For all my faith, two questions continue to haunt me.
I remember driving through rural Georgia in the late 1960s. This was the Deep South, where religion was as ubiquitous as fried food and high-school football, and occasionally I saw on a highway bridge or railroad trestle a zealot’s hand-painted advertisement for God: “Jesus Is Coming Soon—Are You Ready?” or, “The Wages of Sin Is Death.”
But already the smart-alecky spirit of the sixties had infiltrated the Bible Belt. On a large boulder, beneath the message, “Jesus Is the Answer,” someone had scrawled, “So What’s the Question?”
That roadside message stuck with me, and I later saw it appearing on placards and bumper stickers. The graffitist may have intended only an irreverent joke, but he or she had identified the crux of Christian apologetics. In many parts of the country, the church was losing ground because it was giving answers to questions people were no longer asking, and not giving answers to questions they were asking.
Since that day, and especially during times of discouragement and doubt, I have asked myself the question scrawled on that rock.
So what is the question Jesus provides the answer to, for me? Am I hanging onto faith out of habit, like a regional accent I grew up with and can’t seem to shed? Or does Jesus indeed provide the answer to some fundamental question of my existence?
Most of my own doubts, I have learned, circle around two questions: Do I matter? and Does God care? These are the watersheds of my faith. If Jesus is the answer for me, then he must somehow speak to those two questions.
As I stand in the cashier line of the Safeway supermarket, I look around me. I see teenagers with shaved heads and nose rings; a yuppie buying one steak, a few twigs of asparagus, and a baking potato; an elderly woman hunched over from osteoporosis, squeezing bruises into the peaches and strawberries. I ask myself, Does God know all these people by name? Do they really matter to him?
Sometimes when I watch the scenes of abortion protests and counterprotests on the evening news, I try to envision the fetuses that have prompted such ferocity. I have seen fetuses on display in museum jars to illustrate the progessive stages of human development. Worldwide, about six million of these little fetuses are disposed of each year—murdered, say the protesters. The image of God rests inside each one, say the theologians. What does God think of six million human beings who die never having seen the world outside a uterus? I wonder. Do they matter to him?
The little that I know about astronomy also feeds my doubt. Scientists tell us that our sun is one of 500 billion stars in the Milky Way, which is a mediumsized galaxy among two hundred billion others, all swarming with stars. Can one person on a speck of a planet in a tiny solar system in a mediocre galaxy really make a difference to the Creator of the Universe? “When I look at your heavens,” said a star-gazing psalmist who must have shared my point of view, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (NRSV).
I was entertaining such questions not long ago when a letter came inviting me to speak at a Christian conference in New England. The invitation letter gave the theme for the conference, a verse from Isaiah 49: “Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands” (all Scripture quotations from the NIV). I had to smile at the irony of timing. In my current frame of mind, I hardly felt equipped to comfort the saints of New England with the kind of verse that is often embroidered and hung on walls. I considered turning down the invitation, or asking if I might speak on some other theme. But before I did so, I went back to Isaiah and read the context of that verse.
I found that God directed this stirring declaration to people who were suffering through perhaps the lowest point in the entire Old Testament. The situation in view is one in which Israel has been annihilated, its holy city of Jerusalem profaned. Historians record that when Babylonian soldiers entered the temple’s inner sanctum they swept the air with their spears, so great was their fear of the Hebrews’ invisible God. But enemy spears met no resistance. Their temple desecrated, their capital razed, the Hebrews were shipped in chains to Babylon (the site of present-day Iraq).
Psalm 137 expresses well how it felt to be one of God’s people then:
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept.…
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget its skill.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you.…
O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us—
he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.
It suddenly struck me that the Hebrews in Babylon for whom the message of Isaiah 49 was prepared were agonizing over the very question I had been asking. Do we matter to God? This is what it means to be the chosen people—to have our land plowed under, our cities razed, our women and children murdered, our strong men sent into exile? The same questions have been asked by Anabaptists, Huguenots, Armenians, Russian Pentecostals, and other suffering believers through the centuries.
“The Lord has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me,” the Hebrews were saying (Isa. 49:14), and it was to these people that God made his promise. “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast?” he asked rhetorically. “Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”
At this bleak moment, the nadir of the Old Covenant, God gave a series of promises in direct response to the questions tormenting the Hebrews. Bible scholars call them the Servant Songs, and they appear tucked into the prophecies of Isaiah 42–53. They are at once gorgeous poetry and essential prophecy. Taken together, the Servant Songs set the stage for Jesus Christ, God’s answer to the Hebrews’ question.
In effect, God puts his reputation on the line. He will answer the Hebrews’ bitter complaint with an act of boldness, imagination, and courage that none of them could have dreamed of, an event that would test the limits of human credibility and divine humiliation. God agrees to become small.
