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Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel tells a haunting story from the concentration camps. One day some Nazi guards ordered their Jewish prisoners to leave their barracks and assemble in a courtyard. They informed them that some were now to be executed by hanging. They announced no particular offenses. The guards were apparently drunk and thought this would be entertaining. They had arranged a gallows and chose several Jews, among them a sixteen-year-old boy, to die. As the rest watched in horror, the prisoners were executed one by one, the boy last. Wiesel said the young man stepped onto the trapdoor, both courage and non-comprehension on his face. As the trap was sprung and the boy plunged to his undeserved death, one elderly Jew in the crowd, his faith faltering, cried out: "Where is God?" But another in the crowd, his faith still secure, called out: "You want to know where God is? I'll tell you. He's on that gallows with a rope around his neck."

So, at the heart of our Christian faith, no less than that of our Jewish friends, is the conviction that God is somehow involved in our lives and shares our pain. Sometimes our suffering is a result of the way we live with all our sins or, to use the words of the writer, our transgressions. He goes on to accuse us all of this, declaring that "we have turned every one to his own way ... we have all gone astray." This is what some philosophers call "the human condition." In truth, try as we will, though perhaps the majority of us manage to avoid the more obvious forms of wrongdoing, all of us in a variety of ways, however subtle, manage at times to act in ways that are self-centered. And, once in awhile, we're downright hurtful. In our most reasonable moments, we surely realize that if our universe is to hold together morally, there must be accountability for this. A world in which God said, "Oh well, I know you didn't really mean to hurt anyone, so let's forget it," would set everyone free to think and act totally without conscience. Yet, at the same time, if we were to accumulate a lifetime of misdemeanors and felonies with the knowledge that eventually we would be held to account for them and, worse, have to pay a legitimate price for them, our future would seem unbearably hopeless. Of course, there is that theological point of view which believes this, which seems to find some strange comfort in the idea of Hell, but it's often to be noticed that those who hold this view seem to feel that they themselves will somehow be exempt.

This is the heart of divine love, the promise that there is accountability while at the same time there is hope for us if we find the path of remorse and repentance. The wrongs will be redressed, but it will be God who accepts the suffering.

A famous story concerns a mid-nineteenth century religious and military leader in the Caucasus named Shamil. He had struggled for thirty years to maintain the independence of the Dagestan tribes from Russia. One of his biggest problems was the defeatism of his own people. Finally, a law was declared that anyone heard pleading for compromising negotiations with the enemy would be punished with a hundred lashes. But one day someone was overheard to suggest just that. The culprit was brought before Shamil and, to his utter dismay, he realized she was his own mother. He felt he had no choice. If order and justice were to be maintained, he had to carry out the sentence. For three days Shamil remained in seclusion, praying for guidance. At last he ordered the sentence to be carried out. His mother was tied to a stake and the punishment begun. But after five lashes, Shamil ordered the punishment halted. He then stepped forward and ordered that he himself receive the other 95 lashes, insisting that the man with the whip use it with all his strength. He recovered, and history shows that the people were so impressed by this that no further defeatist talk was heard in the land.

There is one problem with that analogy. God is not an implacable judge who delares that for every wrong there is a punishment. It's the element of love in that story, the realization that humanity must understand that selfish, hurtful conduct exacts a price, that allows that story to speak to us. Knowing that God's kindly love is willing to share most of the pain of consequences in the hope that the rest of us will see and understand and be changed, that's where the truth lies. It's a risk that God chose to take for our sake. Nikos Kazantzakis, who suffered much in his own life, once wrote of two men standing together under the night sky. Suddenly a shooting star flashed across the starlit heaven. One said to the other: "Did you see that? A tear running down the cheek of God." What better statement of the deepest meaning of our Christian faith?

Back to our text. In all likelihood, the writer was referring to the community of the Jewish people as a whole who would carry out this "suffering servant" role. There's no way to know if, or to what extent, he anticipated a Messiah as an individual who would pay this price. Yet we Christians are able to look back and realize this is exactly what happened; a Messiah did indeed come to us who shares our pain and the consequences of our misdeeds and failures in the hope that we will be changed and opened up to a love of our own. Because God clearly respects our freedom and refuses to coerce us to become other than what we ourselves choose to be, God, or Jesus as the example of divine love, elected to suffer voluntarily in the hope that such suffering would avail against the hardness of our hearts, the insensitivity of our minds. Why? To awaken in us a kindly sensitivity to each other that we would "bear one another's burdens."

John wrote, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." C. S. Lewis in The Case For Christianity wrote: "Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing, as far as I know, to say to people who don't know they've done anything to repent of and who don't feel that they need any forgiveness. It's after you've realized that there is a real moral law and a power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself in wrong with that power, it's after all that that Christianity begins to talk."

One element in all of this is the freedom God has given us to determine for ourselves how we will use it. Morality becomes irrelevant in the absence of freedom. The moment a person is deprived of the opportunity to do wrong, to do right loses meaning. This is why a parent must sooner or later decide she or he has done the best one knows with a child and must set the child free to make his or her own choices. That was the point of the story of the boy we read about in the Gospel of Luke whose dad gave him a sum of money and let him run off. There's another example in the story we read of the so-called "rich young ruler." In brief, this young man went to Jesus one day and asked, "Master, what must I do to have eternal life?" Jesus first told him to obey the moral law. The boy said he had done this. Then Jesus told him to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor. This must have been tongue in cheek. If everyone did that the result would be economic chaos. More likely, this was Jesus' way of saying, "Young fellow, it's obvious that you're into money and status and possessions. You'll have to get over that to be happy." In any event, the young man who seemed sincere enough in approaching Jesus, turned and walked away. Now the genius of that story lies in Jesus' reaction. He let the boy walk away. He didn't pursue him with further argument. He didn't write the boy's name down to make a later call. He let him walk. Why? Because he trusted that boy to decide for himself when the time was right. That's what God does with us. We're free to decide. But God paid the price of sharing our sometimes painful life situations in the hope that we'd make the right decisions.

Here's what we need to understand. Our choices do matter. What kind of person I become does matter. My moral conduct does affect other people, and therefore it affects God. It's up to me to choose what sort of person I shall be, but God has decided to bet on me, as it were, to pay the price which that entails. If I make the wrong choice, it will affect not only me and my friends and loved ones. It will affect God.

Leslie Weatherhead tells in one of his books about a young man living in Scotland, who got off on the wrong track. Although he'd been a good boy through his teen years, he'd fallen in with the wrong crowd. Before long, the boy had begun to drink too much, to stay out until very late hours, and to show no inclination to become a responsible adult. His parents were patient, but as every mother and father will know, their pain was deep.

One night the boy stumbled home, obviously having had way too much to drink. He ignored his parents, staggered up the stairs and disappeared into his room. For a time the parents sat before the hearth fire in silence. Finally, Mother got up and left the room. After a time Dad, concerned for his wife, went upstairs and peeked in his son's room. The boy lay sound asleep on his bed. As the father watched, his wife, who was sitting quietly nearby, leaned over and gently kissed her son's cheek. When she looked up and saw her husband, she whispered: "I'm sorry. He won't let me do this when he's awake."

So it is: a parent's pain. The eternal hope of a change, an awakening of the spirit. A love which endures and never turns away. A willingness to suffer what pain is necessary to be faithful, to hope that tomorrow will be different, that the suffering is not in vain. So with the love of a devoted mother. So with the love of God.