A God who Feels Pain

If you’ve been to a carol service this year, you might have heard that cryptic phrase: the Word became flesh. While those words seem confusing on their own, the rest of this passage from the Gospel of John makes it clear that they describe the essence of the Christmas story: God took on human form.

This fundamental truth of Christianity changes the way we think about the man we call Jesus. We miss the point if describe Jesus as a teacher, humanitarian or prophet. By becoming human, God revealed something more than ethical guidance. He revealed something of Himself.  

When God became Man, He made it clear that He is a God who cares for the people he created. Some people, asking themselves why a personal God would create a world so full of terrible things, argue that God must be impersonal. They see God as being in everything and everyone, or as a force like gravity, or as some ultimate truth.

I understand how someone could come to that conclusion. The problem of evil is something that has perplexed Christians for millennia. But thinking of God as impersonal doesn’t deal with that problem. It may make God less responsible, but it leaves Him indifferent to suffering. To me, that’s far worse than believing in a God who is control when suffering happens. It means God is unable to explain or even understanding the pain we experience in life. Some religions and philosophies see transcending suffering as the key to a meaningful existence. But how can any ultimate truth explain anything if it can’t account for the pain that characterises so much of human life? And how could any ultimate truth ask us to ignore the feelings that are so fundamental to the who we are? Sometimes, I wonder if the only people able to transcend suffering are those who have never experienced it.

But if God became Man, then He not only understands pain- He experienced it. When faced with the death of His close friend, Lazarus, Jesus made no effort to ignore what he felt. He said nothing about the need to transcend pain. Neither did He come up with any sentimental nonsense about Lazarus living on in our hearts.

Instead He did what all of us would do- He cried.

Of course, that would be meaningless if Jesus was just a good teacher. But if Jesus was God, then it means that the Creator of the World knows what it is like to be human in a way that no impersonal God, force or ultimate truth ever could.  You could pray to a God like that. But how could you pray to a force and expect it to sympathise with you? If God is not personal, if God doesn’t care about you, than His existence can offer you no hope during the hardest times of your life. The force of gravity is far from comforting when the aeroplane engines fail at 40,000 feet. I can’t see how an impersonal, force-like God would be any different. Whenever I hear about a force-like God, I think of Star Wars. I think of the Force, a mercenary God that serves both good and evil.  And if God is nothing more than a force, I can’t see how it could have any conception of right and wrong. How would you know that God wasn’t on the side of the tyrant? If that’s what an impersonal God is like, then I’d rather be an atheist.

 At best, you could hope for Karma to carry out some form of justice when you are wronged.  But that offers no hope if you are in the wrong.  If Karma is impersonal, there is no mercy. You must suffer for what you have done. You can’t ask Karma for forgiveness.

But if God is personal, then there can be forgiveness. In fact, God became Man so that there could be forgiveness. In dying as a human, God restore the personal relationship with Him that we had broken. Because he has personal, He can forgive us for breaking that relationship. But only if we ask him to. If we do ask, then we can enjoy a personal relationship with a personal God who understands what it is like to suffer. But instead than just experiencing this suffering, God defeated it when Jesus rose from the death.

None of this is possible if God is an impersonal or is no more than a force. And because God is personal, He is too familiar with suffering to ask us to transcend it. Instead, He chose to endure suffering so that we could enjoy a world without it. 

"He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem."

Isaiah 53:3