The Servant Songs of Isaiah describe the Incarnation (as the New Testament points out at least ten times). Unimaginably, the Maker of all things shrinks down, down, down, so small as to become a single, barely visible fertilized egg. And that egg divides and redivides until a fetus takes shape, and finally a baby comes from Mary’s loins to join puny human beings on their speck of a planet.
In effect, the holiday we will soon celebrate as Christmas memorializes what God promised in answer to the Hebrews’ questions. The God who roared, who ordered armies and empires about like pawns on a chessboard, emerged in Palestine as a baby who could not speak, who depended on Mary and Joseph for shelter, food, and, love. Here on earth, for 33 years, God experienced what it is like to be a human being. And in the stories he told, and the people whose lives he touched. he answered for all time the question, Does one person matter?
Jesus said God is like a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep inside the fence to hunt frantically for one stray, like a father who can’t stop thinking about his rebellious ingrate of a son though he has another who is respectful and obedient, like a rich host who opens the doors of the banquet hall to a menagerie of bag ladies and bums. God loves people not merely as a race or species, but rather just as you and I love them: one at a time. Once, in a rare moment when he pulled back the curtain between seen and unseen worlds, Jesus said that angels rejoiced when a single sinner repented.
Jesus went out of his way to embrace the unloved and unworthy, the folks who matter not at all to the rest of society—they embarrass us, we wish they would go away—but they matter infinitely to God. People with leprosy who could not live inside the city wall, Jesus touched, even as his disciples shrank back in disgust. A woman, too shy and full of shame to approach Jesus face to face, grabbed his robe, hoping he would not notice. He did notice. She learned, like so many other “nobodies,” that you cannot easily escape Jesus’ gaze. We matter too much.
The novelist Reynolds Price said there is one sentence that all humankind, suffering from what I call “the ache of cosmic specialness,” craves to hear: “The Maker of all things loves and wants me.” And that is the sentence Jesus proclaimed, loud as sweet thunder. God demonstrated that love in person, on the wrinkled hills of Palestine, and on a cross.
“I have engraved you on the palms of my hands,” God said in Isaiah’s day. When he visited earth in the form of a servant, he showed that the hand of God is not too big for the smallest person in the world. It is a hand engraved with our individual names and also engraved with wounds—the cost to God of loving us so much.
My doubts, I confess, resemble a disability more than a disease: they never go away completely. But now, when I find myself wallowing in self-pity, overwhelmed by the ache of cosmic specialness, I turn to the accounts of Jesus’ stories and deeds. If I conclude that my existence makes no difference to God, I contradict one of the main reasons God came to earth. To the question, Do I matter? Jesus is indeed the answer.
In The Soul of the Night, astronomer Chet Raymo tells this story:
Yesterday on Boston Common I saw a young man on a skateboard collide with a child. The skateboarder was racing down the promenade and smashed into the child with full force. I saw this happen from a considerable distance. It happened without a sound. It happened in dead silence. The cry of the terrified child as she darted to avoid the skateboard and the scream of the child’s mother at the moment of impact were absorbed by the gray wool of the November day. The child’s body simply lifted up into the air and, in slow motion, as if in a dream, floated above the promenade, bounced twice like a rubber ball, and lay still.
All of this happened in perfect silence. It was as if I were watching the tragedy through a telescope. It was as if the tragedy were happening on another planet. I have seen stars exploding in space, colossal, planet-shattering, distanced by light-years, framed in the cold glass of a telescope, utterly silent. It was like that.
Raymo adds one more sentence, “How are we to understand the silence of the universe?” The question haunts the rest of his book, and he returns to it often as he tells of his loss of childhood faith. For Raymo, as for so many others, God’s silence in the face of earth’s suffering poses a question with no answer.
The fact that I am a Christian makes Raymo’s question harder for me, not easier. For a person who sees the universe as a product of chaos and randomness, what should one expect but silence? But how can those of us who see it as a product of God’s creative love account for the silence?
Much of my career as a writer has revolved around the problem of pain. The book titles I choose—Where Is God When It Hurts? Disappointment with God—betray me. Like Raymo, I return again and again to the same questions, as if fingering an old wound that never quite heals. I hear from readers of my books, and their anguished stories give human faces to my doubts.
I remember when two people called in the same week to talk about their experiences of disappointment with God. One was a youth pastor in Colorado who had just learned his wife and baby daughter were dying of AIDS. “How can I talk to my youth group about a loving God?” he asked. Another was a blind man who, several months before, had invited a recovering drug addict into his home as an act of mercy. He had just learned the recovering addict was carrying on an affair with his wife—under his own roof. “It’s like God is punishing me for trying to serve him,” he said. Just then he ran out of quarters, the phone went dead, and I never heard from the man again.
I have learned not even to attempt an answer to the why questions. Why did the youth pastor’s wife happen to get the one tainted bottle of blood? Why does a tornado hit one town in Oklahoma and skip over another? Why did that one woman’s child get hit by a skateboard on Boston Common? Why do so few of the millions of prayers for physical healing get answered?
