No Rhyme Nor Reason
Reflecting on sudden death
Friday 24 November 2017. Silvia Purdie.
I’m just back from a funeral. And I’m gutted. I feel hollow, hungry but not for food. You know the sadness that feels like paint stripper. My grief is not really my own, for I never met the man who died, but for the beautiful woman and two young girls left bereft by his death. We know the family through our preschool music group. The girls’ mum was a driving force in getting the group started. The girls’ father was an environmentalist, at home on skis in the mountains or careering around the hills on a bike. A quiet gentle wise good man and a wonderful dad.
There is no upside to his death, no silver lining. No sense to be made, no rhyme or reason to it. Perhaps if he had falled down a mountain cliff, perhaps, but to be killed by someone running a red light, on a city street? - that is utterly banal and pointless.
Our brains rebel at pointlessness; the human mind is hardwired for meaning. Premature death ruptures the fabric our lives are made of. When a child dies people say stupid pious-sounding things like “God wanted another flower for his garden” because even such offensive rubbish feels better than nothing.
It is deeply offensive to me to suggest that God causes tragic death. It is also outrageously un-biblical. Jesus wept at the death of his friend, and raised a boy to life out of gut-deep compassion for his grieving mother. At no point in the New Testament is death referred to as being the will or action of God. With one exception, Jesus himself, who willingly walked to death on the cross. For one reason, to go on ahead of us into the terrible suffering of death, so that we would not be abandoned to it. So that death would not have the last word. So that life and love would conquer the grave.
As I get older I find myself growing in my capacity to hold both meaning and lack of meaning. I don’t ask the ‘why?’ question any more. Why did this man die? He died because another man chose to drive through a red light. That’s it. There is no other answer. When we are children we ‘know’ that the world revolves around us. So the 4-year-old will ask herself “What did I do wrong that made my daddy die?”. Through the years she will need to let go of this question, just as we adults need to let go of the question “Why did God let him die?”.
Many people cannot believe in a good God who would let terrible things happen. For many this is a big barrier to Christian faith. We would prefer a safe world run by the perfect dictator, structurally engineered to prevent all accidents and disasters. The God that Jesus called Daddy could have lorded over a cotton-wool universe, I guess, but he chose a different plan. This plan that we call the real world gives us far more freedom than is good for us; freedom to both design traffic lights and legal systems and also to ignore laws and red lights. So people are killed and maimed for no good reason at all, and certainly not by God’s action or negligence. The God that Jesus called Dad chose to share this world with us, feeling our pain in order to save us from it. In Jesus’ ways those who mourn are comforted and those who die are raised to everlasting life.
Faith does not protect us from tragedy or grief. But faith does sustain us through tragedy and grief because under the swirling waves of loss there is solid rock to stand on, everlasting arms so much bigger than us that hold us and will not let us go.
Friday 24 November 2017. Silvia Purdie.
I’m just back from a funeral. And I’m gutted. I feel hollow, hungry but not for food. You know the sadness that feels like paint stripper. My grief is not really my own, for I never met the man who died, but for the beautiful woman and two young girls left bereft by his death. We know the family through our preschool music group. The girls’ mum was a driving force in getting the group started. The girls’ father was an environmentalist, at home on skis in the mountains or careering around the hills on a bike. A quiet gentle wise good man and a wonderful dad.
There is no upside to his death, no silver lining. No sense to be made, no rhyme or reason to it. Perhaps if he had falled down a mountain cliff, perhaps, but to be killed by someone running a red light, on a city street? - that is utterly banal and pointless.
Our brains rebel at pointlessness; the human mind is hardwired for meaning. Premature death ruptures the fabric our lives are made of. When a child dies people say stupid pious-sounding things like “God wanted another flower for his garden” because even such offensive rubbish feels better than nothing.
It is deeply offensive to me to suggest that God causes tragic death. It is also outrageously un-biblical. Jesus wept at the death of his friend, and raised a boy to life out of gut-deep compassion for his grieving mother. At no point in the New Testament is death referred to as being the will or action of God. With one exception, Jesus himself, who willingly walked to death on the cross. For one reason, to go on ahead of us into the terrible suffering of death, so that we would not be abandoned to it. So that death would not have the last word. So that life and love would conquer the grave.
As I get older I find myself growing in my capacity to hold both meaning and lack of meaning. I don’t ask the ‘why?’ question any more. Why did this man die? He died because another man chose to drive through a red light. That’s it. There is no other answer. When we are children we ‘know’ that the world revolves around us. So the 4-year-old will ask herself “What did I do wrong that made my daddy die?”. Through the years she will need to let go of this question, just as we adults need to let go of the question “Why did God let him die?”.
Many people cannot believe in a good God who would let terrible things happen. For many this is a big barrier to Christian faith. We would prefer a safe world run by the perfect dictator, structurally engineered to prevent all accidents and disasters. The God that Jesus called Daddy could have lorded over a cotton-wool universe, I guess, but he chose a different plan. This plan that we call the real world gives us far more freedom than is good for us; freedom to both design traffic lights and legal systems and also to ignore laws and red lights. So people are killed and maimed for no good reason at all, and certainly not by God’s action or negligence. The God that Jesus called Dad chose to share this world with us, feeling our pain in order to save us from it. In Jesus’ ways those who mourn are comforted and those who die are raised to everlasting life.
Faith does not protect us from tragedy or grief. But faith does sustain us through tragedy and grief because under the swirling waves of loss there is solid rock to stand on, everlasting arms so much bigger than us that hold us and will not let us go.
