I wrote this for a friend on Calvin-in-Common who confessed to being stuck by the evil he sees in the world.

Are you stuck because Christians should be better than this but aren’t? Because they have at the center of their religion a man who is whipped, stripped, mocked, betrayed, and utterly abandoned while forgiving his enemies and yet we don’t recognize the whip in our hand and the spittle passing from our lips? “He saved others but he cannot save himself” we cried, blind to the fact that he was saving us by not saving himself.

This story was played out in the section of the world according to the older story who had exclusive access to the revelation of the creator God. It was the scribes, the Pharisees, the teachers of the law that were able to paste together the unlikely political consensus that resulted in his execution. They knew Moses best but could not recognize the one who claimed to be greater than Moses.

It was the most “Christian” portion of America that enslaved an enormous population merely on the pretext of their skin color. They beat the identity out of the men and raped it out of the women and out of the children who were product of the first rapings.

Israel, according to the story, was the locus of both the revelation and the conflict. Israel would be the crucible in which the brutality of humanity would be displayed and purified. It would lead to enormous incongruities like that of the loving slave owner who keeps the Sabbath on his plantation.

In the narrative of Solomon Northrup who, although born a free man was kidnapped into slavery. His first master was a good Christian man named William Ford.

We usually spent our Sabbaths at the opening, on which days our master would gather all his slaves about him, and read and expound the Scriptures. He sought to inculcate in our minds feelings of kindness towards each other, of dependence upon God— setting forth the rewards promised unto those who lead an upright and prayerful life. Seated in the doorway of his house, surrounded by his man-servants and his maid-servants, who looked earnestly into the good man’s face, he spoke of the loving kindness of the Creator, and of the life that is to come. Often did the voice of prayer ascend from his lips to heaven, the only sound that broke the solitude of the place.

In the course of the summer Sam became deeply convicted, his mind dwelling intensely on the subject of religion. His mistress gave him a Bible, which he carried with him to his work. Whatever leisure time was allowed him, he spent in perusing it, though it was only with great difficulty that he could master any part of it. I often read to him, a favor which he well repaid me by many expressions of gratitude. Sam’s piety was frequently observed by white men who came to the mill, and the remark it most generally provoked was, that a man like Ford, who allowed his slaves to have Bibles, was “not fit to own a nigger.”

You would think that after this kind of treatment both under slavery and Jim Crow the last thing African Americans would want to hear about would be Christianity. African Americans are now the most church going, believing portion of our population. Go figure.

Probably the most important accomplishment of Tim Keller’s book on suffering is to illustrate how incompetent secularism is in understanding suffering. While most other religions address suffering in one way or another secularism either tries to “fix” it or when no fix is possible to indulge in “Sheilaisms”  , shallowly borrowing from other faiths to at least fix it for myself privately.

The Bible is a long book. One conclusion you can draw from it is there is no fixing people, there is only learning to love them, even the bad ones.

Christianity has a very peculiar way about suffering. Psalm reading should probably convince you that within Israel and the church there are many who are stuck, stuck still in a very complicated relationship with God in the midst of a very unjust and painful world. I wish I could “unstuck” you but I can’t even unstuck myself. Did Jesus really unstuck the people around him or lead them into deeper levels of stuckness with both pain and joy?

Faith I think is an optimistic confidence that we rest in even when we’re stuck. That even when lots of things don’t go as they should, and we watch people self-destruct and watch the work of our hands come undone we can hold the very good thought that this was exactly how things looked at the foot of the cross, when God abandoned his son and the disciples abandoned their master. Believing this is always a gift says the Catechism and it is a good gift. Gifts can be sought and asked for.

pvk
stuck with you.