“…he cried out even more loudly, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
This morning’s readings can be great sources of hope for us, but they can also be disturbing. It all depends what mood or what set of experiences we approach them from. In their very different ways, both Job and Blind Bartimaeus have been dealt a rough hand by God, and have suffered for years. Then, in response to prayer, God fixes each of their problems in a trice. The second part of their lives will be so wonderful they could hardly have dared wish it for themselves. The readings can also be disturbing, however, because God does not do this for everyone, not even for many people who pray faithfully.
The preacher was “playing an away match” at Holy Cross, Ramsbury. © 22 February, 2018.
I read an article in Church Times a few weeks ago about a brilliant young academic, who met the love of his life when they were both reading for their doctorates. He had been brought up outside the Church, but thanks to his fiancée, he came to faith in Christ for the first time. The he was struck by what seemed at first to be a routine viral infection, but this left him with a crippling post-viral syndrome which has now lasted for many decades. He has lived in almost permanent exhaustion and pain. His career went nowhere, and his condition placed enormous burdens of caring on that young girlfriend who became his wife. Decades of faithful prayer for healing were met only with occasional false dawns; after so many years, the answer to his prayers was, finally, a sense of peace with his illness, with God, and with the world.
Where, one asks, is the justice in all that? If we accept that God does at times answer prayer in miraculous ways – and I do accept that – it leaves us wondering why He doesn’t do it more often.
Indeed the randomness, the sheer unfairness and capriciousness of the world can leave us feeling angry at God. We’ll return to that in a moment. Before that, I want to explore one solution Christians have come up with to the problem of a God who doesn’t always seem to answer our prayers. This solution is that God doesn’t intervene in the processes of the world; prayer is about us discerning God’s will, because ultimately the only people who can answer our prayers are we ourselves.
There was a time when that seemed to me to be the only solution to the problem of a world with so much unfairness and so much seemingly unanswered prayer. All the people who said that God didn’t actually intervene in answer to prayer seemed clever and open-minded and other things I approved of, too. So, I stopped asking for God’s help, at least for myself. Soon afterwards I found myself in a difficult place – unhappy in a job that was going wrong, and in miserable personal circumstances. On Sunday mornings, I would sit at the back of the church where I was warden at the time, having conversations with God like this:
“I know I’m in a miserable place, God, but I also know I have a decent salary and a nice house and good health, so please don’t hear my prayers but instead use whatever influence You might have used to help me, to instead fix the life of a starving child in Africa.”
Clearly, I needed God’s help. And I got it in the end, the hard way, but that’s a story for another time. I was wrong, of course, to assume that there is a fixed limit on the degree to which God could intervene in the world. Yet, more than that, what sticks out to me here was the sheer stubborn pride that afflicted me – that I was such a pious and holy and self-sacrificing person – and so competent and skilled as well – that I would reject an answer that I desperately needed from God to my prayers. In the end, in desperation, I got on my knees and begged God to help me. And I was led by Him, like Bartimaeus and Job, through many struggles to a much happier place.
I don’t know how prayer works. I don’t know why God seems to answer some prayers and not others. I only know, to use the words of that great Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, that, “When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don’t, they don’t.”
Now, I’ll admit that I sometimes get a bit angry at God about the state of the world, or when I see the suffering of friends. I think that’s OK. We all get angry with the people we love sometimes, and we should be honest in our relationship with God, and never forget that nothing can we think or feel can make Him love us any less. Indeed, I hope you are sometimes angry about the state of the world. We see in the Gospels Jesus, who is God, sometimes overwhelmed with compassion, exhausting himself as He tries to heal an endless litany of suffering. God placed compassion for your fellow human beings into you, because you are made in the image and likeness of God.
We don’t know why the world contains suffering, but without free will we would be nothing more than biological robots, incapable of genuine love for one another, let alone being friends of Jesus Christ and children of our heavenly Father. Beyond that, randomness seems essential to there being any change in the universe; without randomness, we become static and stale and decadent. Without change and chance creation could not be as glorious as it is. But, at times it seems a terribly high price to pay.
Given our experiences as human beings over the last couple of generations, moreover, we should be more humble in thinking we could run the universe more justly and kindly than God does.
The lovely chancel at Holy Cross, Ramsbury. © Gerry Lynch, 22 February 2018.
We human beings have amplified our power, tremendously, but we are no wiser than we ever were. We thought we were clever enough to solve all the world’s problems, but we were too arrogant and naïve to remember that we might generate new problems with our power. Those of you of more mature years will remember the days when thalidomide was a wonder drug and nuclear power a miracle too cheap to meter.
We can’t blame God for climate change. That mess is definitely on us. Unfortunately, the COP26 conference couldn’t be happening at a worse time. The post-pandemic rebound in economic activity means that energy prices have spiked across the world. I don’t know about you, but every time I have to put petrol in the car, I wince when I get to the pump. The same is true in America, in China, in India, and across Europe. Governments across the world are under domestic pressure about energy prices. Let us also not forget that simply raising the price of fuel and electricity to stifle demand as a means of cutting carbon emissions hits poor people hard while barely affecting the rich, so that’s not a morally acceptable solution, not in my book anyway. Pray that somehow progress will still be made.
God managed to preserve this planet’s capacity to sustain life for three and a half billion years without any problems; we’ve placed it in jeopardy less than two centuries after developing an industrial economy. He knows better how to make a cosmos work than we do.
One final point: don’t be like the younger me. Pray for your own needs too – and for your own desires. Life is hard enough for all of us sometimes that you shouldn’t be ashamed of, just sometimes, asking your heavenly Father for a special treat. Earthly fathers like giving their children special treats, too – so give God the chance to spoil you a little as His son or daughter! I find that He lets you know soon enough if you’re asking for something unreasonable.
In conclusion, remember that although the world can be a place of much suffering, it is also a place of much wonder. It can be difficult to reconcile the idea of a loving God who responds to our prayers with that suffering, until you remember the epic scale of destruction we human beings made as soon as we had the power to do so. It doesn’t seem like God can answer all the prayers we offer in the way we might wish, but that doesn’t mean He doesn’t hear them. In the end, he can’t answer any prayers unless we give him the chance to – by praying!
Miracles do happen, as with Job and Bartimaeus, but they are rare. But for everyone who trusts that Christ defeated death when he died on the Cross and rose from the dead on the first Easter morning, there is the assurance of eternal bliss.
Now to the only wise God our saviour, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.
