaking of the divine order. But it’s more. For the much reviled friends of Job verbalize all the views about suffering that are present in the Old Testament. From ‘The evils we bring on ourselves are the hardest to bear’ to ‘what do you think you are that you pretend to have knowledge of God’s secret plans’. Despite the negative comments about these friends, there still are many comforters who think that their theology provides all the answers for people in need. The remarkable fact is that Job, just when he is angry and protesting, does not abandon God. ‘You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has’, says the Lord at the end of the book. Imagine! Job cursing the day he was born, Job persistently upholding his innocence - not an attitude that we should traditionally qualify ‘Christian’ or ‘saintly’. But the Lord says ‘he has spoken of me what is right’(Job 42,8). Job clung to the revelation that God is a righteous God!

Living without answers

Apart from the distinction that Kelsey makes between the Deuteronomic and the prophetic view on suffering, there is the peculiar approach in the book of the Preacher (Hebr. Kohelet). This strange, unorthodox scripture that luckily was accepted as holy writ. In this book we meet a man who on the one side confesses that there is a divine order in everything (chapter 3), but at the same time he says that mankind has not received the grace to discover this order. It is however a solemn comfort that we may know that the broken fragments of our life, joy and sorrow, despair en hope, sickness and health, are hold together by Him. In all the separate ‘incidents’ of life we may not be able to discover any ‘sense’. (18) But God encompasses our existence and is present in and behind all that is broken as the Present-one who does not allow that we fall. To quote Henri Nouwen: ‘To those with serious struggles and burning questions, I want to reach out with compassion and say: ‘You seek answers to what cannot fully be known. I don’t know either, but I will help you search. I offer no solutions, no final answers. I am as weak and limited as you are. But we are not alone. Where there is charity and love, God is there. Together, we form community. Together we continue the spiritual search’ (19).

‘God seeks again that which is passed away’ (Ec. 3, 15)- those things that seemed non-sense and painful memory. He takes it up again and integrates it. The Preacher does not want us to make the fragments a meaningful whole, but the Spirit helps us to notice the grace of God’s presence in the broken fragments. Pragmatically the Preacher advises us to accept that we cannot see or know anything of God’s work. With that limitation however we should enjoy life: ‘oil on your head, with the wife given to you.’ ‘Life is full of meaning’, says the Preacher, ‘and as we are not able to fathom the deepest sense, we should draw happiness from the gifts of life and joy’. ‘Fortune is like glass’ - once broken the Preacher says that the fragments point us to the original, unbroken life. It is wisdom not to despise the happiness in the broken fragments.

Covenant partners for life!

In the sixties of the last century a theology emerged, influenced by Bonhoeffer’s letters

from prison, that God is suffering in and with man. This thought appeared to be a consolation to many and has biblical roots. In Exodus God reveals himself to Moses in a burning bush as the ‘I shall be with you’ (Ex. 3,2-14). According to a rabbinical interpretation speaking from the bush means: ‘Don’t you know that I live in misery, like the Israelites who live in misery? Learn from the spot from where I speak to you’. Between God and the suffering man/woman is no distance: He is all compassion. ‘In all their affliction he was afflicted’ (Is. 63,9). J.C. Blumhardt

(1805-1880), pastor in Möttlingen, was used in a special way by God in the ministry of healing and deliverance. The question however why people stay sick haunted him. He attributed it to the fact that mankind partakes in the groaning of the suffering creation. ‘Where people are ill, they represent the Savior who still bears our sicknesses’, he said (20).

