Why is life so hard? Why do we suffer? We are slaves in search of shade; we are laborers longing for our wages. God has made my days drag on and my nights miserable. I pray for night to end, but it stretches out while I toss and turn. My parched skin is covered with worms, dirt, and sores, and my days are running out quicker than the thread of a fast-moving needle.
I beg you, God, don’t forget! My life is just a breath, and trouble lies ahead. I will vanish from sight, and no one, including you, will ever see me again. I will disappear in the grave or vanish from sight like a passing cloud. Never will I return home; soon I will be forgotten.
And so, I cry out to you in agony and distress. Am I the sea or a sea monster? Is that why you imprison me? I go to bed, hoping for rest, but you torture me with terrible dreams. I’d rather choke to death than live in this body. Leave me alone and let me die; my life has no meaning. What makes you so concerned about us humans? Why do you test us from sunrise to sunset? Won’t you look away just long enough for me to swallow? Why do you watch us so closely? What’s it to you, if I sin? Why am I your target and such a heavy burden? Why do you refuse to forgive? Soon you won’t find me, because I’ll be dead. (Contemporary English Version)
Few people have ever suffered such agonizing loss as the Old Testament character of Job. He literally lost everything but his life. All his children were killed in one horrific event. He was so racked with physical pain and ill health that even his closest friends barely recognized him.
Yet the most severe suffering of all came from the grinding silence of God about the whole affair. Job acutely experienced the spiritual pain of a seemingly distant God. He felt like God’s target, being pierced with sharp arrows, one after the other. It seemed to Job as if God was burdened with his very presence on the earth.
Indeed, when one is in the throes of grief, and there is no response from God, the suffering seems pathetically senseless.
We are currently living in a world of pandemic. There is social and political unrest everywhere. Hurricanes and natural disasters wreak havoc. Religious persecution is on the rise. It may cause one to wonder where God is, in all this human suffering.
As families grieve the loss of home and property, as mothers lament the loss of sons and daughters, and as communities reel in shock over neighborhood violence, how can the loss of life and safety square with a God who is supposed to be sovereign over all creation?
And then there is the very real psychological suffering of mental illness, brain disorders, and unfeeling friends and family who fail to understand the biology and pathology around it – not to mention the extreme trauma of complicated grief.
“Does God understand? Is God even seeing any of this? Why doesn’t God seem to give a @#$!? Am I so odious to God that he’s left the room?” we might say, either out loud or in the deep hurt of our hearts.
It’s the silence that can hurt so badly. Groans, laments, and anguish seem to fly up and away with no easy answers and no immediate relief.
Yet, God hears. God sees. And God knows.
We, as readers, have a big picture perspective of Job’s life. We know the end of the story. We even know why Job suffered, even when he himself never knew. However, even with the understanding we have, there is still a large mystery to the ways and the silence of God.
It is a great temptation for many people to give neatly wrapped answers to life’s most difficult realities. But the book of Job does not allow for it. What we have is a man who never understood all that happened in his life yet held onto his integrity and his faith in the God he never fully understood.
After all, if we understood all there is to understand about God, God would not be God at all.
Invisible God, you are not only unseen physically, but many times spiritually and emotionally unseen, as well. Open the eyes of my heart so that I might catch but a glimpse of your working. Even though I am but a child and know so little, yet I trust in your steadfast love even in the most difficult experiences of life. Amen.
Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
Jesus did not answer a word. So, his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
“Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
Jesus left there and went along the Sea of Galilee. Then he went up on a mountainside and sat down. Great crowds came to him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and many others, and laid them at his feet; and he healed them. The people were amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled made well, the lame walking and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel. (New International Version)
Not much happens until something becomes urgent.
A doctor, a financial planner, or a preacher can tell us something until they are blue in the face, but it usually doesn’t mean much without a sense of urgency that a change must occur – that the way things are isn’t going to cut it any longer.
We can say eating healthy is of value, yet unless there is a sense of urgency to it, it is difficult to do. Someone can proclaim that retirement savings is important, yet unless there is a sense of desperate action, it likely won’t happen.
Christians say prayer is important, lost people matter to God, and ministry to youth is the hope of the world. Yet without a sense of urgency, there is procrastination and talking, resulting in zero change.
It’s the difference between law and gospel, or between duty and grace. The law and duty are important elements of the Christian life. The law shows us our sin and gives us direction how to live. However, law and duty can only take us so far – it cannot effect real and lasting change. Only the gospel of grace can do that.
