A few months ago, God said no. I’d been praying he would stop something from happening, something that would harm people I care deeply about but was powerless to control. But what I feared might happen did happen.

This isn’t my first encounter with unanswered prayer, but this one hit hard. Perhaps because I was weary. Perhaps it was because it seemed like all God had to do was one simple thing and all would be well. Now because he didn’t, people would suffer for it. So, echoing Jesus’ storm-tossed disciples, I leveled my own charge against God, hurling it as a question.

Don’t you care?

Then, I didn’t rage, I withdrew. My anger seeped out in the prayers I didn’t pray. God will do what he will do, for his glory, I know. Why bother if he won’t answer?

I was fighting for faith and losing.

~~~

Hard questions aren’t new to people of faith. It is appropriate for those who believe in a God who is both loving and powerful to wrestle with questions about the presence of suffering in his world. Scripture is full of such questioners: there are the psalmists, prophets, and Job, to name a few. There’s Martha, sister of Lazarus too.

A few weeks ago, at the start of New York’s PAUSE order, I sat next to my husband listening to a pre-recorded message he gave for our church’s online service. In the wake of news in our community of death and sickness, he spoke on the raising of Lazarus, and of Jesus’ lingering when his friends called for him to heal the dying man. Jesus arrives, too late and without apology, and the grieving sister’s words spoken at Jesus’ feet resounded with me.

“Lord if you had been here my brother wouldn’t have died.”

Martha’s words are an indictment. Jesus, you could’ve done something. You say you loved him, but you didn’t answer.

John, the writer of the gospel seemed to anticipate this apparent contradiction between Jesus’ love and his purposeful delay. He gives us insight on Jesus’ intentions up front: “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was” (John 11:6).

Jesus didn’t linger because he didn’t care. He loved them, so he stayed, and his friend died.

Not but, so.

As excruciating as it would be for Martha to live through, Jesus’ love would lead Martha into deep loss. His love meant he’d mourn by her side. His love also meant in due time he’d deliver her out of her pain into joy. Soon, he’d be the one to die and rise again, all for the same love.

This difficult word is written for we who wonder if unanswered prayers to spare us from suffering are a sign of God’s indifference. John’s “so” here is echoed throughout the holy Scriptures. All throughout its history, we see God’s people suffering. And again and again, we are assured that the trials of God’s children aren’t a result of his capricious anger or of cold, calculations for his glory. Lazarus’ death, which Jesus declared to his disciples would indeed be used to glorify God, wasn’t planned with a spirit of indifference toward Mary and Martha. Jesus loved them, John specifically assures us, and his love informed his choice.

Later, Paul would ask, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom 8:32) If Christ’s love was proven at immeasurable cost to himself, can we trust that even as he brings unspeakably hard things, it isn’t because he has failed to love us? That though we may not know why in our lifetimes (think of Job), the One who walked through the valley of the shadow of death for us now leads us to it in his steadfast love?

“I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross,” theologian John Stott writes in a chapter in The Cross of Christ on suffering and glory. He continues,

In a real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?…In imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering.

There is no easy answer for our pain here, no all-purpose remedy or shortcut through grief. There certainly is no path that doesn’t require faith when Lazarus is dead, Jesus didn’t come when we hoped he would, and we are doubly crushed– first, because of our loss, and second, because it seems like the God who we thought loved us, actually doesn’t. Yet God can give that faith. The same gift of faith that enabled you to look to the cross for your salvation becomes the assurance that his intentions for you are always pure, good, and full of mercy.

Perhaps Jesus’ love-driven “so” could bring you some measure of comfort today. Even here, even now, he has not stopped loving us. Even as people we know are dead and dying, his love for us has not faltered. We need to believe this, not to deny the deep darkness, but in order to walk through it without being consumed with despair: Whatever happens, it won’t be because God doesn’t care. Oh, for grace to trust that one day, we will come to see it was because he does.

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;

his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

(Lam. 3:22-23)