The suffering human embodies as it where the liberating solidarity of Christ with the groaning creation. Similar thoughts we find in the work of the Japanese theologian K. Kitamori. In 1946 he wrote, after the nuclear bombs on Japan, his book: Theology of the pain of God. In 1966, at the height of the Bonhoeffer reception, it was translated into English. According to Kitamori pain belongs to God’s being. Our pain is symbol of our solidarity between God and man. God forgiving sin means pain. If there is forgiveness in God, so there is pain, he says. Where people suffer there is the pain of forgiven sin having become immanent. The more forgiveness, the more pain (21), he says. There has been criticism of his view that pain belongs to God’s being, for the consequence of that would be that suffering has no end and can never be conquered. This criticism has a point, as we should guard against a mysticism of suffering (22). Surely, Jesus is with us in our suffering. The question is if He is there just as an impotent victim. From the classic teaching about God’s attributes, this ‘impotence’ is the Achilles tendon of such an approach. Christians who grapple with the superior forces of evil, find it difficult to abandon the dogma of God’s ‘omnipotence’. ‘Why should you still pray or have faith in the coming of God’s Kingdom if the Eternal is not in control?’. I understand this, but the problem here is the anthropomorphism in thinking about God. We see Him as ‘someone’ who is continually busy in deciding where to intervene and where not. ‘Sometimes he does not intervene, for He respects our human freedom, sometimes he does intervene to fulfill his plan of redemption’ (23). His eschatological ‘plan’ conflicts in this view with the present need of His children. And we may ask here how biblical it is if salvation ignores our world of suffering and does not transform it? Sometimes God acts and sometimes he does not: thinking this way about God excites real questions about God’s goodness.

When Moltmann speaks about God’s suffering he does not accentuate His impotency. He is concerned about the nature of his power as suffering love, instead of irresistible causality (24).

It’s exactly the cross of Christ that reveals that God’s ‘omnipotence’ can not mean unlimited power. God’s power is an ‘attribute’ of His love. It’s the power of God that He can humiliate Himself and this weakness appears to be a power to liberate. He rejects Dorothee Sölle’s view about God’s weakness, which he calls a humanist interpretation, in which human beings take God’s place(German: Stellvertretung) in bringing the Kingdom. ‘God himself must help us’, he writes. ‘If, as Bonhoeffer said, God does not help us through his omnipotence but through his powerlessness, not through his untroubled bliss in heaven but through his suffering on earth, then God is still the determining subject of redemption’ (25).

In the time between the Old en New Testament the rabbi’s spoke about the different stages of God’s self-abasement: in creation, in the calling of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the history of Israel, in the exodus and the time of exile (26).

Moltmann dares to speak here of a ‘theologia crucis’ (theology of the cross).

Taking into account the above I don’t think it’s right to maintain a rigorous distinction between suffering for the sake of the gospel and the suffering that is caused by sickness and disasters. As a nurse I had to read from the Bible each day in the dining room. One day Isaiah 53, the song of the suffering servant, had to be read. Dr. Kraan has made clear that this servant probably was a leper. After I read this Scripture a patient asked: ‘Did I hear well that our Lord has been sick too?’ His question made me realize what I just had read and I answered affirmative. Jesus has become our covenant partner in all suffering to conquer it in and with us. ‘When the glory of God itself enters into creation and his Shekinah fills everything and makes everything eternally alive, God’s lordship will be omnipotent and omnipresent’(27) According to the missiologist John V. Taylor creation should not bee seen as a datable event in the past, but he pleads for a more dynamic model of creatio continua(28). Genesis does not tell us that the human drama is a play on the stage called cosmos. Genesis is a confession that we form part of the story of God. The Jews have realized that God, in creating the world and his association with the people of Israel, had made himself vulnerable. To be active in creation signifies that in some measure God limitates himself and becomes vulnerable.(29) Simone Weil wrote: ‘Because He is the Creator, God is not omnipotent. Creation is abdication. But He is omnipotent in this sense that his abdication is voluntarily. He knows the consequence and wants them’ (30). Kraan writes: ‘Creation is liberation of the chaos. According to the story of the six creation days this liberation has just only begun. God wanted to continue the liberation with mankind as covenant partner’ (31).