Law and duty alone won’t do it. And when we figure out it doesn’t work, we try and hide our struggle by keeping up the appearance of being a good Christian. Then, we boil down the rules of the Christian life to merely being nice and attending church (law). Our deep hurts and damaged emotions are handled by burying them in layers of law in order to protect ourselves from any more disappointment.
Nothing could be further from today’s Gospel lesson. We have a Gentile Canaanite woman, who is as far from God as one can get in the ancient world. She is neither concerned about appearances nor hiding to mask her pain. The woman cares about her daughter’s terrible suffering from demonization. She recognizes Jesus as the Promised One and seeks him out.
Only grace, not law-keeping, will save, deliver, or heal anyone.
Grace is bestowed to the humble who recognize the great urgency of needing Jesus – in God’s good timing, not ours. Faith is exemplified by a willingness to beg. It’s demonstrated with dogged persistence in the face of the slimmest of odds.
The Canaanite woman screams for help.
Her daughter is suffering. The region of Tyre and Sidon is demon territory – the home region of the Old Testament character, Jezebel – a place far from the covenant people of Israel’s ways.
The woman has no leverage, no ground of appeal, and no spiritual pedigree. There is no way to approach Jesus by any other means than crying out to him with her deeply felt need. In her sense of urgency, noise and humility is all she has.
Jesus is silent.
Have you ever felt like God is silent, as though your prayers were doing nothing but bouncing off the ceiling?
God is often silent. Yet, let’s not misinterpret this lack of response as thinking God didn’t hear, or doesn’t care, or something is wrong with me. Silence from God is just that – agonizing divine silence….
A superficial reading of the story may lead us to believe Jesus is aloof, or elitist, that maybe he isn’t interested in certain people. It seems to me, a better way of interpreting the silence is through the lens of our patience and perseverance, a sort of faith testing.
There is some mystery to this story we may never fully grasp. However, the story lets us know Jesus is not a coin machine where we can slip in a dollar and get immediate change. Jesus is a person, not a mechanism to figure out, to get what we want from him. This is not the way of grace.
The disciples want Jesus speaking to get rid of the screaming obnoxious woman.
“Holy cow, Jesus, just give her what she wants so she’ll go away!” They wanted a healing, but it wasn’t out of a sense of compassion or grace. “After all, we’ve got important Jesus-work to do here, and we don’t need this woman upsetting the peace, rocking the boat, challenging the status quo, making waves, and ruining our sanctified party.”
The disciples labeled the woman as loud and undeserving. Frankly, they may have been right. But they were operating out of law, not grace.
Jesus and the Canaanite woman, from Saint Germain-l’Auxerrois church in Paris, France
Sometimes the most compassionate thing we can do is not give everybody what they want, right away.
Jesus did not come to this earth to ensure everybody gets their way and stays happy so that no one is upset. In fact, Christ did quite the opposite. Jesus sought to do his father’s will by establishing the kingdom of God on this earth – teaching values that weren’t part of the religious culture, telling the most “godly” people of the time they were a brood of vipers, and generally offending a lot of people who claimed to know God.
Jesus cared enough about the woman to not immediately give her what she wanted. She had to go hard after Jesus, to keep going after him, to exercise her faith muscle.
Jesus doesn’t give the disciples what they want, either.
Two different petitions were given to Jesus, and his response doesn’t really address either one of those asking’s. He just says he was sent to the lost sheep of Israel. Yet the woman responds as if she doesn’t even hear what Jesus just said.
The chosen nation of Israel was meant by God to be a missionary people. All nations on earth are blessed through Abraham, through the Jewish people. It has always been God’s design to have the Gentiles come to faith, and the way that was to happen was through Israel being a great missionary people proclaiming God and being a light to the nations.
I tell you that Christ became a servant of the Jews to show that God has done what he promised their great ancestors. Christ also did this so that the non-Jewish people could praise God for the mercy he gives to them. The Scriptures say,
“So, I will give thanks to you among the people of other nations; I will sing praise to your name.” (Romans 15:8-9, ERV)
And that is exactly what happened. I am a Gentile Christian today because a small group of Jewish persons took the gospel of grace given them by Jesus and fulfilled their role as a missionary people.
The woman worships and tries Jesus again.
Jesus never said “no” to the woman. This was the basis for her asking again. She reasons much like an infatuated teenager who asks the girl of his affections, “so, what kind of chance do I have going out with you?” The girl responds to the teenage boy, “a million to one.” And the boy responds to her, “so, what you’re saying to me is that there’s a chance!”
