From here.
The instinctive feeling that suffering must be a punishment sent
from God seems to lie deep in the human soul - or it does in mine
anyway. In my case it may have something to do with the fact that I was
brought up in a tradition of Welsh Calvinism which took a pretty firm
line on sin and retribution.
In my childhood I also had a naughty great uncle, a man who very
uncalvinistically drank and smoked and swore and womanized. He died a
happy man, as you might imagine, but at a rather early age, of
cirrhosis of the liver. His funeral was the first time he'd been in
Chapel since his wedding. But the really memorable thing was the
sermon, and the gasp of disbelief as the minister took a text of
appalling relevance: Psalm 55, verse 23, "Y pechadur ni chaiff fyw
hanner ei ddyddiau"…; "The sinner shall not live out half his days, for
thou Lord shalt bring him down to the pit of destruction".
Well, you know where you are with religion like that; but belief in
divine retribution isn't confined to Welsh Calvinism. Some years ago
there was a small earthquake on the island of Crete, which the local
bishop promptly declared was God's punishment on the Cretans for
practising contraception. And it's not so many years ago that some
people in the Church of England were seriously wondering whether God
had personally hurled a thunderbolt at York Minster in a fit of pique
at Bishop David Jenkins' consecration. It is a pleasing thought in some
ways, I admit, but it does leave you with an alarming picture of God if
you carry it through.
Even on a personal level we seem to have this instinct that good
fortune or bad must somehow depend on how good or bad we have been.
Something awful happens and what we do? We look up to heaven and say
"What have I done to deserve this? - as though divine rewards and
retributions really were immediate and automatic.
Now, as it happens, there is some biblical backing for this
instinct. In most of the earlier parts of the Old Testament, the bits
that date before the Babylonian exile, this is precisely the way God's
justice works. Sinners are struck down on the spot; Sodom is razed to
the ground; whole clans are wiped out for the transgression of a single
member, and the people of Israel suffer or prosper in direct proportion
with their obedience or disobedience to God. At the personal level, if
a man is healthy and happy it means God approves of him, he must have
been behaving himself. Bu if he's poor, ill, luckless, childless, and
subject to cirrhosis or earthquakes, then he must be a bad man, God is
obviously punishing him.
"The Lord preserves the way of the righteous" says the Psalmist,
"But the way of the ungodly shall perish".... "Once I was young and now
I am old" he says, "Yet I never saw the righteous man begging his
bread". I must say I've always felt, reading that, that the Psalmist
really needed to get out more. Because of course it's nonsense. The
theory doesn't work, and after the experience of the Exile most of the
later Old Testament writers saw very plainly that it doesn't work; but
it remained a persistent theory. And of course a very convenient one,
if you happen to be rich, successful and healthy, because it gives you
the added bonus of knowing you're in with God as well. But if you are
none of those things, then not only do you have to suffer your
misfortunes, you have the added burden of knowing God doesn't like you
either.
There's a much-ignored passage in Luke's Gospel that tells us very
clearly what Jesus thought about this theory of retribution. The
disciples come up to Jesus one day and tell him about two recent events
in the Palestinian news. In Galilee Pilate had just staged a massacre
of some sectarian Jews who had been holding an illegal sacrifice; he
had actually had them burned along with their offerings. And then in
Siloam, a suburb of Jerusalem, a tower block had collapsed and killed
l8 people. The disciples were very excited about all this and
distinctly inclined to gloat. These people had got it in the neck, so
they must have deserved it; besides, they had just been to Jerusalem
and Galilee with Jesus, and those people had refused to listen. So
plainly they had it coming to them. But when Jesus replies, what the
disciples get is a wonderful smack in the mouth. "Do you really think
the Galileans were worse than anyone else because they suffered? Or do
you suppose the people in Siloam were greater sinners than anybody
else?
The fact is that throughout the New Testament the primitive theory
about the relationship between justice and suffering is turned
upside-down. Jesus couldn't have been clearer. Blessed are the hungry,
he said, not the well-fed. Blessed are the poor, not the rich. Blessed
are the sick, the miserable, the disreputable, the outcast, the down
and out. They are the ones who will get their reward. If anything, a
man's suffering and failure in this life are the sign of God's special
blessing and care for him, not the opposite.
Come to that, how would Jesus himself have fared by the standards of
worldly success? He who was the best and most holy of men, who should
have been the happiest man alive if the old theory had been correct,
turned out to be a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And then finally, at the end of it all, he got himself crucified.
Crucifixion may or may not be the worst form of torture in the world,
but it had a particular theological significance we mustn't miss. As St
Paul explains, crucifixion was the method of execution which, according
to the Law, was the special sign of God's ultimate punishment, his
absolute curse: "Cursed be he that hangs upon a tree". On the cross,
says Paul, Jesus took the place of all those who were supposed to be
punished according to the Law. "God made him into sin who knew no sin".
"He became a curse for us".
But hang on - you may well say - what exactly does that mean -
'Jesus took our place' ? Does it mean, then, that we are back with a
punishing God after all, and that the Cross is somehow to be understood
as God's ultimate punishment for sin?
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