a question about God and suffering

What is it about the nature of love, suffering, and God that bring them together?

One time I went to a really trippy wedding. It was held in a Mason Hall and I remember being a little unnerved by the weird pictures on the ceiling in a room that was way too huge for us. There were maybe 80 or so people at this wedding and the hall was probably build to hold at least 400. The bride had told me about 2 weeks beforehand that she was getting married because "it felt like true love" and she wore a dress that was so revealing that it was kinda gross. She was a pretty cool person otherwise, but the wedding was pretty weird, probably the weirdest (although the wedding that involved the puppet and the cap guns was a close second.)

Perhaps the part that unnerved me most about the wedding was the homily. Now, I have mostly been to weddings of good Christian friends at this point, so I'm quite used to hearing mostly pretty good thoughts about marriage and love and God and whatnot by whoever was officiating the ceremony. This did not happen at this wedding, as the dude (I have no idea if he was a real pastor or not, if he was then somebody in charge somewhere needs to be shot.) This guy opened his homily by talking for what felt like five minutes about how scientists have isolated a force beyond gravity and the weak nuclear attraction. I was homeschooled, so I knew what he was talking about and was intrigued. He went on and on about science and math et cetera et cetera until he declared that scientists that love is the force that binds the universe together. I may have only been a stupid 12-year-old, but I knew that was ridiculous when I heard it.

Now, 10 years old, I've come to agree with him. Sort of. I think he was speaking the truth about the nature of love, but he didn't need to bring in gravity (the only reasonable comparison, in my mind, is that both cause me and my roommate Alex to be extra clumsy.) But love is so important, so unifying, so powerful, and so ubiquitous that the only reason why it's inappropriate to say that it binds the universe together is because Obi-Wan Kenobi took the line. What else do we write as many songs and books and movies about? What else do we celebrate, joke about, worship, or chase after so desperately?

But if we dissect a lot of those songs and books and movies and jokes, we find something deeply disturbing: love is, as Derek Webb once so wonderfully put it, "you're so great, I'm so great, so we're so great together." Anyone who has sustained a loving relationship with someone else for more than 3 weeks will immediately see the problem with this, and if you don't please call me right away so I can help save you from a lifetime of disaster.

So we have a deeply false concept of love, and yet we hunger for it so badly. Indeed, one of the reasons why we spend so much time trying to get love and affirmation from others (be it a romantic partner, friends, family, and even people at work) is that we have such a twisted concept of love, one that relies entirely on how we feel and how other people feel about us. Yet if we dig deeper into the vast library of human creativity, we find more art that has been created about love. But not the sappy, sentimental, vacuous kind of first-crush love (though sometimes it starts like that), nor the warm, tender, caring kind of mother-and-child love (though sometimes it works like that), nor even the passionate, exclusive, brazen man-and-wife kind of love (though sometimes that comes in its time.) No-- if we look at movies like Gran Torino and The Dark Knight, or books like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter we see that there is a more meaningful sort of love. Self-sacrificial love. Even though our culture isn't particularly fascinated with the cross of Jesus anymore, we can't stop telling stories about Him.

We can't stop.

It's unavoidable.

Some readers might give me a hard time for being so bold as to assert that Harry Potter and The Dark Knight are about Jesus. Awfully self-centered of me and my religion to do that, right? Yeah, well, too bad. There is no more perfect story of self-sacrifice, because Jesus had more than any other lover in any other story ever had and gave it all up for people who did more to not deserve it than any other beloved in any other story. And He did so in a way so painful, so trying, and so... well, excruciating that it still makes you shudder when you read about it. And what He accomplished for His beloved-- transformation! Even if you think that the stories about Him were made up, I would posit that His story still licks all the rest (and thus you should give whether or not they were made up a second thought.)

So this finally gets me to my question. Since love seems to be the fragile string that holds the fabric of humankind together and suffering is probably the thickest thread in that string, what does this say about God? After all, the Bible says that God is love. What does that mean?

In Hebrews 2 it says that "...we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor( because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering." (emphasis obviously added.) What does this mean? Is it in God's nature to suffer? Would a universe without suffering be a universe without true love? Would God be love without suffering?

What is it about the nature of love, suffering, and God that bring them together?


go ahead and comment, I want to hear your thoughts.

[cross-posted on facebook]