Theology and Grief: God’s Perfect Empathy

TCE 503R: Theology 1

Chelle Stearns, Ph. D.

Theology Research Paper

December 2, 2014

Theology and Grief: God’s Perfect Empathy

When I was 18 years old, I met death. Death was civil--took my grandfather with all the politeness and regret I expected. We regarded each other solemnly and didn’t speak much. Death did his job. The job was a gruesome one, but it had to be done. My grandfather was old, and lived long and well so far as I figured, before the cancer came. I was not angry when Death took him. Sad and a little empty-feeling, of course, but not angry.

A month later, my best friend’s mother called me the night before my first college final. She said that one of my church friends went to the hospital for mono, but Lee did not have mono. Lee had leukemia. I heard “cancer,” and I feared Death’s return. I wept for the unfairness of it, for an eighteen year old boy, the kindest person I knew in the world, with the disease that took my grandfather. I closed my eyes and asked my damp pillow, “Why, God, why? Why him? Why now?” I prayed for his remission to stick, but he relapsed. I prayed for his bone marrow transplant to succeed; it failed. I prayed for Lee to live, prayed harder for it than I’d ever prayed. But when doctors told me, told his parents, that there was nothing left to be done, I stopped praying. I stopped asking why. I sat by his bed, and when the medications pulled him under, I wept. I read the loudest lament psalms, gave up hope. I dwelled in the bleak knowledge that death would come again. Five years after his diagnosis, Lee died. For months, my prayers were rarely any longer than, “God. Help me.”

When tragedy strikes, darkness falls. We stumble, blindly throwing out our hands, fingers desperately seeking to grasp God. When prayers go unanswered, we wonder if God heard them. We wonder how a God of love could allow a gentle soul to die young. Where is God in the midst of trauma? How can God be good in a world of pain and suffering? If God is omnipotent, why did Lee’s healing never come? These are questions I asked, questions I will probably always ask. No seven page essay or its sources referenced could hope to answer them, so I shall not attempt it. Instead, as a person who has experienced her own debilitating grief and felt and shared that of others, I submit a less popular perspective.

God’s immanence does not wane in the darkness. Instead, God’s immanence is intimate; God not only remains with us, God suffers too. Because of Jesus, God knows the pain of loss and betrayal and the sting of death. The love of Yahweh, the crucifixion of Christ, and the movement of the Spirit give Creator God deep proximity to our suffering, such closeness that the Creator feels it too.

Children confused by the evening news are just as likely to question theodicy as the intellectual giants of the faith. C.S. Lewis explores the issue of human suffering in The Problem of Pain.

[Christianity] is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain: it is itself one of the awkward facts which have to be fitted into any system we make. In a sense, it creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.

In humility and eloquence, Lewis explores the nature of suffering and the nature of God. He suggests humanity would not object so to pain if we we not so convinced that God is loving and good. Initially, Lewis’s exploration of God’s omnipotence focus on the importance of human free will-- where does that leave Lee, who did not choose cancer? Lewis might answer with a more eloquent version of the platitude loathed by the grieving: “What seems to us good may therefore not be good in [God’s] eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil,” which smacks of God’s “mysterious ways.” Lewis, what little consolation you offer! But even Lewis, in the midst of his intellectual meandering, touches on the truth we seek, quoting Hosea 11:8 where Yahweh agonizes “How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? How shall I abandon thee, Israel? Mine heart is turned within me.” Even as he seeks to show that God transcends our definitions of love and justice, Lewis stumbles onto scriptural evidence that God feels and suffers.

The suffering of God is not a new concept. Through the Hebrew Bible, glimpses of God’s pain rest in verses like the very one Lewis quotes. Terence Fretheim wrote an entire book on the concept of God’s suffering from an Old Testament perspective. Fretheim begins with the importance of metaphor and the nuance thereof. “God is not simply father: God is a certain kind of father. God is a loving father, always (Hos. 11:1). And God is not simply mother; God is a certain kind of mother. God is a mother who will not forget her children, ever (Isa. 49:15).”

Throughout his text, Fretheim guides us through instances of divine suffering, particularly as show in the Hebrew Bible, whose God is much maligned by western Evangelical readings of wrath and rage. He explores new metaphors, or new understandings of ancient ones. (In a longer paper, I would praise both the accessibility and eloquence of his book.) Perhaps God is bound by the rules inherent in that which God created, or bound by the promises God makes, and God’s freedom to intervene in tragedy is limited. But this is circular, and not the issue at hand. Fretheim claims that God can be vulnerable, can suffer violence, and that the Old Testament notion of omnipotence is different. He also writes and bluntly that:

The immanent and transcendent God of Israel is immersed in the space and time of this world; this God is available to all, is effective along with them at every occasion, and moves with them into an uncertain future. Such a perspective reveals a divine vulnerability, as God takes on all the risks that authentic relatedness entails. Because of what happens to that relationship with those whom God loves, God suffers.

God loves us, and so, enters into relationship with us. Because of relationship with us God risks the pain that comes with relationship. Fretheim later writes that “God’s powers of commiseration, of shared suffering, must be considered unsurpassed.” God empathizes so much that the our problems, our pain, our tears, become God’s own. Yet the assertion that God suffered on behalf of Israel or even suffers alongside us is not where we stop. Indeed, I submit that God’s deep empathy is inextricably tied to the cross, and embodied in the Trinity.

