Given at St Mary’s, Potterne
Romans 8. 18-25
Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait (1969). Sold at auction last year for US$34.6 million.
Most of us stoically accept our own suffering as part of life. It’s usually the suffering of those we love that makes us angry, and which can lead us to be very angry at God.
Most of us ask God why we were made in a way that leaves us subject to suffering. There are good answers to that question, but at our darkest moments they can all sound a little trite.
I can’t justify the existence suffering because on the basis of it being character forming or even redemptive. I mean, it can be, but equally it can be very embittering. There is a bad history of this idea being used to justify all sorts of needless or preventable cruelties: surely God can do better than that? And those arguing God’s case must do better!
For me, it has always been convincing, although uncomfortable, that we can’t have a universe without suffering unless God has us on remote controls, like robots. We’ve all met earthly fathers who dominate and control their children to ensure they’re always ‘well behaved’; they aren’t people we admire or aspire to being. Heaven forfend that we should worship a God that was like one of these hard cases for social services. So, our heavenly Father gives us freedom to make our own mistakes and to work our own wonders, and He gives that freedom to the whole of His creation—including, strange as it sounds, viruses and bacteria, and the rocks and tectonic plates that make up the Earth, and other seemingly insentient causes of human suffering.
None of that necessarily helps when we’re watching the suffering of innocents on our screens, or seeing someone we love racked with cancer, or addiction, or collapsed mental health. But it does make clear that to imagine a world without suffering is to imagine a world that is one of two things—either frightening and inhuman, or else where reality is fundamentally different what we know. Perhaps to imagine a world without suffering is to imagine heaven.
St Paul has a few interesting thoughts on this subject in tonight’s reading. Again, they can sound trite if they catch us at the wrong moment, but to give Paul his due, he wrote them as someone who endured a lot of suffering himself.
Keep that in mind when you hear him say “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory about to be revealed to us”— heaven is something that is so much more significant than the sufferings of our lives that we can’t even meaningfully compare them.
In that light, here’s another interesting phrase—creation is in “bondage to decay”; this is one of those places where you realise ancient thinkers had many intuitions that would much later be confirmed by science. Some of you will have learned Second Law of Thermodynamics in school. Entropy is a fundamental law of the universe; every material thing, certainly including our bodies, will eventually decay. Even the atoms that make up matter will do so, on a long enough timescale.
So here’s another interesting phrase from St Paul to leave you with—He says that we await “the redemption of our bodies”. We so often think that eternal life is about the abandonment of our bodies. Yet, remember that after the Resurrection, while Christ clearly had different physical properties from those of a mortal human, He also still displayed His wounds. So our bodies will in some sense remain with us in heaven where, a place into which, as St Paul reminds us, the whole of creation groans to be reborn.
If we were capable of understanding what exactly that meant, it wouldn’t be worth believing in. Amen.
Top image—Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962). Hangs in the Guggenheim, New York.