Wrestling for a healed creation God suffers defeat too and his love is defamed and denied. But He is faithful to what His hands have created! In creation He put potencies of healing, in mutual love given, in the words of Thora which reveal peace and righteousness. Love works miracles when men and women bless one another, love gives ability to bear, vitalizes and tears from the power of death

In reformed tradition the beautiful metaphor was used that we have to ‘embrace’ the Word/promises of God. That reminds me of the custom that on the festival of Simchat Torah - Joy of the Law - in the synagogue the men dance with the Torah scrolls. The fruit of that attitude is endurance, says Jesus. In this life we need all the powers of faith, hope and love. And one should realize how often, even when the word itself is not mentioned, endurance is an indispensable quality in the life of the believer. See the parable of the widow who knocks again and again at the door of the judge crying: ‘vindicate me against my adversary!’

Her endurance in knocking is a metaphor for unceasing prayer. When the Son of Man comes, shall he find this endurance among his children? In Romans 8 the apostle says that we received the Spirit, so that we might pray with the whole groaning creation that God’s righteousness is revealed on earth.

I think that the bible shows us a fruitful way here in the issue of the mystery of suffering. No, there is no explanation yet for the suffering in this world.

The way that God has shown Israel and the followers of Jesus when it comes to the mystery of suffering: are we prepared to stretch forth with our total existence - in prayer, in acts of righteousness - to the future of God? Pannenberg wrote: ‘Only the eschatological consummation in which God will wipe away all tears (Isa. 25:8; Rev. 21:4) can remove all doubts concerning the revelation of the love of God in creation and salvation history even though the love of God has been at work already at each stage in the history of creation.(32).

Speaking about the ‘last days’ in Luke 21 Jesus predicts that terrible things shall happen. But to his disciples He says: ‘by your endurance you will gain your lives’ (vs 19). In my opinion this promise is about our quality of life in the present and the future. The secret of endurance is that we embrace the promises of God. If we hear and do the Word our life will become meaning-full and non-sense is conquered. To say it with the deep word of John the Evangelist: ‘In the beginning was the Word...and in Him was life!’

When God’s Word is heard and done among us, we shall experience life and suffering shall not be able to separate us from God. In the Word we are told who we are and who we shall be! (33).

That’s revelation! And in this way we become part of God’ answer to suffering. In this way the non-sense of suffering and sickness is elevated, without placing it into a neat, new system.(34). That people discern ‘sense’ depends of the answer here and now of God’s children, sick and sound.

Notes:

1. From the fifties till he became emeritus secretary of the Dutch Reformed Council for Church and Healthcare 1910-1997

2. The ‘Vierhoutendeclaration’, in 1981 written by pastors and medical doctors, that stated: ‘God gives strength to endure suffering’

3. Charismatic renewal, page 65

4. Ruard Ganzevoort in ‘Omgaan met verlies’ (coping with bereavement) page 93. He approaches the question of suffering from four perspectives or stories of people’s life: Genesis, rupture, restoration and future

5. Hans Küng, page 231

6. ‘’In het einde ligt het begin’ (In the end is the beginning) .Translation RvE from Dutch version, page 73.

7. ‘We force down on Him our definitions of goodness, justice and honesty. Page 190. ‘Everything that is wrong on earth, is the guilt of mankind.’ Dunn, page 192. (RvE: does he really mean this?

8. ‘Ziek zijn en God’, Lannoo, Tielt. 2005

9. ‘Ziek zijn en God, Lannoo, Tielt. 2005

10. Stap, page 17,18

11. Stap, page 165

12. Ganzevoort, page 94 ‘the search for the meaning of suffering....’

13. Kelsey, page 40,41 ‘The same attitude continued to be expressed in the rabbinic schools of later Judaism. In the Mishnah, and also later in the Talmud, we find the conviction that sin is the root cause of illness. Rabbi Jonathan, for one, is quoted as saying: ‘Plague comes for seven sins, for bloodshed, perjury, unchastety, pride, embezzlement, pitilessness and slander’ (Babylonian Talmud, ‘Arakin 16a).

14. Kelsey, page 42

15. Kelsey, page 44 ‘The great protest against the Deuteronomic theory of sickness and healing is found in the story of Job. One of the main purposes of the book was simply to challenge that theory.’

16. Ganzevoort: page 98 Restoration: ‘with Him we see both the line of creation as well as the line of the redeeming acts and the eschatology in his actions’.