One question, however, no longer gnaws at me as it once did. The question “Does God care?” lurks behind Raymo’s poignant story about the silence of the universe. I know of only one way to answer that question, and for me it has proved decisive: Jesus is the answer.
When I wrote Disappointment with God, I went through the entire Bible, verse by verse, looking for expressions of doubt and disappointment. I was surprised to find so many. Whole books—Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Job—center on the theme. More than a third of the psalms have a dark, brooding tone. Psalm 77 asks bluntly, “Will the Lord reject forever? Will he never show his favor again?… Has God forgotten to be merciful?”
In striking contrast, the New Testament Epistles contain very little of this anguish. The problem of pain has surely not gone away: James 1; Romans 5 and 8, the entire Book of 1 Peter, and much of Revelation deal with the subject in detail. But nowhere do I find the piercing question “Does God care?” I see nothing resembling the accusation, Has God forgotten to be merciful?
The reason for the change, I believe, is that Jesus had answered that question for the witnesses who wrote the Epistles. In Jesus, God gave us a face. If you wonder how God feels about the suffering on this groaning planet, look at that face. James, Peter, and John had followed Jesus long enough for his facial expressions to be permanently etched on their minds. They learned how God felt about suffering by watching Jesus respond to a hemorrhaging woman, a grieving centurion, a widow’s dead son, an epileptic boy, an old blind man. By no means did Jesus solve the “problem of pain”—he healed only a few in one small corner of the globe—but he did signify an answer to the question—Does God care?
Three times that we know of, suffering drove Jesus to tears or lament. He wept when his friend Lazarus died. I remember one dreadful year when three of my friends died in quick succession. My experience of the first two deaths did nothing to prepare me for the third. Grief hit like a freight train, flattening me. It left me gasping for breath, and I could do nothing but cry. I find it somehow comforting that Jesus must have felt something similar when his friend died. It provides me with a startling clue into how God must have felt about my three friends, whom he loved, too.
Another time, Jesus sorrowed when he looked out over Jerusalem and realized the fate awaiting that fabled city: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem … how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing” (Matt. 23:37). I sense in that cry something akin to what a parent feels when a son or daughter goes astray, flaunting freedom, rejecting everything he or she was brought up to believe. Or the pain of a man or woman who has just learned a spouse has left. It is a crushing pain of futility, and it staggers me to realize that the Son of God himself emitted a kind of helpless cry in the face of human freedom. Not even God, with all his power, can force a human being to love him. Judgment would come, as Jesus knew well, and the prospect of such judgment moved him to sadness.
Finally, Hebrews 5:7 tells us, Jesus “offered up loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death.” But of course he was not saved from death. In Gethsemane and at Calvary we get the incredible scene that Martin Luther has described as “God struggling with God.” Is it too much to say that Jesus himself asked the questions that haunt me, that haunt most of us at one time or another? Do I matter? Does God care? What else can be the meaning of his quotation from that dark psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I find it strangely comforting that when Jesus Christ faced pain, he responded much as I do. He did not pray in the garden, “O Lord, I am so grateful that you have chosen me to suffer on your behalf—I rejoice in the privilege!” No, he experienced sorrow, fear, abandonment, and something approaching even desperation: “If it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.” Ever attentive to bodily detail, Luke adds, “And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.”
Because of Jesus, I can trust that God truly understands my pain. I can trust that I matter to God, and that he cares. When I begin to doubt these things, I turn again to the face of Jesus and there I see the infinite, personal love of a God well acquainted with grief.
Only once in the Gospels is Jesus directly addressed as God. It occurs at the very end, after his death and resurrection. Of the 11 disciples, one skeptic remains: Thomas, the patron saint of doubt. A hard-headed materialist, Thomas refused to believe the wild reports from his ten best friends unless he got the chance to thrust his hands into the wounds of the one who supposedly died and rose again. He soon got that chance.
Jesus, who presumably could have chosen to have his resurrection body look any way he wished, had chosen one complete with scars, souvenirs of his stay on planet Earth. When he invited his disciple to finger those scars, Thomas the skeptic had only one response, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus was the answer to his questions.
I am no longer so obsessed with the two questions Do I matter? and Does God care? For me, as for Thomas, Jesus does not give an answer; he is the answer. Mozart’s Requiem contains a wonderful line from a medieval hymn that has become my prayer, one I pray with increasing confidence: “Remember, merciful Jesu, that I am the cause of your journey, / Lest you lose me in that day.”
Yet even so I must acknowledge that for many of my friends, and for much of the world, those questions remain unanswered. As I grow in faith, I find that the questions I have asked of God gradually become questions he hands back to me. Perhaps that is part of the meaning of the phrase the body of Christ. It is a challenge for me, for all of us who know Jesus and in fact embody him, to answer these two questions for the rest of the world.
Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
