LIGHT FOR THE MYSTERY OF LIFE                    Matthew 27:45-56

‘…the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus… exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!’’’ (v.54)

If we are to soar above suffering and adversity rather than sink beneath it, we need to adopt another attitude: fix it in your mind as an axiom that suffering and adversity are not inconsistent with the fact of God’s love. Often people ask, ‘If God is a God of love then how can He allow such terrible things to go on in His world?’ Lofton Hudson, a writer and theologian, tells of a wounded soldier whose legs had been amputated. When he awoke from surgery to discover that both his legs had gone, he looked at the nurse standing beside his bed and said, ‘It’s just like God to do that to me.” Without attempting in any way to detract from the pain and hurt that people feel in their sufferings, it’s surprising, as George Buttrick points out, that ‘for believer and sceptic alike, for faith or unfaith, the fact of pain gets linked with God’. People who know little about God or His ways make a basic assumption that  God either cannot or will not stop suffering and pain. If He cannot, He is not God in the traditional sense of a God with all  power. If He will not, He is not a God who does not love and care. Someone has put that same argument in this form: If God is God He is not good If God is good He is not God. Is God good? Really good? Intrinsically good? Those who have stood at the foot of the cross and understand what God did for us there through Jesus will not doubt it. Whatever gloom and mystery there may be in the world, there is sufficient light at the cross to guide us through the deepest and densest darkness.

PRAYER LINE: Father, I am so thankful that in the cross there is light for the mystery of life, and power for the mastery of life. Help me to know both in my life and experience day by day. In Jesus’ name. Amen. (EDWJ)