God, after all, knows Death for Death once came to God’s door as he came to mine. God knows the physical pain of the dying body, and God knows the unspeakable grief of loss. In Rachel’s Cry, a exploration of lament, Kathleen Billman and Daniel Migliore quote Moltmann: “The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son.” This moving text on ancient and modern lament continues with respect to Moltmann, asserting that “loss, grief, and the feeling of abandonment are not just experiences of humanity in general or of Jesus in particular but are a defining moment in the experience of the triune God.”

Lee’s diagnosis and death, so far, is the defining tragedy of my life. I can be confident that God, through Jesus, knows how it feels to die. I can be confident that through Jesus, God knows the terror and dread and the final resignation death’s approach incites. Because of Jesus, Creator God knows the insufferable ache of grief that follows the death of a most beloved one. Knowing that God understands is comforting in a way. We can trust God understands something of what we feel because God experienced death and grief through Jesus. But then God is no better than me, a chaplain who says to a grieving family, “I understand your pain because I have felt pain like it when Lee died.” No, God’s empathy not this; God’s is perfect. God does not simply understand our pain because God experienced something similar. No, God feels our pain, just as we do. God’s empathy is perfect and God’s suffering is identical to our own. Only because of this might God be of any use to those who are grieving or dying, especially when God feels distant or even absent. From prison, Bonhoeffer wrote, “Only the suffering God can help.” And the suffering God can help even more than a suffering chaplain for God’s empathy is flawless and boundless.

Through Jesus, humanity and God enter into a Martin Buber-esque I-Thou relationship. Our conceptions of the cross and theologies about Jesus will always fall short because “Jesus the Christ cannot be contained in statements about Jesus the Christ.” We cannot turn Jesus into an IT; Jesus must always be a Thou. Jesus is not the same as the doctrine that surrounds him, and it is in Jesus the Thou that we seek to find the key to God’s empathy. In The Cross in Our Context, John Douglas Hall makes the connection clear:

If, in the face of the one who suffered, we cannot see a Redeemer who shares precisely our questions (What is it all about? What are we for?), then surely we have lost any theological imagination we might once have had. If, in the word of dereliction from the cross (“Why have you forsaken me?”), we cannot hear the anguished cries of millions of our contemporary abandoned and our own own deeply repressed cries as well, how shall we ever expect to find in this person one who takes our despair upon himself and gives us in return hope?

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus perfects the immanence of God through perfect empathy. Jesus’ cry from the cross is his own but also my own, the same thing I sobbed into my pillow the night that Lee died. Why God, have you abandoned me to feel this loss alone? Yet I was not alone; God cried with me. When prayers dissolved to wordless weeping, the Spirit translated, interceded, felt, and cried out with me. Nor was Lee alone; while his earthly father held his hand, the Father God held his soul and all the fear and longing within him.

Jesus himself perceived what felt like God’s distance, even absence, as his death approached. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This alone suggests that no one is exempt from feeling like God has failed, from questioning God, even accusing God. If Jesus, in perfect humanity and perfect divinity, can ask this question, then it is not an unholy one. In fact, it is in Jesus that we can find the healing that comes from God’s empathy and concurrent suffering with us.

In Trauma + Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World, Serene Jones describes an encounter she had with a woman who had suffered domestic violence. At a retreat. Jones’ self-defense class coincides with Maundy Thursday, and so battered women battling to take back control of their lives and bodies, watch as lights are slowly and ruthlessly extinguished in the solemn liturgy Maundy Thursday. Jones writes that they women wept, and one said, “This cross story,...it’s the only part of this Christian thing I like. I get it. And it’s like he gets me. He knows.”

As Jones writes, this woman’s response seems simple, but within it, she inadvertently captures “well a long and complex thread of Christian interpretations of the cross that highlight the believer’s experience of solidarity between themselves and Christ as the source of redemption.” Knowing that Jesus has suffered and that God knows our very pain is the very avenue to our great hope for renewal.

In moments of deep grief, we feel that God is far from us, removed from our pain. In “A Hymne to Christ,” John Donne pens these lines:  

Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise

Thy face; yet through that mask I know those eyes,

Which, though they turn away sometimes,

they never will despise.

God’s face is clouded, God turns away, even when love never ceases. But in his aforementioned text, Terence E. Fretheim suggests that perception of God’s immanence is affected by a person’s emotional state. In other words, God does not withdraw into darkness; we have only closed our eyes to the light. In the suffering of Christ, we find solidarity with God. As we cast our burdens on Jesus, we can rest knowing that he feels and understands, and with this, burdens lift.

Bibliography

Billman, Kathleen, and Daniel Migliore. Rachel's Cry. Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Letters and Papers from Prison: The Enlarged Edition, trans. Reginald Fuller, Frank Clarke, et al. London: SCM, 1953.

Fretheim, Terence. The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

Grierson, Herbert J.C., ed. Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the 17th c.Oxford, The Clarendon press, 1921; Bartleby.com, 1999.www.bartleby.com/105/, accessed 2 December 2014.

Hall, Douglas John. The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Jones, Serene. Trauma + Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.

Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1940.