It is tempting to think that there is an answer to everything.
I should know. After all, I just recently graduated seminary.
And seminarians know everything, right? Or at least we think we do.
We have read the scriptures. We have read the Fathers, we have undergone years of training and instruction.
But what’s funny is that it’s actually not that hard to stump a seminarian.
I’m gonna let you in on a little secret.
If you want to make a recent graduate of seminary squirm in his cassock, do this:
Tell him about a hardship in your life, or a tragedy that has occurred to you or to a loved one. Or, just mention to him all of the wars, the illnesses, and the instabilities that we all face throughout our world.
And then ask him one simple question.
“Why?”
“Why does this happen?”
Because it is very tempting to answer with, “well…everything happens for a reason”
“God works in mysterious ways, and he is somehow working through whatever tragedy that has occurred.”
Take, for instance, this blind man, whom Jesus encounters today. Christ himself tells us that the man suffers this blindness so that the works of God might be revealed in him.
So it can be appealing to simply point to this blind man as an example and say, “see, God is working through his suffering, in the same way that he works through yours”.
But saying that everything happens for a reason doesn’t necessarily bring me comfort.
Instead, it can lead me down a road where I start to think “Well, wait, so GOD is doing all of this to me? God is causing me to suffer? Why? As some sort of example for other people?
Also, this blind man is cured in the end, good for him. But what does that mean for me, when I am
stuck here in my own suffering with no end in sight?I start to think that God is punishing me somehow, abusing me for something I have done. But in thinking like this, I participate in the very same mistake that the disciples make today, just in a different way.
The disciples today are convinced that someone must surely be at fault for this man’s blindness, either the man himself or his parents.
And if I convince myself that my suffering is caused by God, either for something I have done or for his own purposes, then I am operating under the same faulty logic as the disciples, that there is in fact someone to blame, and that God is punishing me.
And what this does is that it isolates me in my own suffering.
Now, when I am hurting, I have convinced myself that God has done this to me, and so I surely cannot go to him for comfort or for healing.
Instead, I convince myself that I am alone. And I despair.
But Christ comes to us today in our hopelessness, and he shows us that he is not the cause of our suffering.
Because God does not work through our suffering by causing it, but rather He works through our suffering by transforming us through it.
Suffering is not something God intended for us. There is no day in the Genesis account of Creation where God created suffering.
And he most assuredly did not sit back and say to himself that suffering was good.
Instead it was humanity, by choosing sin, by rejecting our Creator for our own desires, that created a world of suffering for ourselves.
By rejecting God, mankind molded for itself a world of imperfection, a world of continuously seeking pleasure but only finding pain.
Now again, we are not able to link our specific suffering directly to specific sins.
Just like the blind man, there is no single act in this life that explains our own spiritual blindness.
Yet following our passions and rejecting our God contributes to the fallen state of this fallen world.
A fallen world that perpetuates illness, and suffering, and death. A world that blinds us to God.
But Christ chooses to welcome unto himself all of the suffering of this world, and to bear it on the
Cross.Every single moment of struggle and hardship that we endure, even in this very moment, Christ
takes and he bears for us. He enters into that suffering with us.
And he takes that suffering, and he transforms it into something new. He takes on death, and instead brings life.
And by suffering in this way, by dying in this way, and by rising again, Christ has offered us an example and a pathway to do the same.
Any suffering we experience is now an opportunity to suffer as Christ suffers, to take up our cross and to follow him.
And we rejoice because, by imitating Christ’s suffering on the Cross, we may now look to the
Resurrection, and we rejoice.
For Pascha is already here.
We do not look to some future promise of healing, but rather a present reality, a present victory.
Christ offers us true spiritual comfort amidst our own suffering.
In spite of all the chaos and the struggle that mankind has instilled into the world, God takes that and uses it as a way of guiding us back to him.
Therefore, though it may not be true to say that “everything happens for a reason,” it is right to say that everything God does is for a reason. And that reason is his unending and unbreakable love forus.
Christ is Risen!
