Iain McGilveray
I recently visited the village of Captain Cook, in Hawaii. It is where James Cook was killed and there is a monument that can only be reached after a strenuous hike, as the road was covered in a lava flow. Cook, possibly the greatest navigator and cartographer ever, charted part of Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland (often with the same names for bays, etc.). He also assisted General Wolfe by taking shore soundings before the 1759 battle for Quebec. His death is attributed to a misunderstanding. He had landed at Kealakekua Bay on January 17, 1779, in the middle of a religious festival. Some say that, with his two ships, he was revered by the natives as a god and was welcomed. His group stayed for several weeks, returning to sea shortly after the end of the festival. After suffering damage during a storm, the ships returned two weeks later, and relations deteriorated. Clearly, the Polynesians thought this god would not suffer storm damage! Following a dispute over one of Cook’s small boats, Cook was stabbed to death on February 14, 1779. This led me to think of our expectations of God.
The hymn, What does the Lord require of you? calls us to seek justice; love mercy and walk humbly with your God. This is a key message for Christians and sometimes the humble part is difficult to live by. However, in times of sorrow, disgust at world events, including personal and national loss and suffering, people question God and what they require of him (andmost of us have ‘Why me Lord?’ moments.)At disastrous times, preachers have difficulty in comforting their communities. For example, many lost their faith along with loved ones in the two World Wars. Such feelings of desolation happen in our times—consider the 32 dead and 17 wounded students at Virginia Tech, in April 2007. One pastor there, Jim Pace, wrote a book Should we Fire God? (Finding Hope in God when we don’t understand). He states that the answers are clear in the scriptures, but they are often not what we expect or desire. No one is immune to pain or insulated from suffering. But God is there to provide real comfort and hope no matter what we face in this life. While God may seem absent, He is never really gone. While He sometimes seems silent, He is always speaking His love for us. In pain, we learn things about God that we will not learn any other way.
Many others have wrestled with such questions of faith. Philip Yancey, in Disappointment With God, deals with the gap between what many people “expect from their Christian faith and what they actually experience.” He writes about our deepest desire to understand God when he seems silent. He asks why God fails to prevent our suffering, end it or reach down into our lives and make things right. He also examines three basic questions we would like to ask God about our suffering, but few dare ask aloud: Is God unfair? Is God silent? Is God hidden? These questions have less to do with faith than with our feeling that God has left us—that somehow he doesn’t care. But there is an irony in the idea that God seems to hide himself from human suffering. Throughout history, in his dealings with human beings, God has been the betrayed one. God has been repeatedly put off by humans, as a jilted lover or rejected parent. He has been forced to distance himself because people have kept the potential relationship between Creator and human beings from being formed.
Yancey concludes, “All feelings of disappointment with God trace back to a breakdown in that relationship.” To make this point clear, he devotes a number of pages to the life of Jesus. God had come in human flesh to live among human beings—and he dramatically affected their lives—yet was rejected by them.
In Paul’s letters there are some interesting verses about this. Thus, Romans 9:20, “But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,‘ Why did you make me like this?’ ”and in Romans 11:33, “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” Of course Paul was a Jekyll and Hyde character who changed on the road to Damascus and, perhaps, as humans, we should question ourselves.
The last word of comfort at Easter is found in John’s gospel 3.16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”