A Christian Perspective on Suffering

There are many possible entry points to a discussion of Christianity and suffering. Philosophers through the ages have offered defenses for the idea of a loving, omnipotent God in the face of suffering. Arguments address different kinds of suffering, from suffering caused by human sin (e.g., Nadia Murad’s rape) to suffering by natural causes (e.g., motor neuron disease), and suggest that inability to see a reason for any given experience of suffering does not mean a reason cannot exist. Think about the movie series Harry Potter, Severus Snape had a morally defensible reason for killing his mentor, a reason that Harry could see only when he accessed the broader story. But rather than focusing on philosophical arguments, we will start with the Gospel story to which I have most often clung in the face of suffering. It’s a story of Mary and Martha. When Martha was serving, while Mary sat at Jesus’s feet. And it offers an entry point to a whole biblical theology of suffering.

When Jesus Doesn’t Come

In John 11, Mary and Martha’s brother Lazarus falls sick. But the sisters are lucky: they are close friends with a miracle-working healer, so they dial 911 for Jesus. The text claims, “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (John 11:5). But then comes a stunning non sequitur: “So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was” (John 11:6). Jesus frequently healed strangers. He even healed long-distance. But this time, when his closest friends cry out, he waits. This is the first reality with which Christians must grapple. Sometimes, we call for Jesus through our tears, and he does not come.

In biblical terms, we have models for our seemingly unanswered cries. On the night he was arrested, Jesus pleaded with God, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me” (Luke 22:42). But he went to the cross nonetheless. Paul was tormented by a “thorn in his flesh.” He prayed repeatedly for the Lord to take it away. But God answered, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).

When Jesus Comes

Lazarus has been in his tomb for four days by the time Jesus arrives. Ever proactive, Martha goes out to meet him. “Lord,” she says, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you” (John 11:21–22). Perhaps we sense reproach in these words. And yet Martha’s faith in Jesus is complete: Lazarus is dead, but she still believes her Lord can help.

Jesus responds, “Your brother will rise again” (John 11:23). Like many first-century Jews, Martha believes in an end-time resurrection of God’s people. “I know that he will rise again,” she replies, “in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24). But we can almost hear this grieving woman think, But what about now, Jesus? What about now? Why won’t you help me now?

In this moment, Martha stands where many Christians stand when faced with suffering. We have ultimate promises: one day Jesus will return and put the world to rights. But we are much more like children than philosophers. Our pain is real and urgent. It refuses to be soothed by faraway hope. Neat, theological answers will not do. But neither are they all that Christianity offers.

When Jesus finally comes, he does not fix Martha’s problem. Instead, he changes the terms of engagement. Jesus looks into this grieving woman’s eyes and says: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25–26). Is Jesus talking about Lazarus? Perhaps. Though he is physically dead, he trusted in Jesus, so he is truly, spiritually alive. But Jesus is not talking to Lazarus—not yet. He is talking to Martha, who is reeling from Lazarus’s death—a death that has cost her emotionally, and likely also jeopardized her security at a time when most women depended on male relatives for support. Martha longs to have Lazarus back. But Jesus looks her in the eye and says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” As you stand here in your desperate grief, your greatest need is not to have your brother back again. It’s to have me.

This statement is yet more shocking than Jesus’s failure to come in the first place. Far from being the “good moral teacher who never claimed to be God” of modern mythology, Jesus here claims not that he is offering good guidelines for life but that he himself islife: life in the face of suffering, life in the face of death.

All parents know that, at times, they must let their children suffer. We hold our crying babies still while strangers stick needles into their healthy flesh. They look at us through tears of betrayal, and we cannot explain that we are making them suffer now to save them from future disease. Some parents are faced with a far harder task: allowing doctors to poison their children with drugs that ravage their bodies, making them vomit and lose their hair as they lie shut up in a hospital for days, or weeks, or months. The pain is bitter, but with this cruel course these parents hope to save their child’s life. The question we must always ask of suffering is this: What could possibly be worth it? Jesus’s flabbergasting claim is that he is. But this play has two more acts.

Jesus Wept

Martha responds with stunning faith: “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world” (John 11:27). But then she calls Mary, who falls at Jesus’s feet, weeping, and repeats her sister’s reproach, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:32). Jesus is deeply moved and troubled. He asks where Lazarus has been laid. And then we encounter one of the shortest and most confusing verses in the Bible: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). These words are strange because we know how easily these tears could have been spared. If Jesus had only come when he was called, no one would be crying. The bystanders observe, “See how he loved him!” But some also wonder, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?” (John 11:36–37).

We have all had the experience of being comforted by someone who does not truly understand what we are going through. It is often unsatisfying. But Jesus is no remote deity, watching suffering from a safe distance. He is the God who inhabits our suffering. The prophet Isaiah calls the Messiah, “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3), and we see in the Gospels how Jesus is moved with compassion for suffering people. This compassion goes beyond sympathy. Jesus does not just feel sorry for us in our weakness and pain. He takes that agony on himself.

