Where is God?

“Where is merciful God, where is He?”

This question was asked by a man in a concentration camp as he watched two men and a young boy being hung for stealing food. It is perhaps the defining question that echoes not only from the camps, but also haunts our own lives as well.

Elie Weisel describes the scene in his book Night.

“Then came the march past the victims.  The two men were no longer alive.  Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish.  But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing… And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writing before our eyes.  And we were forced to look at him in close range.  He was still alive when I passed him.  His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. 

“Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’

And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where is he? This where—hanging here from this gallows…’”

No sadder words have been written, and no truer question has ever been asked.  “Where is merciful God, where is he?”

I listen to people’s pain for a living.  It’s what I do.  I may not be good at it and the Navy may not consider me necessary, but it’s what I do. 

The scenario’s change on a daily basis, “I don’t love my wife any more,” or “My husband is cheating on me…” or “when I was young my father put his hands on me…”  “I’m tired of hurting, Chaps….I’m tired of pain…”

Behind it all, whether they know it or not, they are all asking the same question, “For God’s sake, where is God?”

Now, this is not to compare my life, or any of our lives to the horror of the Holocaust.  There are no words to describe my horror at the events of the camps or to describe my awe in those that survived.  But there is a sense in which we all ask that same question when we think of the pain in our own lives.  Where is God in the midst of all the things we go through:

Broken marriages

Financial Crisis

Cancer

Estranged relationships

Parkinson’s Disease

The death of a beloved child

In my own life, I ask where “God” is in the midst of my estrangement.  I am in virtual exile from my church and my Christian Community. The people I work with on the ship neither understand what I do nor find any value in my position.  I am alone on the other side of the world wondering if this sacrifice is worth it.  More often that not, I feel alone and wonder what I have done to be ostracized.   There are times when I wonder if God is completely done with me, casting me out and abandoning me to the forces of oblivion.

“For God’s sake, where is he?”

As I encounter people on a daily basis, I wonder if God is aware of all that we are going through. 

This is nothing compared to the other horrors of the world.  A mother kills her daughter so that she can stay with her boyfriend.  A man shoots up a church in the name of racial cleansing.  And all day I am surrounded by people who laugh at other’s misery, who take bets on whether someone will kill themselves and who consistently advocate for violent and destructive answers to problems and who belittle and bereate and dehumanize people to accomplish their own goals of self-agrandizement.

“Where is he?”

Wiesel closes that section of his book with the following comment, “that night, the soup tasted of corpses.”

In that sentence, he perfectly captures the desertion of joy, the abandonment of hope, and the futility of life.   There can be no satisfaction in life while the cries of the wounded echo throughout our world.

“For God’s sake, where is he?”

As fate would have it, at the same prison camp that Wiesel wound up was a young theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was also asking the very same question, but from a different vantage point.  He writes, “The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who let us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually.  Before God and with God we live without God.  God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.  He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us…The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering.  Only the suffering God can help.” (Letters and Papers from Prison). 

Only the suffering God can help.  God suffers.  He not only suffers for us, he suffers with us. God is not absent nor has he abandoned us to our fate with no more concern than we have for pizza boxes.  Jurgen Moltmann builds on this and states that the only help we have is the crucified God.  God knows our suffering because he Himself suffered and continues to suffer and will continue to suffer until his kingdom comes in full.

I come from a tradition that has a hard time the crucifix, or at least the corpus on the crucifix.  For a long time, I did too.  After all, Jesus has been resurrected, he is off the cross and no longer suffers the pain of death.  But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I begin to see the crucifix as a reminder that God still suffers.  He suffers on our behalf and he suffers with us and at times he suffers through us.  Perhaps this part of being crucified to the world through the cross of Christ (Galatians 6:14). 

When we are going through terrible times in our lives, we can perhaps join our voices with Wiesel, “Where is merciful God?” “He is there” and we can point to the cross, we can point to the wounds of our own lives.