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It was late February in one of those long, cold northern Michigan winters. The families were close friends. The parents often socialized. The children attended the same school. They looked for something they could all do together. The lake had been frozen for more than a month and snowmobiling around the shoreline seemed a possibility. The men checked the condition of the ice on Monday evening. It was safe. Early Saturday morning, the parents cranked up the family snowmobiles and attached sleds for the children to ride behind them. All eight of them headed on to the ice.

Unfortunately, there had been an unusual amount of sunshine that week. The ice opened where a stream entered the lake. They were driving east into the rising sun. No one noticed the open water until it was too late. All eight plunged through the ice. Five struggled out of the water. One family lost a nine-year-old son. In the other family, both the mother and father drowned. Their sons, ages eight and ten, were orphaned.

It was a small town. The families were well known. The news of the deaths of two adults in their early thirties and a small child thundered through the community. The child was sweet and innocent. The parents were nice people. How could this happen? Why do bad things happen to good people? For people of faith, it was even more pressing to know where God was when that happened.

On Sunday morning, the Sunshiners Class at First Church wanted to continue conversations from the day before. This issue needed something it was not getting in discussions at the Coffee Cup CafŽ. It needed serious theological reflection. Seldom had the class remembered an incident as spiritually compelling or as complex. If God is merciful and just, why are two little boys orphaned and another boy dead? Where is the mercy and justice in that? If God is all-powerful as well as just and merciful, why didn't God step in to prevent this tragedy? The Sunshiners Class wanted a satisfying answer. When bad things happen to good people, where is God?

Jim lived down the street from the family that lost the little boy. He opened the class discussion, "If this is the will of God," Jim wondered, "why would God do that?" He continued, "On the one hand, I have always thought that there is a reason for everything. On the other hand, I believe the Bible when it says that 'God is love.' How could this be the act of a loving God? I simply cannot believe this is God's will."

Larry, another member of the class, had grown up with very traditional religious beliefs and he was uncomfortable questioning the goodness of God. "But it had to be in God's plan. You and I may not understand why, but God has a good reason for everything. It may be a mystery to us, but not to God. The Lord must have wanted those parents and that little child to come early to their eternal home. Why? We will never know. It is a mystery, just a mystery."

Sally grew up in the rural South and frequently offered fitting anecdotes. "When someone died young, my mother used to explain that 'God is not content making bouquets from old, wilted flowers. God wants heaven to be beautiful. That is why God occasionally picks a few flowers at the peak of their loveliness.' "

Mary could no longer contain herself. "I cannot accept that. How could it be God's will for a child to die? That does not make God mysterious. That makes God cruel and capricious. I believe in a good and loving God. A good God would not do such a thing. As for 'picking bouquets,' I simply cannot believe God goes around drowning young children and their parents for no more purpose than to recruit a youthful contingent for heaven's entering class."

For a moment, no one spoke. They remembered that two years ago Mary's eighteen-year-old daughter died in a car accident. Mary didn't come to church for almost a year after that. She harbored too much anger toward God. But as she spoke, members of the class watched the rage slip from Mary's face. She was remembering the things people said that brought her comfort in that hard time. Tears began to form in the corners of her eyes. In a distant voice she said, "When those people slipped beneath the ice, God's heart sank more rapidly than those snowmobiles. God weeps today for those orphaned children. God knows the feelings of a parent who has lost a child. After all, God also lost a son. I believe that God's heart is broken."

Mike was a new member of the class and unaware of the grief that burdened Mary. Unfortunately, he was also not particularly sensitive to others. Without considering the impact of his remarks, he jumped in. "I just don't buy that 'will of God' stuff. Human error, not God's plan, killed those people. No matter how thick they thought the ice, they never should have been driving snowmobiles on it. Water regularly freezes and unfreezes. God created the world that way. It's a law of physics that snowmobiles do not float. Those people tried to defy a law of nature and suffered the consequences. God does not suspend the laws of physics just because parents are good and children are innocent."

George was the resident cynic in this Sunday school class. The other members had concluded years before that he attended only because he took great pleasure in keeping things stirred. "Don't you see the intellectual swamp you have wandered into?" George laughed. "Christians claim that God is good, just, and merciful. They also claim God has power over all things. But this problem demonstrates that you cannot have it both ways. Either God is all-powerful or God is good, kind, merciful, and just. It has to be one way or the other.