Surely he has borne our griefs,

and carried our sorrows.

Isaiah continues,

He was pierced for our transgressions;

he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,

and with his wounds we are healed. (Isa. 53:4–5)

In this prophecy, grief, suffering, and sickness are rolled up together with sin and guilt and loaded onto the Messiah’s back. And when Jesus comes, he carries that load. He bears the moral weight of guilt and sin in our place. But he also bears the heartbreak of our suffering. Jesus holds us close as we lament. He weeps with us as we weep. He knows the end of the story, when he will wipe every tear from our eyes. But this does not stop him from cleaving to us in our pain. In fact, pain is a place of special intimacy with him.

We see this in our own lives. We can laugh with anyone. But we cry with those closest to us; and the bond is strongest when their suffering connects with ours. In Jesus, we find the one person who knows all our heartache and all our pain. Left by those closest to him, beaten by strangers, stripped and abused and hung up on a cross to die—there is no wound of ours he cannot touch. He has even experienced abandonment by his Father. On the cross he cried out with the words of Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).

Jesus knows his resurrection is coming. And yet he cries out in his distress. Jesus knows the end of Mary and Martha and Lazarus’s story. And yet he weeps.

“Lazarus, Come Out!”

When Jesus comes to Lazarus’s tomb, he is deeply moved again, and he commands that the stone be taken away. Martha cautions him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days” (John 11:39). But Jesus insists. He prays. Then he shouts, “Lazarus, come out!” And the man who has died comes out (John 11:43–44).

Jesus’s power over death is absolute. I believe it is the only hope we have in the face of our inevitable end. But what fascinates me about this story is how little focus there is on Lazarus himself. Rather, the narrative draws our gaze to profound questions: Why, if Jesus planned to heal Lazarus, did he not just do so in the first place? Why did he let Lazarus die, and leave Mary and Martha mourning for days? Why not tell Martha what he was planning to do right away? In this strange stretching of the story, we get a glimpse of the whole biblical framework for suffering. The space between Lazarus’s death and Jesus’s calling of him out of the tomb is the space in which Martha sees Jesus for who he really is: her very life.

This story illuminates both suffering and prayer. We often see prayer as a means to an end: God is a cosmic vending machine; insert prayer and expect results to drop into your hand—or kick the machine in anger when they don’t. But the story of Lazarus upends this idea. Jesus is not a means to an end, a mechanism through which Martha can change her circumstances. He is the end. Her circumstances drive her to him. It’s not that her suffering or our suffering doesn’t matter: it matters enough to bring tears to the eyes of the Son of God! But it matters like a first meeting matters to marriage, or like birth matters to motherhood. It is an entry point to relationship, a relationship formed through suffering as much as through joy. If, as Jesus claims, the goal of our existence is relationship with him, finding him in our suffering is the point.

Suffering and Sin

Recognizing the role of suffering in our relationship with Christ helps us see through a common misconception about suffering from a Christian perspective. We are tempted to believe that suffering is a punishment for sin. But the Bible is clear that—while sin and suffering are clearly connected in a universal sense, and living in rebellion against God can cause us heartache now—the amount of suffering a person endures is not proportional to his or her sin. The Old Testament book of Job dramatizes this point. Jesus reinforces it. Earlier in John’s Gospel, Jesus encounters a man who was blind from birth, and his disciples ask, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents?” (John 9:2). Jesus replies, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3). Then Jesus heals the man.

This teaching sets Christianity apart from the versions of Buddhism that teach karma and reincarnation. Within that logic, our present circumstances are the result of past actions: sins in a past life can determine suffering here and now. Not so in Christianity. Indeed, if anything, Christianity reverses that paradigm: those who live in privilege now are warned of an afterlife of suffering if they do not take the radical medicine of Christ. Those who suffer now are closest to God’s heart. This dynamic is explored in one of Jesus’s most uncomfortable parables—a story guaranteed to send chills down the spine of every person reading this book—the parable of the rich man and another Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31). While we can absolutely look for meaning in our suffering, we should not use it as a measuring stick for guilt, or think that if we only prayed harder or had more faith or did better, our lives would be suffering-free.

Suffering and Love

From a biblical perspective, we must also reject the idea that if God loves us, he cannot intend for us to suffer. This premise crumbles on every scriptural page. Time and again, we see those who are chosen and beloved by God suffering. When Jesus comes, we see that script played out on a cosmic stage: God’s beloved Son, the One in whom the Father is well pleased, comes expressly to suffer and to die out of love for his people. Indeed, our beliefs about God and suffering expose the fault lines between our natural assumptions and the biblical narrative.

The loving, omnipotent God of our imagination would move swiftly from creation to new creation, from the garden of Eden of Genesis to the heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation. But the God of the Bible charts a different course. He spreads his story out over thousands, even millions, of years and weaves in all the mess of human history—sin and sex and death and historical accident. And at the center of history, he stakes the cross of his beloved Son. Jesus’s death is no accident. It is not even Plan B. It is the lynchpin around which all human history revolves, the central peg of reality itself. This brutal death of an innocent man—bearing a world’s weight of sin and guilt and suffering—is the focal point of the story. Indeed, it is the lens through which we visualize the narrative itself. But it is not the last word.