Slim as the woman’s chances seem, she saw an opening where others might not. This is precisely the nature of true faith – it sees possibilities where none seem to exist.
This is raw, real, and persistent faith. If we don’t resonate with this kind of faith and persistence, there is not a sufficient level of urgency in our lives. The bald fact is: If we don’t pray, it’s because there is no desperation. We are still more fixed on law than gospel. Duty only goes so far.
Jesus still doesn’t answer the woman’s request, but gives her a metaphor about dogs, instead.
Jesus is restating what he said about the Jews: Salvation is through the Jews, not around them. We cannot ignore or get rid of the Old Testament because the gospel comes through it.
The woman still doesn’t give up but works with the metaphor.
She doesn’t argue with Jesus about being a dog; doesn’t insist she ought to be an exception; doesn’t say she has a right to be like the Jews; and doesn’t claim Jesus is being unfair or uncaring.
The woman simply accepts Christ’s words. Then, replies that even as a dog she would be allowed to receive a few crumbs from the table of the children. She might be a dog, but she’s still in the house, even if it’s under the highchair. The woman is looking for mercy as expectantly as my own dog looks at me with those sad brown eyes while I’m eating.
Jesus honors her faith.
Why? Because she humbly looked for grace. We need not write an essay to God about why our requests should be answered, as if Jesus needs convincing. We just need to seek the mercy of God.
Faith, coupled with urgency, doggedly persists. It believes Jesus will deliver. Great faith overcomes discouragement, despite the odds. It doesn’t listen to naysayers who want us to shut up and quit bothering them. Urgent prayers are an unabashed begging before Jesus because only he can help. Begging isn’t sexy. It isn’t comfortable. But it’s needed.
So, pray. Pray like it’s the only thing that will make a difference. Pray with a sense of urgency.
The death of Christ, Holy Hill, Hubertus, Wisconsin
Christ suffered here on earth. Now you must be ready to suffer as he did because suffering shows that you have stopped sinning. It means you have turned from your own desires and want to obey God for the rest of your life. You have already lived long enough like people who don’t know God. You were immoral and followed your evil desires. You went around drinking and partying and carrying on. In fact, you even worshiped disgusting idols. Now your former friends wonder why you have stopped running around with them, and they curse you for it. But they will have to answer to God, who judges the living and the dead. The good news has even been preached to the dead, so that after they have been judged for what they have done in this life, their spirits will live with God. Everything will soon come to an end. So be serious and be sensible enough to pray. Most important of all, you must sincerely love each other, because love wipes away many sins. (CEV)
I haven’t been a confessing Christian my entire life. I can relate to Peter’s exhortation. I still remember what it feels like to live my life without any thought to God or spiritual matters. The thing about partying and immorality is that it’s a life filled with constant movement. Slowing down only makes one come face-to-face with what is truly inside the soul.
If someone has an empty vacuous soul, or a damaged spirit, or a broken heart, then attempting to drink or work away the inner pain makes sense when there’s no regard for God. The last thing I ever wanted to do was suffer, yet until I had my spiritual awakening, it seemed I could never outrun the hurt no matter how hard I tried, even with all the constant locomotion.
Today is Holy Saturday – a quiet place sandwiched between the ignominy of the cross and the celebration of resurrection – a day of solitude, silence, and stillness. This is something of a lost day for many folks. In fact, many Christians haven’t had a thought that Holy Saturday could have any significance. Yet, this very day has its place in the scheme of the Christian life.
There cannot be resurrection and new life without death and dying to self. There must be suffering before there can be glory. Whenever Christians quickly jump to triumphal language about victory and speak little-to-nothing about suffering, then we are left with a cheap grace which has been purchased with the counterfeit currency of velocity.
Today is meant for us to get out of our heads and wrap our hearts around the important reality that Jesus Christ was in the grave. It was real suffering on Good Friday. It was a real death on Holy Saturday. There is no movement. All is silent and still. Jesus is in the solitude of a dark tomb. There’s no getting around it. If we want a Resurrection Day with all its celebration and glory, then we cannot circumvent Holy Saturday.
