The Arbitrary Nature Of Blaming God
It’s easy to blame God for everything, isn’t it?
Over the last couple of years I’ve been exploring the nature of suffering and our responses. Much of the criticism inherent in suffering is the question of God’s role in response to it. We want God to rush in and save us from suffering, and then question him when He doesn’t. But as I walk through these responses, something doesn’t quite reconcile. Something doesn’t quite work.
First, much of our criticism blames God for what we do to each other. We look at Auschwitz and Burma and we question God’s love? We want God to rush in and save us from ourselves, and then drop us off at the nearest corner, thank you very much. Our interactions resemble the lost demanding first class service from our rescuer and then forgetting to pay the bill as we exit the ship. Our need for God is only as WE determine.
We have conveniently forgotten that it is US who threw the second punch. It is US that fell into the downward spiral of rage and rash judgment. It is US that demanded justice at the expense of our neighbor, who we are so willing to let rot in the nearest jail cell. Who is God to question our demand for retribution? Yet the moment we have been caught, the moment we have failed ourselves, when we are the ones on trial, we demand the very mercy we refused to extend. We suddenly want the world to see that we are worth saving.
Second, our criticisms are entirely arbitrary. “How could God let this happen?” the critics ask, from their bully pulpits. We want God to intervene on our behalf when we would suffer. Yet those demands typically extend only to those moments when we would experience harm. But are we actually capable of determining when those moments are? Does harm extend to the moment we trip and fall, to bruise our knee? Does it extend to moment we burn ourselves at the stove? And does one harm extend universally to all people? One person’s pain is another person’s pleasure.
Are we ignorant to the value of learning by failure? Have we not seen the value in learning to get back up, to overcome our own destructiveness, and ignorance? For if God rescues us from ourselves, who will then save us?
Is it possible that God does NOT step in because to do so would actually keep us from seeing the problem that is deeply embedded within us? Suffering magnifies and clarifies the problem in ways that our own observations cannot. It reveals that deep within, the problem lies inside, not with God. For we have judged ourselves as unworthy. We have condemned ourselves before God has ever arrived on the scene. And if we are at fault, who will condemn? We will.
The thing I love about Jesus is that he offered a dramatically different response to suffering. He stood in the face of brutal retribution and essentially said, “Bring it on.” The cross was the moment when God allowed us to lay all of our rage and anger, all of our pain back onto God. It was the moment when love was revealed in the midst of suffering. But once we had exhausted our hate, we were left with the reality that God had been there all along. He was with us in the midst of suffering, asking us if we were ready to let go.
The cross essentially takes away our blame. It steals away our resolve to consider God uninvolved, benign to the suffering that goes on. It invites us to lay our excuses at the cross, redeeming them for something better, something whole. It compels us to own our own destructiveness and realize that it does not define us. To blame is to deny. To own is to overcome.
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Jim
