God can never really be said to be ignoring us, even if our experience with God at any given moment is that he is.
I recall reading once from a passage in Augustine’s Confessions, where the author describes the feeling of grief “suffocating” him. I thought that was a powerful way of describing the experience of desperation that can often make grief or anxiety worse. When someone is desperate, they can become almost manic; they see few options and may uncharacteristically betray personal morals to survive.
We sympathize with desperation because we all understand it. We sympathize when the main character in Les Miserables, Jean Valjean, steals a loaf of bread to feed a starving child. Desperation made him do it. When a woman gives up her child for adoption, we sympathize. Desperation was at hand. And when a person commits suicide, though we feel betrayed and angry, confused by and helpless for the victim, in another sense, we sympathize: it was the disease that did them in.
Desperation is like Augustine’s suffocating metaphor. It feels like the slow choke of impending death but also the graphic and frenzied fight to live. It can feel like we aren’t getting any air, that the light is fading, and all that matters is survival. People are good at hiding their fears, anxieties, depression, financial problems, and addictions until they are desperate. Desperation, unfortunately, leaves no space for privacy.
Psalm 69 does nice work in shepherding readers into the throws of desperation. The opening is dramatic, intense, and surreal:
Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in the deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. I am weary with my crying out; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God (Ps. 69:1-3).
These are the words of a person who is spiritually exhausted and believes they are going to die soon. The person is in a living hell.
Although the details are few, context throughout the psalm reveals that what occasioned this suffering has something to do with the writer living righteously (7,9). In other words, the author took the hard road, living morally upright, doing the right things, and being a good person. And for this, he has suffered a great injustice. Whatever the misunderstanding is, it has made him “enemies” and caused estrangement from his closest family members (8,14). He is suffering greatly, and at times he becomes indignant, praying curses down on his enemies (22-28). But we can give the author, an otherwise reliably good man, some sympathy. He is desperate. Listen to just a few of his petitions:
- Deliver me! (vs. 14)
- Answer me! (vs. 16)
- Hide not from me! (vs. 17)
- Draw near to my soul, redeem me! (vs. 18)
- I am afflicted and in pain, let your salvation, O God, set me on high! (vs. 29)
These are the cries of a man at the end of himself and doubly hurt by God’s apparent silence and inaction when he needs God most. In truth, God’s silence may pain him more than his situation. It is one thing for family and others to believe lies and be taken in by rumor and conjecture. We can be angry our loved ones were deceived, frustrated they did not trust us and our character, all the while understanding that they are under the spell of misunderstanding or deceitful forces. But God never gets to use that excuse. God is never deceived; he knows our hearts, the facts regarding what happened, and the ultimate truth. So, people face a certain kind of spiritual pain, like this Psalmist, when they struggle to understand God’s silence and apparent inaction. “Everyone has abandoned me, why you too? You know I am innocent!”
What sufferers need is not justifications for God’s actions but truth in the form of promises.
Notice I keep saying apparent inaction. That’s because God can never really be said to be ignoring us, even if our experience with God at any given moment is that he is. Perhaps God is waiting for the right time to intervene, to set things right? But there is little comfort here. There is little comfort in a spirituality of faith that argues for the ends justifying the means when it comes to God. Even if that were true (and I’m not confident it is), it would be a cruel ministry to the broken and desperate: “You’re suffering is all worth it because of some good end.” Is that really the only theological answer for those hurt by God’s mysterious and painful ways?
Desperate people, like this Psalmist, need more than academic or theological explanations for God’s apparent motives. It may be fine and good to assign God reasons for why he behaves as he does in the theological classroom or bible study. But for those “weary from crying out,” such defenses are not helpful. In the throws of desperation, sufferers do not need theological defense attorneys justifying God’s ways (this is exactly why Job’s friends were such terrible comforters and abysmal theologians). God can defend himself. What sufferers need is not justifications for God’s actions but truth in the form of promises. People can accept that God has sovereign ways of dealing with them and the world, but that acceptance is a rational explanation. Hurt people, in the throws of doubt, do not need rational arguments but God’s promises to them. We are complicated beings who are emotional as well as rational. In desperation, we need the truth about how God loves us and cares for us, not high theology speculating on God’s hidden will.
