One of the difficulties of reconciling the goodness of the Christian God (the God that Jesus Christ believed in; the Jewish God; I AM WHO I AM) with the badness of the world we live in is that it’s easy to misunderstand the badness.
If we don’t understand the problem, we will be baffled by the solution. It will seem no solution at all, and we will be left feeling angry and disillusioned about God. We won’t be able to see him as good.
A striking example of this is the healing ministry of Jesus. It seems to be a simple encounter between badness and goodness. There is a bad (illness and disease) and there is a good (God incarnate) and the good overcomes the bad. Hooray for the Kingdom of Heaven at hand!
Except this simple, straightforward, intuitive understanding falls apart as soon as we examine it. The good doesn’t eradicate the bad! Jesus doesn’t heal everyone, he doesn’t even try! This understanding just needs one question thrown at it to fall completely apart.
“If God loves my mother/father/brother/sister/uncle, why doesn’t he heal them?”
This indictment is even more damning in the church today; if God incarnate couldn’t wipe out illness, what hope do we have?
Part of the tremendous challenge of the Christian faith is that it grounds all badness in a single badness: we are sinners; we are not faithful to God. Indeed, we need to understand all badness and tragedy in the light of sin. Why are illness and disease among us? Why poverty, war and famine? Why isolation and desolation?
In understanding badness we need to start at sin and faithlessness, at separation from God, and work our way down. Why?
Because God’s solution is to provide redemption, spiritual life and transformation. It is from these that goodness is manifested in our physical world.
Jesus’ healings came in the arrival of the Kingdom of God. This is the power flowing forth; this is the arrival of the Spirit of God. He has burst through the door; he is here. The door he comes through is confession and repentance.
When we see that the glorious Power of God came bursting through to earth and yet all were not healed, what do we say?
Well, we say that the power of badness itself is broken; that salvation is on offer to all; that a holy transforming power is at work which will make us comforters where we have been ostracizers, brothers and sisters where we have been strangers, caregivers where we have been oppressors. We ask him to wash away our meanness and disdain, our smallness and our fear.
Illness and disease are not the badness that oppress us.
This sounds such a monstrous thing to say. But it does not minimize suffering; rather it emphasizes good.
We look at the goodness of God at its source: righteousness and holiness. We see how these come to us through confession and repentance, we see how these flow out – from God, to us, to all. Christ’s healing was a sign of this, it was a wonder to make people look and see: Righteousness and Holiness are flowing out, through Christ, through God’s anointed one!
The depth of human pain we experience and the great landscape of human suffering on display in every newspaper remind us how important it is that we constantly meditate on God’s goodness, as he has revealed it.
If we don’t get goodness into our hearts, we will never get it into our hands.
Just as from our faithlessness and separation from God comes our worldly groaning, from his redemption and salvation comes our worldly transformation and our empowerment through his Spirit.
When we pray to God and ask him to “make us better”, he always does. But he means a little something different by it.
