One of the most difficult challenges to faith is to be found in the suffering of the world. Skeptics ask, “How can a good God permit such terrible suffering? If he is good and powerful he would prevent it. If he doesn’t prevent such suffering he is either not good, or not powerful, or he does not exist.” We not only see suffering around the world, we see it in our own relationships. All of us have experienced suffering in our families, our children, disappointed hopes, our marriages, our finances, our own physical and mental health. How does our faith in a good and powerful God help us in our sufferings?

It does not help to deny the reality and pervasiveness of suffering. Some Christians view the world through rose-colored spectacles. They see the hand of God in the beautiful design of the world, but overlook the essential nature of suffering as part of creation. Suffering is built into the creation. It is through suffering that life comes forth. It is through suffering that life is nourished. It is through suffering that reproduction and survival occurs. Conflict between tribes and nations is inevitable as migrations occur and new territories are fought over. War is a constant in human history. Peace is uncommon. Totalitarian governments inflict suffering on their citizens through oppression and police control. Abusive authority figures in business, institutions and families exercise cruelty on defenseless men, women and children. The breakdown of marriages and families causes much suffering, especially on children.

St. Paul was clear-eyed when he wrote, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Romans 8:22)

Arguments for the existence of God often use the argument from design. Believers may claim that they see the hand of God in the beauty of nature. Yet the design of the universe also includes billions of years of suffering. An atheist will see the violence and cruelty of predators in the food pyramid, and the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest, as evidence of no design, no purpose, no evil or good, nothing but a blind, pitiless indifference in the universe. But while the distinguished American environmental philosopher and theologian Holmes Ralston III also sees the creation as full of suffering, it is also “orderly, prolific, efficient, selecting for adaptive fit, exuberant, complex, diverse, regenerating life generation after generation.” (Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation, 3)

It is important to see the creation as it is, as a whole, and not through overly romantic spectacles. All creation suffers. Animals struggle with chronic disease, or the effects of parasites or die lingering deaths from inefficient predator attacks or their own injuries. Suffering is endemic and intrinsic to the development of creation. It does not help for Christians to turn a blind eye to suffering, to ignore it. Our faith has to accept suffering as part of life, just as Jesus accepted suffering and death on the Cross for us.

This realistic view of life should inform the artist. John Ruskin in Modern Painters (1860) reflects upon a landscape in the Scottish Highlands.

“Ruskin insists that God does not wish us to see only the ‘bright side’ of nature. God has given us ‘two sides’ of nature and intends us to see them both. Those who see nature only in positive terms are failing to see it as it actually is. To make his point Ruskin points to an unnamed ‘zealous’ Scottish clergyman who was determined to see the landscape as a witness to the ‘goodness of God.’ And so he described it in terms of ‘nothing but sunshine, and fresh breezes, and bleating lambs, and clean tartans, and all kinds of pleasantness.’

Yet Ruskin dismisses this as inept. The zealous clergyman has chosen to see what he wishes to see, not to see what is actually there. For Ruskin, ‘to see clearly’ lies at the heart of poetry, prophecy, and religion. How can one live with such a blatant failure to see clearly? How can nature be sunlit without there being shadows? Ruskin offers an alternative viewing of a Highland landscape, stressing its moral and aesthetic ambivalence. Ruskin’s point cannot be challenged, and there is nothing to be gained by gilding his lily through further comment. There is a shadowy side to nature, which cannot be denied or softened by even the most romantic imagination.” (Alister E. McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe, 81,82)

The scriptures teach us that creation is good. “Good” means appropriate to the purpose of which it was created. Creation gives rise to great values of beauty, diversity and ingenuity. It is good because it is the Lord’s – “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.” (Psalm 24:1) It would seem that suffering is the only way God could give rise to the sort of world with all the values that the creation contains. Therefore the God who creates must suffer with his creation. He is in childbirth with us. Christopher Southgate writes, “I take the Cross of Christ to be the epitome of divine compassion, the moment of God’s taking ultimate responsibility for the pain of creation, and – with the Resurrection – to inaugurate the transformation of creation.” (op.cit.16)

How can a good God permit such terrible suffering? Because “the sort of universe we have is the only sort of universe that could give rise to the range, beauty, complexity and diversity of creatures the Earth has produced.” (Southgate, 29) Christ created a world (“through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” John 1:3), that “has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” Christ is still in the process of creating the universe. Christ suffers in the suffering of all creation.  “Rolston says, ‘The secret of life is that it is a passion play.’…at the Passion of Christ, the good does not have its meaning without the suffering intrinsic to it.” (Southgate, 46) Christ is in all events, with the sufferers, in a way that brings forth new life – childbirth. God is the midwife of creation. Christ suffered death for the transformation of the world. God in Christ bore the pain of the creation and human sin. We are called to participate with God in the divine transformation of the creation.

The goodness and beauty of the creation is often hidden and obscured by suffering, yet in the pain there is the hope of new life, a new birth, a new opportunity. Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, you will weep and mourn…You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time is come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.” (John 16:20-22)

Just as there is pain in labor when we are born into the world, there is often pain as we labor in the final suffering of dying. As I visit the dying in hospice I am aware of the fact that we are all born to die and we must bear our suffering with the courage and hope Christ gives us in his Cross and resurrection.

You can see your suffering as participating in the birth of new life. “The capacity to suffer through to joy is the supreme essence of Christianity.” (Holmes Rolston, III)

“Life is not beautiful all the time. But through the ugliness and pain…and loneliness there is available to every human being the fragrance of the very Presence of Christ.” (Eugenia Price)