Suffering and Story

The Lord of the Rings kindled my imagination as a child. My father read it to me. Now I’m reading it to my eight-year-old—much to our mutual delight. At a low point in the narrative, two central characters, Frodo and Sam, discuss where they are in the story. Sam recalls how he used to think that people in tales went looking for adventure because their lives were dull. But, he reflects, “that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered.” Frodo enjoys the story Sam starts to tell about their own adventure. But then he stops his friend: “We’re going on a bit too fast. You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point ‘Shut the book now, dad; we don’t want to read any more.’ ”

The hobbits do not know how their story will end. If it ended in this moment, it would be bleak and hopeless. But the story goes on. Tolkien takes them through darkness and suffering and loss to a painful victory, as Gollum bites the ring off Frodo’s hand. The story leaves Frodo scarred in body and mind. But it is a victory nonetheless, and one of which he and Sam hear songs sung and stories told. Finally, changed and matured, Frodo goes with the elves to their land across the sea. Tolkien’s work was sculpted by his Christian faith, and that was a faith not just in Jesus’s death but also in his resurrected life. The journey of all the central characters is through darkness—even death—to new life. But tap them on the shoulder at the darkest moment, and none would know where they are in the story.

If you are in the midst of suffering now, hope of a happy ending may feel crass. A friend who lost his first child to miscarriage shared with me that for a long time, he and his wife could only pray Psalm 88, which ends with darkness. The panacea platitude “Everything happens for a reason” is often cold comfort to an anguished heart. But another friend, whose teenage son was brain damaged in a sport accident, shared his perspective on suffering like this: “People often think that the reality of suffering is an embarrassment to the Christian faith. But I think suffering is the greatest apologetic for Christianity there is.”

From an atheist perspective, not only is there no hope of a better end to the story; there is no ultimate story. There is nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. From a Christian perspective, there is not only hope for a better end; there is intimacy now with the One whose resurrected hands still bear the scars of the nails that pinned him to his cross. Suffering is not an embarrassment to the Christian faith. It is the thread with which Christ’s name is stitched into our lives.

Genesis to Revelation

This perspective on suffering helps us understand the grand sweep of the biblical narrative. The beginning of the Bible paints a picture of Paradise: human beings in relationship with God and with each other, unstained by sin or suffering or death. Many people conclude from this that the end point of Christianity is a return to Eden. But when we examine this idea, we realize that it renders the whole of human history a cosmic waste of time. God could just have stopped Adam and Eve from sinning in the first place. And even if there were reasons to allow sin—granting human free will, perhaps—one can imagine a much shorter, straighter line to draw between the beginning and the end than the Scriptures describe. But the Bible’s “new creation” is not just a return to the idyllic old. It is far better.

In the early Genesis narrative, Adam and Eve knew God as Creator and Lord—perhaps, even, as friend. But Christians know Jesus far more intimately: as Savior, Lover, Husband, Head, Brother, Fellow Sufferer, and their Resurrection and their Life. The first humans could not have dreamed of this earth-shattering intimacy with God. It was an intimacy best glimpsed in their experience of each other before they turned from their Maker. But the lack of that intimacy with God himself explains the strange declaration that it was “not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18). The original vision of humanity was very good. But it was not the best. The best, from a biblical perspective, was yet to come. And the way to get there would be through suffering.

My eight-year-old is an avid reader and an aspiring writer. Her vocabulary is broad, her imagination is wild, but her stories are dull. Why? Because she strives for happiness throughout. Without suffering, her characters cannot develop. Without fellowship in suffering, they cannot truly bond. The Bible begins and ends with happiness, but the meat of the story is raw. Christians are promised that one day, God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” (Rev. 21:4). But we are not promised that God will not allow us to cry in the first place. What end could possibly be worth all this pain? Jesus says he is.

“I Am the Resurrection and the Life”

Believing that Jesus is the resurrection and the life is not a one-time posture of the mind. Rather, it is a daily battle of the heart. As with a kid riding a rollercoaster, all our senses scream otherwise. I’m routinely tempted to believe that something or someone else is in fact my life. I look to the things I desire to fill me up. And those things, those people, can feel so real compared with this impossible God who calls me to crucify my desires and throw myself into his arms.

In those moments, when I don’t believe, I recall Martha’s story. Her heart yearned for her brother. His restoration felt like life to her. But Jesus stood before her, looked into her eyes, and said, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Sometimes I win the battle. Sometimes I lose. At times I feel Christ’s presence flooding my meager heart. At other times I cling on for dear life, not knowing the end of the story. But I must stake my life on this claim: that Jesus is the resurrection and the life.[1]

[1]McLaughlin, R. (2019). Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion (pp. 197–208). Crossway.