August/September 2010

Only the suffering God can help...

By Dan Etheridge

“One day when we came back from work, we saw three gallows rearing up in the assembly place, three black crows. Roll call. SS all round us, machine guns trained: the traditional ceremony. Three victims in chains – and one of them, the little servant, the sad eyed angel … All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him.

The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses.

‘Long live liberty’ cried the two adults.
But the child was silent.
‘Where is God? Where is he?’ someone behind me asked.
At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over.
’Bare your heads!’ yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping.

Then the march passed began. The two adults were no longer alive… but the third rope was still moving; being so light the child was still alive…

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. Behind me I heard the same man asking:
‘Where is God now?’
And I heard a voice within me answer him
‘Where is he? Here he is – He is hanging here on this gallows...’”
Ellie Wiezel Night (p71-2)

Where is God?

We’ve all asked the question. Often, during some of the harshest experiences of our lives and collectively throughout human history, the cry ‘where is God?’ has been whispered, shouted, accused and lamented. For those of us that utter the question this is no trivial thought. It challenges the very heart of our faith: not asking does God exist, but perhaps more painfully, drawing into doubt the very character and power of the loving, intimate and involved God that we once knew: the God who in former times responded, but now seems devastatingly absent.

The extract above illustrates the destructive and crushing power this question holds. During world war two six million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners and other so defined ‘deviants’ were ‘exterminated’ by the German Nazi party. In historical context, for some the holocaust or shoah (a Hebrew word that literally translates as ‘destruction’) represented the end of the philosophical era known as the enlightenment. The hope that man was becoming more reasonable, scientific and rational was shown to be a false illusion as supposedly rational, scientific and reasonable ideas, processes and policies were uncritically put in place to systematically ‘cleanse’ or ‘eradicate’ certain people groups. In the gas chambers, transport systems and incinerators of Auscwitz, Bergen Belsen and Buchenwald new technology was put to murderous ends, scarring the twentieth century and turning notions of human progress into optimistic, naïve meanderings.

However, perhaps more significantly the story above highlights the plight of a people who understood themselves as ‘God’s chosen’; a designation that has since been brutally challenged by the devastation of the shoah. Where is God when 6 million of his children are harassed, persecuted, beaten and executed? Why didn’t he act? Where is the saving, liberating and involved Yahweh of the exodus?

This isn’t just a specifically Jewish question, or even a question limited to the holocaust. The 1994 Rwandan genocide left 800,000 people massacred - and all in a country that was experiencing a Christian revival. Where was God when churches sheltering hundreds of Hutu’s and Tutsi’s were burnt to the ground?

The same question can be asked by those who remember the killing fields of Cambodia and Kosovo, the victims of racism and oppression in South Africa and even the African American communities of the southern states of the USA.

Even on a personal level we cry ‘where is God?’ in the midst of individual struggles, as family members are diagnosed with terminal illnesses, as debts rise and relationships break apart. Where on earth is God?

The whisper of the prisoner in Ellie Wiesel’s novel Night provides the beginnings of an answer. This isn’t an answer that exposes the riggers of theodicy and explains how a loving God permits evil... Doctrines of free will, human potential and development all have their place, but may be far from helpful to those who have cried unending tears of past memories and experiences.