Taking His own Medicine
Apr 16, 2010
In my last entry, I wrote about Jesus as the Wounded Healer (to borrow a title from Henri Nouwen). In that entry I make the argument that Christianity takes the brokenness and the pain of our world seriously, in fact more seriously than any other worldview or religion. In religions like Islam and Judaism, one can morally escape the effects of sin on the world by obeying religious instructions and following (to the letter) each rule and law. Thus, undoing brokenness is simply a matter of needing better teaching and more willpower. That does not take seriously the severity and scope of pain in the world. Eastern religions tend to see pain, suffering, and evil as illusory, and therefore advocate for a mystical experience that removes us from the physical world which the Bible describes as real and “groaning” under the weight of injustice and evil (Romans 8.18-17). With no ‘god,’ atheism cannot appeal to standards except the standards of nature. Unfortunately, nature gives us the prime example of how the strong eat the weak; nature would give us the ok to perpetuate violence on any who cannot withstand our power. In nature, the Lion is king because he can destroy any who oppose him (See Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). The atheist, lacking a “god” and therefore any objective standard must play a game of choose your own adventure morality if he/she is unwilling to appeal to the example of nature itself. This hardly takes the brokenness and pain of the world seriously.
Back to Christianity…The Bible does not avoid or attempt to sidestep the question of suffering or evil in the world. The Bible acknowledges the reality that all of us are scarred, all of us are broken, all of us have shed tears of sorrow, all of us have felt sting, pain, and loneliness, and that our world is also reeling from injustice and oppression. In fact, as The Long Silence showed us in the last entry, we know that God Himself didn’t avoid it—God entered history as a human and suffered the worst pain imaginable. Listen to the words of Dorothy Sayers:
“For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worth while.”
So, Jesus has suffered, with us, for us, and more than us. Because He has taken on suffering, pain, and evil AND defeated them (Resurrection), He can transform our smaller suffering and pain into a story of wonder and awe. This is why the Bible can say in Romans 8.18 that the present sufferings are not worth comparing to the future glory, which in v. 23 he describes as the redemption of our bodies, a physical future (not destruction of the world but restoration) where everything crooked will be made straight, where we will dance like the greatest of dancers, where we will travel like the wealthiest millionaires, where we will sing and play and worship in ways that are unimaginable to us now. Tim Keller writes, “The Biblical view of things is resurrection – not a future that is just a consolation for the life we never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted. This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater.”
The Bible promises that God’s work in the present leads to a world in the future where, in the words of Sam from Lord of the Rings, every sad thing comes untrue. This is what is so unique and powerful about Christianity: Jesus did not abolish suffering, he absorbed it; He did not sidestep it, he swallowed it. He did not stop the crucifixion; He rose from the dead. He took the crown of thorns and in the Resurrection twisted it into a crown of glory; He took the cross of death and in the Resurrection made it into a place of life. That’s what the Resurrection means for your pain and the pain of the whole world. Practically speaking, every cross the Christian must bear, every thorn in your flesh, every tear from your eyes will be twisted and remade for your glory, it will be worked for your good—not just consolation but restoration. Any suffering that God allows, we know He has taken His own medicine and therefore not only can empathize with us but He can also change us. Again Sayers:
“Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all. That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find Him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as News; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it News, and good news at that; though we are apt to forget that the word ‘Gospel’ ever meant anything so sensational.”
