Joy to the world! the Lord is come: let earth receive her King; let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing. No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground; he comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found ✠ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
The most difficult issue in faith is generally considered to be the “problem” of evil. In simple terms, if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, then why are we still dealing with a pandemic? Why are children abused? Why do tornados come? Why do people get Alzheimer’s Disease? I’ve heard it put this way – if you have someone babysitting your child, and the child runs out into the street with traffic coming, you’d want the babysitter to grab the child or try to alert the cars to stop. If the worst happened, we’d take very little solace in the babysitter telling us that they were simply letting the child exercise free will. When God cannot be trusted to be as responsible as a babysitter is, it causes issues for faith.
The churchy word for this topic is “theodicy,” theos meaning God and dike meaning justice – so it’s a question about how we find God to be innocent or guilty of what would pass for criminal negligence in our court system. The reason I’m bringing this up on the Second Sunday after Christmas is, for one, this question is raised by the reading from Jeremiah, but also because a faith that can’t respond to this question will fade away faster than Frosty the Snowman.
It’s not the appointed Gospel text for this particular Sunday, but just a few days ago the Church marked the Feast of the Holy Innocents, a day on which we remember that part of the Christmas story that somehow never seems to make it into a Christmas pageant – that when King Herod learns from the magi that a rival king has been born, he orders the genocide of all Jewish male infants and toddlers. That is the story into which Jesus comes. It’s not all Silent Night, as moving as that can be. Life also includes the Coventry Carol which says, “Herod the king in his raging set forth upon this day by his decree, no life spare thee, all children young to slay. Farewell, lully, lullay.”
The way that Christmas is celebrated, it’s all about sentimentality. Now I’m not trying to be a grinch about it all – I enjoy some holiday traditions. It’s just that these traditions, even some of the ones we have in the Church, are only tangential to the Gospel. It’s one thing to talk about peace, and love, and joy when you’re reading “Twas the Night Before Christmas” or decorating Christmas cookies. But we all know that most of life doesn’t happen in such sentimental situations. We need a faith that is not just a cozy blanket in front of a warm fireplace, but also one that serves as an emergency blanket after the disaster has come. Thanks be to God that in Jesus Christ, that’s exactly what we have been given.
Consider the words from the prophet Jeremiah, “Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob, and raise shouts for the chief of the nations.” It’s a passage from a section of Jeremiah called “The Book of Consolation.” What reads as a fairly comforting message comes in the midst of a horrifying reality – Israel and Judah have been defeated, the Temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed, and many people have been taken captive from their ancestral homeland and are now living in exile in a foreign nation surrounded by idolatry. It seems that God’s promises have failed. Sure it was easy to have faith and trust in God’s provision back when the walls of Jerusalem were standing strong and the songs of praise could be heard echoing from the Temple. But now? After decades of waiting for and not receiving deliverance, hope seemed but a fanciful idea. As one of the Psalms puts it, “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered you, O Zion. As for our harps, we hung them up on the trees in the midst of that land. For those who led us away captive asked us for a song, and our oppressors called for mirth: ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’ How shall we sing the LORD’s song upon an alien soil?”
So you’ll have to forgive the people for not immediately rejoicing when they heard the words of God coming through Jeremiah: “See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor, together; a great company, they shall return here. With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back.” It’s the same experience as not being comforted by knowing that your particular type of cancer has an 82% survival rate or knowing that most kids get through their teenage struggles.
To be clear, God did make good on this promise and did console the people. Roughly seventy years later, the Babylonian Empire fell and the people were free to return to Israel, where they rebuilt the city walls and the Temple. God’s promise was true and his words accomplished what they said. But we’re still left with that question of theodicy. Because the Temple would fall again about 500 years later, the Holocaust would happen, Sandy Hook happened, and climate disaster is happening. Is God not all-powerful? Not all-knowing? Or not all-good?