To put this in the spirit of the Apostle Peter: Are we ready to follow Jesus and suffer as he did? Are we willing to stop our striving, manifested through constant movement, and embrace the Holy Saturday of solitude, silence, stillness with its contemplation and embrace of suffering? Will you and I have sense enough to pray? Will we practice a Christian counter-cultural shift and face the ridicule of friends so that we might take some much-needed time to be with Jesus in the tomb? Or are we so antsy and anxious that we just want to leap into Easter with no solidarity with our Lord in the grave?
You may think I’m being a bit too hard or harsh or cold…. That’s because Jesus is cold. He has a bonified cold dead body. It’s no fake death. There’s no “swoon theory” here, as if Christ only passed-out and did a weird divine fainting spell. Nope. He’s dead. And if you and I want to live with Jesus, we must die with Jesus.
Anyone who tries to promise new life apart from journeying with Jesus into the grave is a spiritual charlatan. Only through death can there be life.
On this Holy Saturday, let’s intentionally slow down, do less, give ourselves a large chunk of unstructured time, and put aside routine matters. Fill the time with unfettered access to God in Christ. Slowly read the Gospel accounts of Christ’s death and burial. Read the book of 1 Peter. Allow prayers to arise from the careful and mindful reading of Scripture. Feel the solidarity with Jesus, journey with him along the way from life to death… so that there might be a truly glorious resurrection filled with abundant life and flourishing – a life that doesn’t need hedonism and workaholism to feel happy and significant.
May you die well so that you might live well.
Loving Lord Jesus, today all is silent. You died a horrific death and gave incredible mercy from your wounded heart. Now you rest in the tomb as the soldiers keep vigil. I also keep vigil, although in a quite different way. I know this day doesn’t last forever; there is tremendous glory coming. Yet, for now I sit quietly mourning your death. Assist me, God Almighty, to enter the sorrow and the silence of this Holy Saturday. Today, help me to wait patiently and to sit with this constellation of emotions swirling around my heart. As I keep this sacred vigil, fill me with hope – not only looking forward to the celebration of your Resurrection – yet also to anticipate the hope of my own share in the new life you offer, as you lay lifeless and still. May your rest transform the brokenness of my own soul, my weaknesses, and my sin. I express my trust, O God, in your mighty power to do all things through Jesus Christ, my Lord, your beloved Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
Praise the Lord! Because it is good to sing praise to our God! Because it is a pleasure to make beautiful praise!
The Lord rebuilds Jerusalem, gathering up Israel’s exiles. God heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds. God counts the stars by number, giving each one a name. Our Lord is great and so strong! God’s knowledge cannot be grasped! The Lord helps the poor, but throws the wicked down on the dirt!
Sing to the Lord with thanks; sing praises to our God with a lyre! God covers the skies with clouds; God makes rain for the earth; God makes the mountains sprout green grass. God gives food to the animals— even to the baby ravens when they cry out. God does not prize the strength of a horse; God does not treasure the legs of a runner. No. The Lord treasures the people who honor him, the people who wait for his faithful love. (CEB)
Early each morning I rise, take the dog for a short walk, make a cup of coffee, then open the life-giving message from the God of the Bible. I read out loud – slowly, mindfully, carefully – allowing the words to seep and make their way down into my soul.
The Holy Spirit of God gently nudges, sometimes forcefully hurls, me toward a verse, phrase, or word from the text. Contemplating, ruminating, thinking about the Holy Scripture begins to set the trajectory of my day. God is throughout the hours, as I move from one to the next. Sometimes the Lord and Scripture are very much at the forefront of my thinking, other times in the background shaping how I speak and act, and always on my heart enlarging it and filling it with his grace.
Most of life is lived in the mundane. The banality of life is the norm, even in times of change. While others run from prayer to prayer looking for miracles and the next big spiritual high, the one who is patient… waits… and honors God… has a treasure within which transcends language or outward fanfare. The settled conviction of the person in continual communion with the God of the universe peacefully waits for faithful, steadfast, committed, divine love.
There is no description for such a divine/human spiritual relation which exists, giving patience to the penitent and joy to the heart of God. Such love exists beyond the plane of daily news crises and the continual hum of the crowd. Indeed, the Lord God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, has stooped to cup his hands and treasure the creature formed in the divine image.
“Prayer is an act of love; words are not needed. Even if sickness distracts from thoughts, all that is needed is the will to love.”
Teresa of Ávila
Patience is not a bore. To wait is to be at peace. Because God is there. And it is good to be full of God.
O God of peace, you are the one who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your gentle Spirit, lift us, we pray, to your loving presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Rev. Tim Ehrhardt 