Suffering

Today in Religion class I introduced the concept of the hypernatural miracle. We are studying the Ten Plagues and, the justice lovers that they are, 6th graders don't like the God of the Old Testament much these days. I keep telling them, "there's a lot of trauma in the Old Testament" but that makes sense to only one person in the room, and that person is the 41 year old mother of three sitting on a stool on the side of the room. That person is me.

So we talked about how things happen in the world and it turns out to be a miracle for some even if it's a disaster for others. I went through the plagues as devastating natural phenomenon that could cascade from each other--an algae bloom in the Nile kills all the fish, the frogs flee the oxygen deprived water, then the gnats and flies arrive to eat up the dead fish and they spread disease and kill the livestock and give the people boils. It's a terrible Rube Goldberg machine.

"So did God make the algae bloom?" one student asks.

"I don't know," I answer. "Perhaps God communicated with Moses that it was coming."

I talked about the death of the firstborn, to a room which obviously has some firstborn sons in it. They are deeply troubled by this one. This is harder to explain than a hailstorm or locusts...and I didn't offer any platitudes.

I just said, "I believe in a loving God. This is God, who created not only the chosen people, but also the Egyptians. I don't believe that God would set out to destroy them. I believe that something terrible did befall the Egyptians, and the people at the time, and as the story was passed down, gave credit to God--but that doesn't mean we have to believe this about God, especially how we understand things through Jesus."

Please don't believe God wants anyone, any group of people, to suffer. Please don't believe God wants you to suffer. Please believe that God suffers with you. Every Easter Christ suffers with us, and every Christmas he comes to live, deeply, with us, again.