People try to say helpful things when they meet you at the funeral parlor.  Yet sometimes they fail miserably.  When my father died suddenly of a stroke some 17 years ago, one woman told me:  “You are so blessed that God took him quickly.”  I was thinking – “No, I don’t feel tremendously blessed at the moment.  In fact, I feel pretty rotten.  I really miss my father and if I didn’t believe that you were trying to say something helpful, I’d deck you right now for saying that.”  When suffering strikes, people try to give us some comforting words and thoughts, and most often in the name of God.  Yet, as my experience at dad’s funeral taught me, sometime people resort to religious answers that are mostly not satisfying, because to confront the thought of suffering without any kind of meaning is almost unbearable to them.  People tend to teach lessons when what is most needed is listening and understanding and compassion. 

Why do people suffer?  A French specialist in ethics, Xavier Thevenot, gave perhaps one of the more thought provoking answers to the question about the meaning of suffering.  His reply was that it is not the right question to ask.  That question presupposes that there would be some kind of meaning pre-existing human interpretation.  And, he continued, because obviously there are some sufferings which DO NOT MAKE SENSE and for which the healing can start only when one recognizes the nonsense of most of those pat answers.  How do you explain to a child that her grandparents are dead because of a 700 mile wide storm called Hurricane Ike?  Or to a mother that her son was killed in a random act of violence on a college campus.  Or to the father of a pedestrian who was killed because she happened to be at the wrong place at the right time. There are some sufferings that do not make sense at all.  And if you resort to God for an explanation, then you will distort the reality of God. 

At that point, then, the question for family and friends becomes:  What is the meaning I want to give from now on to MY life in the wake of this event?  How do I choose to live now, through the tragedy of this suffering, this illness, this death? 

The Cross of Jesus is there to remind us of what is perhaps the best and only response to the question of the meaning of suffering.  In Jesus, God took upon himself the experience of even meaningless suffering.  Jesus did not seek the suffering, nor was he asking for the humiliation of the cross.  But he chose to live the Father’s love into the world, and had a pretty good idea of where that might lead.  So he takes upon himself the burden of human suffering as well as the burden of human madness – to redeem it from within.  To redeem it from within.   “For Jesus so loved the world that he chose to be lifted upon that cross – he chose to enter into the fullness and folly of meaningless human suffering that it might be transformed.  Jesus absorbed the worst of what humans could do so that he might give us the best of what God could give.   That is the lifting up that John alludes to – Jesus’ choice to transform our suffering by entering into it, to transform our pain by embracing it with arms wide open.  That is the emptying that Paul speaks of in the great hymn, the emptying of all our human crutches and wise sayings and explanations of suffering – so as to live it from within. 

Many people try to say helpful things at funeral parlors. And helpful things in the face of all our human suffering.  They are simply trying to say they love us and will be with us through the suffering.  Which is exactly what Jesus said to us on the cross, and what he says to us a this altar – I love you, and I will be with you through the suffering.  For God so loved the world that the send his only son – to suffer, to die, and to lead us through our own valleys of death – to the bright promise of the resurrection.