With everything I have been through since March the one thing I haven’t experienced much is pain. That is apart from the preparation for the apheresis procedure ie. the harvesting of stem cells. This involved daily injections of a drug the name of which I have forgotten but which I was warned would cause me some bone pain. A lady who was in the next bed to me during the harvesting described it as feeling like your bones were about to explode. It wasn’t quite like that with me but the pain in my upper legs and back caused me a great deal of discomfort.
This caused my mind to drift back to a sermon I heard many years ago in which the preacher referred to ‘the gift of pain’, a messenger to tell us that something is wrong in our bodies. An article in a recent edition of The New Yorker magazine deals with the phenomenon of people who feel no pain. That might seem like a good prospect but it has its downside. One lady, Joanne Cameron, who lives in the North of Scotland is highlighted. She had no pain in childbirth (which I am told is earnestly to be desired!) and as a child had a fall while roller skating but had no idea she’d broken her arm until her mother noticed it was hanging strangely. This was treated successfully but things have not worked out so well with others with the same imperviousness to pain. The article cites another woman who suffered multiple fractures in her youth without noticing them. Her bones never set properly and she was left with permanent damage.
So, yes, most of us will go along with the idea of pain as a gift when it flags up something that has gone wrong. But the preacher didn’t stop there. His text was Joel 2: 25:
‘I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten - the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm - my great army that I sent among you.’
The background to this is a ‘plague’ of locusts which has destroyed crops throughout Israel. It has become a favourite text for many speaking as it does of restoration and renewal after tragedy. But the preacher focussed on God’s description of the locusts which had destroyed the crops as ‘my great army that I sent among you.‘ In other words the locust swarm was not ‘just one of those things’, not a quirk of nature, not the work of an implacable fate but quite literally an act of God. From this the preacher argued that God has not merely built pain into our bodies as a warning system; nor does He merely allow pain to exist; but that He is actually the source of our pain.
At the time I was startled. I had been reading a number of books on healing some of which boldly stated that it was not God’s will that anyone should suffer and the rarity of healing in the Church showed a lack a lack of faith in Christians. One book by Morton T. Kelsey claimed that the Church was under judgement because people were dying who would otherwise have been healed if only we had prayed in faith. Whatever you make of this it is certainly the case that Christians do not live comfortably with suffering. We have all struggled to respond when people have cited the amount of suffering in the world as an argument against an omnipotent and loving God. It surely would not help if these people were exposed to the kind of preaching that spoke of God sending His ‘great army’ amongst us.
The problem is that this is a vein of thought that you will find throughout the Bible. Personal suffering and national tragedy are acknowledged as part of human experience and the source of it is God. He hasn’t just allowed it. It emerges from His will. He has sent His ‘great army.‘ Very often this is seen as an act of judgement, as was the case with the locusts, and the purpose behind it was to bring back to God a people who had grown away from Him. Therefore, His dark side is not so dark because His purpose is good. His desire is to see His people turn back to Him.
I can hear voices protest that this is Old Testament stuff which we don’t need to take too seriously. But it continues in the New Testament. Another sermon which has stayed in my mind over the years was on John 15: 1-4 where God is pictured as a gardener tending fruit trees. The preacher emphasized that in order for fruit to grow there has to be pruning. The gardener has to take his knife and cut away at the branches.
I had read that passage on so many occasions and indeed preached on it but the image of God with a pruning knife had escaped me. But it is there. And what does it mean for me? For Paul it meant seeing his ‘thorn in (his) flesh’ as God’s will for him and an opportunity to depend more on His grace and not his own strength. (2 Corinthians 12: 7-10). For Peter it meant seeing ‘all kinds of trials’ as an opportunity for faith to be tested and found genuine. (1 Peter 1: 3-9). For the writer of the Hebrews it meant seeing ‘hardship’ as discipline and a sign of God’s care for His sons and daughters: ‘God disciplines us for our good, that we might share in his holiness.’ (Hebrews 12: 7-13).
However we look at it what we cannot escape is a conviction throughout the Bible that the trials, tribulations and suffering we are called to endure can be seen in a positive light. The supreme example of this is the crucifixion experience of Jesus where body, mind and spirit were strained to the utmost and yet through His endurance the salvation of humankind was achieved. It is with this in mind that the writer of Hebrews was moved to write:
‘In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.’ (Hebrews 2: 10).
This is not to say that Jesus was not ‘perfect’ before His sufferings but as F.F. Bruce has written in his commentary on Hebrews:
‘ . . . the perfect Son of God has become the people’s perfect Saviour, opening up their way to God; and in order to become that, he must endure suffering and death.’
C.S. Lewis’ The Problem Of Pain begins with a quotation from George Macdonald for whom Lewis had a high regard:
‘The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.’
And how can that that be? Surely in accepting whatever dark shadows fall on our lives as an opportunity to seek God in a more committed way and to celebrate what has been done for us through the suffering of Jesus. Even when we feel our lives are coming apart it cannot be altered that we are ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.’ With that light shining in the depths of our being the darkness is not dark.