"Look at it this way," George tried to explain. "Bad things do happen to good people. That is a fact. If a bad thing happens and God is all-powerful, then we have to accept that this omnipotent God was involved in a bad thing. On the one hand, if we choose to believe that God always does good and something bad happens, then God must not be all-powerful. Bad things happen to good people. That is the reality. If God is all-powerful, then God is not always kind, just, and merciful. If God is always kind, just, and merciful, then God must not have the power to stop bad things from happening to good people."

Then George drove home his point. "At the very least, we should expect an omnipotent God who does only good to do more than offer sympathy. It may be comforting to believe God's heart is broken over this, but sympathy is cheap. That is why there is so much of it. There is no complete, satisfying way to answer the question, 'Where is God when bad things happen to good people?' "

For thousands of years, religious people have repeated the experience of the Sunshiners Class at old First Church. The more it is discussed, the more complex and confusing the question and the less satisfying the answer.

Job wrestles with this issue more than any other book in the Bible. In the end, this Old Testament poem falls short of a clear, satisfying answer. Job, you will recall, was a very good man. In spite of that, he encountered a series of tragedies that swamp his life. In his time, the common wisdom was that God did only good. Bad things, religious people believed, happened only to bad people. When the friends of this patient man from Uz stop to talk, they insist that Job must have done something to offend God or bad things would never have happened. Job rejects all their explanations and insists that he has never done anything to offend God. Toward the end of this long poem, Job shakes an angry fist at God and demands an explanation.

God does not give Job a direct answer on the "whys" for suffering. Instead, God responds from the whirlwind in a way that seems intended to scare the man into submission rather than inform him.1 "Just who do you think you are, Job? I am God and you are not God. I do not have to answer to you. I am trying to run this universe and all you do is complain that you are a good fellow and therefore, nothing bad should happen to you. Life doesn't work that way. Suffering just happens. Get used to it" (paraphrased from Job 38).

Rather than answer the question to human satisfaction, the scripture takes the position that suffering is just a part of life. Rather than an explanation to justify this reality, the Bible offers that even though bad things will happen to good people, God sustains us through and in our suffering.

In the fourth chapter of Paul's second letter to the church in Corinth, he puts it on the line. Everything is a great gift from God. It comes to us, however, wrapped in a throwaway wrapper. Human life is "a treasure in clay jars," Paul says, so that it can be made crystal clear that "this extraordinary power belongs to God and not to us." Then he continues that we experience this as the Sustaining Presence. "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed ... So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day" (2 Corinthians 4:7-16 NRSV). To paraphrase Paul's point: "Sure, we encounter some tough times, but God sustains us through them."

In the fifth chapter of the letter to the church in Rome, Paul even claims that there are redemptive qualities of this suffering. As he puts it, "Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us" (Romans 5:1-5 NRSV).

To summarize that a different way, we may never fully understand why bad things happen, but we do have the assurance that when those times of suffering come, we can be strengthened instead of destroyed. As Ernest Hemingway puts it in A Farewell to Arms: "The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at all the broken places."2

Our faith never gives a clean, clear, simple explanation for why suffering happens. Instead, we are told that we can be made stronger by the inevitable suffering. By God's grace, suffering can produce endurance; endurance can produce character; character can lead to hope, and God never disappoints. In fact, we are more likely to grow from the hard times of life than from the easy times. It may be trite, but it is still true:


I walked a mile with Pleasure

She chattered all the way;

But left me none the wiser

For all she had to say.


I walked a mile with Sorrow,

And ne'er a word said she;

But, oh, the things I learned from her

When Sorrow walked with me.



-- Robert Browning Hamilton


On this question we have to live without an easy answer. In fact, when we cry out, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" the response that echoes back is: "You are asking the wrong question. Suffering just happens. It is part of the structure of reality. Look for the strength that God offers to help you through the inevitable. For, by God's grace, you can be made strong at the broken places."

____________

1. William Safire, The First Dissident: the Book of Job in Today's Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 15-16.

2. As quoted by William Sloane Coffin in the unpublished sermon, "Alex's Death," preached on the occasion of his son's death in 1983.




For Further Reflection And/Or Discussion


With which members of the Sunshine Class do you most agree? Disagree?

Do you have a viewpoint that they do not discuss?

If comfortable discussing the matter, what bad thing has happened to you?

Have you found answers? Strength? Redemption?