Why is there so much suffering in the world and what can be done about it?
A sermon preached by the Revd Dr Trevor Jamison at Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, July 28th 2024
Job 1:1-4, 13-22; Psalm 104:1-12, 31; Romans 7: 15-25
Watch the whole service on YouTube
So, welcome to the second of a series of five sermons that are about answering big questions. The questions come from a Church meeting where participants were invited to share a question they would want to ask God or Jesus. They were the sort of questions that all sorts of people ask, not just church folk.
I’ve consolidated those many questions down to a mere five. Last week it was, ‘If there’s a God what are they like, and why might it matter?’ This week it’s ‘Why is there so much suffering in the world and what can be done about it?’ Next week the focus will move to the related question, ‘Why doesn’t God intervene to make things better?’
Then in the final two weeks, after three weeks of big questions focused on God we’ll move to two more focused on us:
- Why is Church irrelevant as far as so many people are concerned, and what should we do about that?
- What happens to us (and others) when we die?
For now, though, let’s get back to today’s big question: ‘Why is there so much suffering in the world and what can be done about it?’
Such suffering is a reality for human beings. In 1981 the Jewish rabbi, Harold Kushner wrote a best seller whose title captures something of that: ‘When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” Many of us, I’m sure will resonate with that, Not only do bad things happen, but they seem to happen to good or innocent people. It all seems so unjust, as though who knew and sympathised with the title character in the Book of Job would agree.
The first thing we are told about Job’s character is that he was ‘blameless and upright; one who feared God and who turned away from evil.’ (1:1) You can’t get a better character reference than that. If bad things can happen to someone like Job, you might think, they can happen to anyone. And happen they do. So much of what he has is taken away from him in traumatic circumstances. A servant arrives with news that his oxen and donkeys have been carried off by raiders and his servants killed. (1:14-15) Next moment he hears news that ‘the fire of God fell from heaven, consuming both his sheep and yet more of his servants.’ (1:16) Another band of raiders seize Job’s camels, with yet more of his servants murdered. Then, to top it all, word comes that Job’s sons and daughters have all been killed when a storm collapses the house in which they were feasting. (1:18-19)
Job replies with words which have become proverbial: ‘’the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.’ (1:21) I very much doubt if that’s what I would say if I were ever unfortunate enough to find myself in similar circumstances.
Deliberately, I have started with Job – who was blameless and upright; one who feared God and who turned away from evil. Whether his story retells actual events or is literature written to make a point about human suffering, it present s a challenge to one of the usual explanations for the existence of suffering in this world. It’s an explanation that has a lot of truth in it, but which does not fully meet the challenge.
The explanation that is so often offered is that where suffering in the world is concerned the problem is with us, not with the world. The apostle Paul puts it well in the letter he wrote to Christian congregations in Rome a couple of thousand years ago, and what he says then still holds good today, even if he puts it in extreme terms.
Writing about himself, but only as one example of a wider, indeed universal phenomenon, Paul says, ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do … so I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.’ (7:19, 21) Why is there so much trouble and suffering in the world? It’s because, we, humankind, do so much that is bad. If there was a book on this subject it might be called, ‘When Bad People Do Things To Good People.’
You don’t have to think too hard to find examples of people doing bad things which cause trouble and lead to suffering in this world. Some of those happen on the personal level, including abusive relationships. You see it in unfair work settings and in money-grabbing business practices. Think about how the Post Office appear to have treated sub-postmasters in relations to computer problems. More widely, you see it in the clash of nations, with the power-hungry waging war on their neighbours, as peoples all around the world today could testify.
Even when the human element in the equation it not so apparent just dig a little deeper and you will find it. When a hurricane makes its way across the Caribbean for example, note the differing impact it has upon different nations. Those with fewer economic resources are the ones who get hit hardest and will take longer to recover. Likewise, when the climate changes it is those nations which contributed the least to causing the changes which suffer the most malign effects. So it’s true then that significant responsibility for the extent of suffering in the world lies with people; people like you and me.
And yet … And yet, human responsibility is not the whole story as far as trouble and suffering in the world is concerned. There’s the question about what God is up to … or not. God is the creator and sustainer of this world; God is sovereign over the universe. That being the case why does God permit trouble and suffering? To go further, might it be the case that God causes trouble and suffering in this world? The writer of the Book of Job puts it in those terms. They tell it as a tale of God permitting Satan to torment Job as part of a wager about whether a blameless, upright person will keep faith in God when sufferings rather than blessings come along.
Now we are entering into an area of mystery here, as when we try to understand why God has made the world the way it is, and why God acts (or refrains from acting) in the world. Next week’s big question, remember, is about why God does not seem to intervene to make things better. When trying to understand these things it’s as Saint Paul put it in another of his letters: ‘For now we see [things] in a mirror dimly, but then [in God’s good time] we will see [God] face to face.’ (1 Corinthians 13:12)
It might be that a dynamic, living, breathing world, where its elements interact and collide with each other all the time, generates what you might call ‘inescapable friction’. For example if the earth is to have gravity, which is a good thing, and is to retain atmosphere it must move, must spin. For the planet to move, to spin, causes movement of currents, waves, and winds, which cause storms.
Another suggestion about why God has made the world this way is that it might be that an element of what we experience as “suffering” is necessary for us to grow as human beings. We have all had things happen in our lives which we experienced as bad, or as suffering at the time, but now we look back and acknowledge they enabled us to grow. As the saying goes, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’
I think there is something in both of those thoughts, but they seem lacking, seem insufficient as explanations for the reality we experience. They don’t explain the apparent injustice that some suffer, and others do not; or at least, not equally. They don’t account for the suffering caused by the actions of us human beings. Nor do they answer the final element of our big question: ‘and what can be done about it?’
So why might there be there so much trouble in the world?
- Because of human failings
- Because it’s an inescapable side effect of a world that is alive and dynamic
- Because it forces us to grow, both psychologically and spiritually
And what can be done about the trouble in the world?
- Well, humans can behave better, and Jesus both calls upon us to do so and demonstrates how to do so
- And we can trust that God, in Jesus Christ, is at work doing something to make things better. In his suffering Jesus is at one with those who suffer unjustly in this world, offering hope to them, and he also offers hope to all of us who have ever caused suffering to others
You might say that loving God and loving our neighbour combine to be our best response to the world’s troubles and suffering, which was also the conclusion we came to last week when asked to respond to the sort of God we discovered God to be. As for why God permits any trouble and suffering and why God has not intervened to put everything right immediately …
Well, that’s a big question, and it’s the one I’m due to preach upon next week.