Suffering Love
Many people rightly question how there can be a good or just God in the presence of so much evil and suffering in the world—about which “God” appears to do nothing. Exactly how is God loving and sustaining what God created? That is our constant dilemma, and without some answer you can quite reasonably become an atheist or at least an agnostic.
I believe—if I am to believe Jesus—that God is precisely suffering love. If Jesus is the living “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), and if there is this much suffering in the world, then God is in some very real way suffering. God is not watching it, but in it! Did your church ever tell you that? How else can we understand the revelation of the cross and that our central Christian image is a naked, bleeding, suffering man? Christians strangely worship a suffering God, largely without realizing it
.. The genius of Jesus’ ministry is his revelation that God uses tragedy, suffering, pain, betrayal, and death itself, not to wound you but in fact to bring you to God. There are no dead ends. Everything can be transmuted and everything can be used.
On the cross, in dramatic theater, God took the worst thing, the killing of God, and made it into the best thing—the redemption of the world!