17. P.C. van Leeuwen in ‘Difference between suffering and sickness’, page 45-43 in Inleiding tot de dienst der genezing. Also Morris Maddocks in Twenty questions about healing, page 32 (Dutch edition): ‘In the NT ‘suffering’ does not mean sickness and diseases, but it is the cost of discipleship and the unavoidable persecution wherewith a real follower of ‘The Way’ shall be confronted’. The systematic theologian A.van Egmond (Free University, Amsterdam) says in Heil, heling en gezondheid, blz. 52: ‘the word ‘suffer’ is almost exclusively used for suffering that has to do with following Christ, with the Kingdom or with righteousness. Bonhoeffer emphasized this strongly in his Nachfolge (The Cost of Discipleship).’

18. Suffering does not have a meaning. It does not have a sense given in advance. It’s the mystery of what should not be there’. A. v. Egmond, page 54

19. Spiritual Direction, page 11

20. Schreuder, page 50

21. From the Lectures of Jerry Gort at Free University, Amsterdam

22. Simone Weil is in danger of making suffering something to long for when she writes: ‘The greatness of Christianity is in the fact that it’s not a supernatural medicine, but that it looks for a supernatural use of suffering. Herman Berger, page. 81

23. Dunn, page 192,193

24. Moltmann, 1972. Page 238 ‘God is not only outside this world, He is within this world too, He is not just God, but He is man too, He is not power, authority and law, but He is the event of suffering, liberating love’

25. Moltmann in ‘God for a secular society’, page 184

26. (Moltmann, 1972 page 260. ‘God had made His dwelling amidst the people of Israel and that’s why He suffers with the people, goes to prison with them and suffers the tortures of the martyrs. In His Sjechina the Holy One shares in the suffering of Israel and in Israel’s redemption.’)

27. Moltmann, in ‘God for a secular society’, page 185

28. Taylor, page. 182

29. Taylor, page 191

30. Taylor, page 193

31. Kraan I, page 20

32. Pannenberg, W. Systematic theology. Translation of: Systematische Theologie. (3:645). Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans.

33. Ganzevoort, page 99. Future: ‘This tension calls for the second coming. The Christian faith always lives from the future to the present. Essential in faith is hope, conflicting with our experience, the tension between future and present, cross and resurrection’.

34. A glimpse of the final victory over suffering can be seen already in the way people cope with suffering (-) Men and women can give it meaning/sense - without at any moment glorifying it in a masochistic way. And in this way they conquer it - in endurance and hope - already a little’. A. van Egmond, page 54

Literature:

Dunn Ron,Zal God mij genezen?, Gideon, 2004

Ganzevoort Ruard, Omgaan met verlies, Kok Voorhoeve, 1996

Egmond A van, Heil, heling, gezondheid, Meinema, Den Haag 1990

Kelsey Morton T., Healing & Christianity, Harper & Row, New York, 1973

Kraan K.J/Leeuwen P.C., De dienst der genezing, De Tijdstroom, Lochem 1972

Kraan K.J., Genezing en Bevrijding 2, Kok, Kampen 1984

Kung Hans, On being a christian, Collins 1977

Leeuwen P.C., Inleiding tot de dienst der genezing, Boekencentrum 1989

Maddocks Morris, The Christian Healing Ministry, SPCK London 1995

Maddocks Morris, Twintig vragen over genezing, Vuur 1996

Moltmann Jurgen, In het einde ligt het begin. Een kleine leer van de hoop. Boekencentrum, 2006

Moltman Jurgen, God for a secular society, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1999

Nouwen Henri, Spritiual Direction, Harper San Francisco, 2006

Pannenberg, W. Systematic theology, T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1993 (English 1998)

Smail Tom/Walker Andrew/Wright Nigel, Charismatic Renewal, SPCK, London 199

Stap Dick, ‘Ziek zijn en God’ - Een spiritualiteit van het niet meer beter worden. Lannoo, Tielt, 2005

Taylor John V., The Christlike God, SCM Press LTD London, 1992