Have You Not Known?

[Our lessons were Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-12, 21c; 1 Corinthians 9:16-23; and Mark 1:29-39.]

“Have You Not Known? Have You Not Heard?”

Our reading from Isaiah is addressed to a broken people long in exile in Babylon. It has been many years since they heard the prophet Ezekiel and they feel forgotten by God. Their Temple is destroyed, Jerusalem has been laid waste, and they are forced to live far from home, serving pagan masters. They must feel about as far from God as it is possible to feel.

We have our times of exile, our times of pain and suffering, when we may feel far from God. A year ago this week, my own father’s two years of illness was ended by his death. Nine years ago, my father-in-law’s brief but painful illness ended in the same way. We all have examples of loved ones, friends, or perhaps even ourselves who have suffered painful, debilitating illnesses. We ask why these good people have been forced to suffer as they did.

In these hard economic times, we have other examples of suffering. To the breadwinner whose job is disappeared, to the family who has lost their home to foreclosure, God may seem very far away indeed. We cry, even as Israel did from Babylon, “My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God!”

We say that God “sits above the circles of the earth” and he “stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in.” He “brings princes to naught and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” How can such a mighty God care or even notice our suffering and pain?

He can care because who suffered pain himself. He notices because he had friends die and wept for them. He understands our hunger and thirst because he felt them himself. He knows about death because he died himself and rose to overcome death.

It may be that it is during times of suffering, when our need is greatest, that we are closest to God. We tend when things are going well to think that it is our doing that has gotten us there and we normally fail to give God much credit. But, when things don’t go well, we attribute events to God—I’ve never heard the term “Act of God” used to describe a good thing. We may even say, wrongly, that some suffering is God’s will.

Sometimes the greatest spiritual growth comes through suffering. Like the Exiles, we may need to lose what we have to find strength in the very elements that exile brings into focus: frailty, vulnerability, the potential for sacrificial servanthood. In exile, we can discover the power that a focus on God can bring when we no longer calculate our own self-interest.

In his book, Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff claims that human fragility and suffering are central to our being made in the image of God and that, through them, we become God’s temple on earth.

In what respects do we mirror God? … One answer that rarely finds its way onto the list: in our suffering. Perhaps the thought is too appalling. … Are we to mirror [God] ever more closely in suffering? Was it meant that we should be icons in suffering? Is it our glory to suffer?

But, as the Psalmist says, God “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” He “lifts up the lowly” and, in the words of Isaiah, he “gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless.” God gives power preferentially to the faint and helpless. The Exiles’ suffering, and ours, is the gateway to God. Human frailty in many ways is its own reward and God will reward it. “Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

God is working things out so that our humility and selflessness will blossom in extravagantly new life.

“Have you not known? Have you not heard?”