Finding God amid pain and horror

This is a horrible and sacred story I hesitate to use. But it is being reenacted in our time.

In “Night,” Elie Wiesel describes the execution by hanging of two Jewish men and a boy, conducted before the entire camp at Auschwitz. “The men died quickly,” Wiesel wrote, “but the death struggle of the boy lasted half an hour. ‘Where is God? Where is he?’ a man behind me asked. As the boy, after a long time, was still in agony on the rope, I heard the man cry again, ‘Where is God now?’ and I heard a voice within me answer, ‘Here he is — he is hanging here on this gallows.’”

Think of the last few weeks in Ukraine — the children killed at a train station in Kramatorsk, the streets of Bucha scattered with tortured corpses, the gathered cries of Mariupol. The world seems bound on some hideous wheel, destined to repeat its worst crimes. It wasn’t enough to stain European history with the Holocaust and the gulags. Now, there are new leaders pursuing their cause through human sacrifice.

For many, I suspect, this mass of suffering overshadowed their Passover, Ramadan or Easter celebrations. We consume the media reports of terrible events. We long for unlikely justice. But none of this touches the human need for explanation amid tragedy. Where is God?

The boy on the gallows is not a Christian story. But it has Christian resonance. It is not only that God is on the side of the victim, though he surely is. It is that the founder of this faith was also the victim of a slow execution. And if God was somehow uniquely present in this person, it was God who subjected himself to a full dose of human malice.

The Christian faith does not set out a philosophy explaining the problem of evil. It responds, instead, with a person. It answers an experience of pain with an experience of pain. It offers the fellowship of suffering. In the process, it gives permission for grief, outrage, even despair. Yet it also raises the prospect of a dramatic reversal. A hope on the far side of anguish. A homecoming on the far side of death. An assurance that the violent will not inherit the earth.

We see the same struggles not only in world historic events but also in the course of nearly every life. In the death of a child from a lingering disease, in a cruel cancer diagnosis, in the self-crucifixion of depression. Every minute is someone’s last minute. Even the bravest and loveliest decay to dust.

There are immoral responses to this tragic state of affairs: to live in smug indifference, or to feed endlessly on our own bitterness. Yet there are also moral reactions. We can live in revolt against a cruel and meaningless world, adopting the existentialists’ hopeless heroism and embracing goodness and justice in a doomed enterprise. Or we can live in the hope that there is a deeper meaning, even if we do not fully comprehend it.

This kind of faith — shared by many faiths — is not an opiate or a self-help manual. It is not a call to look on the bright side. It is certainly not the sanctification of our political predispositions. Rather, it calls the bluff of our deepest beliefs. If we want mercy, we should be merciful. If we demand justice, we must be just. If we hate murder, we should examine our own consuming rage. If we seek deliverance, we should be the source of someone else’s deliverance.

This holds true on the largest matters of state action. Our friends in Ukraine give their lives willingly. Russian forces take lives randomly, show no mercy or remorse, and plan to expand the scope and scale of

Every minute is someone’s last minute. Even the bravest and loveliest decay to dust.

their murder. There has seldom been a clearer moral case for collective action to deliver a nation-state from evil. Failure would be a source of danger and of shame.

A similar moral framework applies on a smaller scale. Humans live in a democracy of vulnerability. We are alike in our susceptibility to pain and loss. We are equal in our capacity for hope and heroism.

This is the message of the cross and the empty tomb. God is on the side of the boy on the gallows and the man on the cross. Even amid horror, some vital purpose is making itself known. Against all my doubts, I choose to believe in a God with scars.