Truth is the only salve in such situations, but it is the truth from a certain spring of water, living water that comforts and gives life. That journey to hope begins with the desperate return to Christ himself, who, as a man, suffered greatly. By return, I mean a focus on Christ as revealed to us.
In Christ, we see the desperation of human existence in his own life. He was poor, and it seems likely he lost his father, Joseph, at a young age. He was rejected by those in his hometown; the religious and political establishments later rejected him, and then his own closest friends. He was tempted by Satan, harassed and hurt by that old serpent. The “faithful” often saw him only as a means to an end, a healer, and not for who he really was. So, he was used to being misunderstood. He endured injustice at the hands of both Jewish and Roman courts and was lied about, tortured, and mocked. He was shamed publicly, never owned a home, and sold for a relatively low amount of silver. He was nailed to a cross for sins he did not commit and suffered the wrath of God for those he loved.
Jesus Christ is God-betrayed. And as God-betrayed, one intimately able to relate to those who have also felt betrayed and abandoned by God. Christ’s lips speak the words of the desperate, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” These words are not original to him but to Psalm 22. In using them on the cross, he appropriates them to his own experience and births a blessed solidarity with the desperate. In Revelation 6:9-11, when the fifth seal is opened, the martyrs under the altar in heaven cry out for justice. They are given a white robe and told to wait a little longer.
Jesus Christ is God-betrayed. And as God-betrayed, one intimately able to relate to those who have also felt betrayed and abandoned by God.
Wait a little longer. It is the one thing the desperate do not want to hear. How could anyone do it? I think only by traversing the way of Christ, by meditating on his suffering and the promises of his salvation. Only then can we endure the desperate machinations and troubles that assail faithful followers. We are, after all, not given to walk around the Valley of Death, but through it, through it with a Shepherd who walks alongside us.
Only when we are able to claim and see that Jesus Christ is also God-betrayed, one whose closest relations abandoned him, can we follow him in desperation. God was betrayed by everyone. Totally abandoned, so we do not ever have to be. For in the garden, before his death, sweating drops of blood and offered a cup of wrath, we see his desperation. Desperation cannot be hidden, and Christ wears it so that we can know he understands our plight as a fellow sufferer.
But Christ, like the Psalmist in 22 and 69, maintains trust in God. They continue to seek and trust him. Faith knows the truth and grabs hold of it even when experience can make no sense of faith. This is the work of the Holy Spirit and the Word.
For those of us who know people caught in desperation, I hope we can help them by meeting their needs and, if this is not appropriate, by committing to prayer. For desperate readers, I can only say that there is no one road or way out of suffering. Until new options materialize (and they will) and circumstances change (they will), there is One who has been where you are. His violence-torn hands are stretched out now with beckoning invitation. It is a summons to come and receive an embrace, to share the load, to be double-yoked with him. It is an invitation that never is fulfilled because Christ is always reaching out, always embracing, always coming into the new and fraught moments of our suffering and fear. So, it is an embrace that can never be used up or overused.
Taking his hand means that you will suffer as one, not alone. It is to trust that the Suffering God can see you, meet you, and heal you in your suffering and in his silence. It is to take up the cross and follow, but not for the sake of suffering, but for the sake of being like him in your suffering. Not because “being like him” is the reason you are suffering, but because “being like him” in suffering has a winnowing effect that gives you him in ways that you could not know without out. This doesn’t mean it justifies the suffering; only that in suffering can God be seen in new, graceful ways.
When the Suffering Servant meets you in your suffering, it is there that the love of God will become afresh and subtly perfect. And this never makes suffering good; it may not make suffering “worth it,” but it does mean that, for those who are desperate, there is a place to go, a person who knows and whose hands are ready to embrace. In the end, when all things are made new, our suffering will not be wasted. Like those martyrs, God will set right whatever has been extracted from us (as he did for Job). There is no way to know why God allows certain suffering. But there are promises from a Suffering God that meet us in our own desperation and reach out to quiet and assist broken hearts.
