Faces of God: God the Enemy

We need God to be the enemy.  Why?  It's the age old question of theodicy:  God and justice. Why does God allow bad things to happen?  Job knows plenty of this.  God the enemy, God in the clouds playing puppeteer with creation.  Popular thought often portrays the Old Testament God as the God of anger, wrath, and destruction.  And somehow, with the flip of the page, the New Testament God is all-loving and now wants to enter into the course of human history. 

The reality is that we want to have a reason when something happens.  In Islam, the Arabic expression is insha' allah, or "if God wills."  Unfortunately, this idea gets applied equally to the tragic death of a child, news of cancer, and the unknowing depths of endless human suffering. Does God really will death and destruction for creation?  I believe the answer is an emphatic "no."  Following the days of creation in Genesis, God blesses the work by calling it good (Gen 1:31). The pain and suffering in the world is the result of sin--turning away from God's will and looking to our own for comfort and happiness.  Cancer is not from God, nor is HIV/AIDS, or even genocide for that matter.  From my experience of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) and working with death and dying in a hospital, I can speak from the depths of my faith that God is present somehow in the suffering and tears of humanity.  God's presence, whilst at times seems far away, is so close that we fail to recognize the comforting love of a friend.  God does not will destruction for creation, the rainbow set in the sky affirms God's promise to Noah that never again will God destroy the earth (Gen 9:8-16).

The only comfort that I can find in the problem of theodicy is simply that we find God's tears falling with our own.  We need to make God the enemy to rationalize why or how something so terrible could occur in our lives.  Again, see the Book of Job.  But even in Job's ordeal, he maintains faith.  Perhaps that's why this bit of the Old Testament gets a lot of attention because we cannot comprehend how and need to hear it over and over again.

There is no question that even in my own journey of faith I have blamed God for this or that offense, discovering only in the end that I am my own worst enemy.  I have also discovered that the more helpful route is to simply investigate where God is present in all my calamities.  That is the true question that we should be asking and the one that most likely contains the raw, painful answers that we cannot bear to face. God was not absent at Auschwitz; God was there amid the Hutu and Tutsi genocide.  God was there when I baptized 16-week old Jesus (Spanish) following his death.  God suffers with us because the suffering is not willed.  Yet, we do know that suffering and pain can serve as the furnace of transformation for our faith and life, but we cannot romanticize the tragedy.  

Living with the problem of theodicy is hard, faith-testing matter.  There is no one answer that completely satisfies the human heart, nor fills the cavernous voids of painful loss.  The only example we have is that of Our Lord on the cross, crying out in dereliction.  In the end, we do believe that God's justice is wrapped up in the Kingdom.  The Kingdom is where we live for God's will and not ours, where justice flows down like waterfalls, and everyone has just enough to eat.