At Christmas, God answers the question of suffering and evil, but not on the terms by which we pose the question. Jeremiah declared the promise of God, that “the LORD has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him… Their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again… I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.” This is a powerful and beautiful hope that God will redeem us. And this promise is made real not in the ways that any of us would have expected. The promise is perfected not in a nation-state with the most secure borders, not in an economy that always has double-digit growth, not in cures for every disease. No, the promise comes through a child born to a peasant girl who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly.
This is the promise we heard proclaimed in Ephesians: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.” This grace is what makes this promise so wonderful. Before the foundation of the world, before God said “Let there be light,” before the Big Bang, God had already chosen us in love. So those mistakes you’ve made, those New Year’s resolutions that you’ll forget about by March, those quirks of your personality – they have absolutely zero bearing on God’s love and mercy for you. That’s the tough thing about grace – we like to think that we contribute to our success, but grace says that “before the foundation of the world, you were chosen in love.” Or, if you really want to insist on being a part of your salvation, as several theologians have noted, the only thing we bring to our salvation is the sin that made it necessary. God’s response to suffering begins with gracious love.
What we know through Jeremiah and see perfected in Jesus Christ is that God wants to bless us with abundant and flourishing life. We heard in Ephesians the prayer that “You may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.” God’s promise is that we have been given an inheritance. In Jeremiah, the language is different but the idea is the same – “Save, O LORD, your people, the remnant of Israel.” The idea of a remnant is that God will never abandon us. Even when it seems in our suffering and sorrow that we have been forgotten, there is always a remnant through whom God will use to bring salvation to the world.
This remnant is the inheritance among the saints that we heard about in Ephesians. Our Baptism brings us into the promise of God. This is how God has chosen to handle suffering and evil – to be born right into the middle of it, to endure it in human flesh, and to rise in glory so that human flesh might participate in the power of Resurrection. Jeremiah wrote about being saved from hands too strong for us – that’s what God does in Jesus, rescuing us from the consequences of Sin and the finality of Death. An early Church theologian famous said, “For that which God has not assumed God has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved,” meaning that because God came in human flesh in Jesus, sin has been healed. Because Jesus lived and died, death has been defeated. Because Jesus suffered and experienced evil, it means that evil has already done its worst. Because of the Cross of Jesus, we know that we are never left alone in our suffering. Because of Baptism, we are united with Christ in his death to sin and join with him in his new life. Because of the Resurrection of Jesus, we are promised that nothing can defeat the love of God and so it’s not wishful thinking, but rather the promise of the one who created all things that all shall be well. Jesus is God’s answer to the problem of suffering and evil – not to eliminate it, but to go right into the heart of it and thereby give us a way out of it.
Our inheritance is secure in the heavenly places and so no sin is unredeemable, no death is eternal, no suffering is everlasting, no disease is incurable. Yes, it might mean that we deal with pain, and evil, and disease throughout our lives and even up to the point of death. But the promise of God is that the only thing that is eternal is God’s gracious love. And this promise is what has given Christians through the centuries the faith to stand tall in the Coliseum as lions roared around them, to go into the heart of poverty and illness to serve those in need, to demand justice when it meant laying down their lives for it.
Jeremiah said that “their life shall become like a watered garden.” On the one hand, this means that God will provide the nourishment that we need. While sometimes we crave more, just as Adam and Eve craved more in the garden, all we truly need, we have been given in faith, hope, and love. In the face of evil and suffering, God promises to always give us those good things that we need. And the other side of a garden is that it produces fruits to nourish others. Just as God has chosen us for redemption from before the foundations of the world, God has also chosen us to be the instrument by which God blesses the world. The fruits of God’s grace in us are meant to feed a world starving for compassion, for mercy, for love.
It’s a plan crazy enough that only God could have come up with it: to have love be the response to evil and suffering. Only love can heal. Only love can redeem. And given that God is love and that God created all things, it follows that things can only be restored in love. Love is what God has promised to us and the fullness of love is given to us at Christmas. When we deal with bad things, we always resort to some form of violence, or manipulation, or resignation. But God has given us the most excellent way of love, and in coming to us in Jesus, has given us the way of love to follow. Love came down at Christmas and this love is what makes all things well.
