Why God allows suffering and death?

Over the last month I buried six children from the hospital, where every Saturday liturgy. Five boys: Eugene, Anton, Sasha, Alyosha, and Igor. And one girl - Eugene Zhmyrko, seventeen year old beauty from which stayed in the hospital church iconostasis icon of the Holy Great Martyr Panteleimon. She died of leukemia. She was dying slowly and painfully, to no avail nothing. And this month is not some kind of special. Five children's graves in a month - it is a statistic. Inexorable and devastating, but the statistics. And in each coffin dear, beloved, clean, bright and beautiful. Maxim, Xenia, Nastya, Natasha, Serge ...

In the last day I visited the three patients: Clara (Mary), Andrew and Valentina. All three of them die - hard and painful. Clara nearly grandmother was baptized recently, but one would think that life lived in the Church - so bright, wise and transparent. Andryusha - 25 years old, and his son only a year. Dozens pray for him, even, perhaps, hundreds of people take out the drugs, and bringing the car to the hospital and home to collect money for treatment - and metastases elsewhere. And that day is not a peculiar, so every day.

It took half a day. Clara died. Valentine died. In Chechnya, killing six Russian soldiers - as well as Chechens, do not tell Kate ... died (from the Department of Oncology) - a girl with huge blue eyes. This told me right at the time of service.

It is easy to believe in God when you walk through the field in the summer. The sun is shining and the flowers smell sweet, and the air trembles, filled with their fragrance. "And in the sky I see God" - as in Lermontov. But here? God? Where is he? If he is good, omniscient and omnipotent, why silent? If He punishes them for their sins or the sins of their fathers and mothers, as many believe, then he really does not "slow to anger, and plenteous," then he is ruthless.

God allows evil for our own good, or when we teach, or when he wants to have happened to us something even worse - so taught since the days of medieval and Byzantine theologians of the past, and we affirm because behind them. The dead children - the school of God? Or weakness will the lesser evil to avoid a greater?

If God gave it all, at least for our admonition, it is not God, it is an evil demon, why worship him, he should just drive out of life. If God so that we senses, it was necessary to kill Antosha, Sasha, Zhenya, Alyosha, Katya, and so I do not want to believe in a God. I recall that the word "believe" does not mean "to recognize that he is", "believe" - ​​a "trusted embark in all confidence, trust, or give yourself." Then it turns out that those were right who in 30 years destroyed the temples and burned at the stake of the icon, who turned the temples into the palaces of culture. It's sad. Worse than sad. It is terrible.

Maybe not to think about it, just to console? Giving to those who really bad, the "opium of the people," and they did not even true, but it will be easier. To comfort, soothe, to pity. But opium is no cure, but only at the time of lulls, relieves pain for three or four hours, and then it is necessary to give again and again. In general, afraid to tell a lie - especially about God. I can not.

Lord, what do you do? I look at your cross and I see how painful it you die. I look at thy plagues, and I see you dead, naked, unburied ... You're in this world, shared with us our grief. You're like one of us cries, dying on his cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" You're like one of us, like Jack, like Anton, as Alyosha, as, after all, every one of us asked God is a terrible question, and "gave up the ghost."

If the Apostles state that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and redeemed them with His blood, we are redeemed (see 1 Cor 6.20, and 1 Peter 1,18-19), it means that we suffer not for something that is not for sin - their own, parents, someone. For them, Christ has already suffered - so taught the apostles, and on this rests the foundation of their theology. Then it turns out it is not known for what we suffer.

Meanwhile, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law fair with His blood, goes to the ground, not as a winner, but as the loser. He will be arrested, crucified and die an agonizing death, saying: "Oh, my God, why have you forsaken me?". His throw everything, even the closest disciples. His witnesses will also be missed, and kill, imprison, and camps. Since the time of the apostles, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer until the mother of Mary and Maximilian Kolbe, up to thousands of martyrs of the Soviet gulag.

t Why all this? I do not know. But I know that Christ is joined with us in trouble, in pain, abandonment by God - in the coffin of the deceased child, I feel his presence. Christ comes into our lives to join us in the face of pain and misery in one whole, to gather us together, so we did not stay in the moment of misfortune alone with this trouble, as he once was.

Joining us in the face of the whole trouble, he does what no one else can not do. Thus was born the Church.

What do we know about God? Only the fact that Christ has revealed to us (John 1:18). And he showed us, among other things, and his abandonment by God and man - it is in this abandonment It is more connected to all of us.

Greeks, and after them the Romans, and have always wanted to know everything. Based on this entire ancient civilization. It is at this irrepressible, bubbling and indefatigable thirst for knowledge. And about God, when they became Christians, they also wanted to know - He may or not. Hence the word "Almighty" or Omnirotents, one of the epithets of Jupiter in Roman poetry, which likes to use in his "Aeneid" Virgil. And God "neizrechen, nedovedom, invisible, incomprehensible" (we know not of theology, often falls under the influence of ancient philosophy, and experience of the prayer of the Church, from the experience of the Eucharist - not by chance that every priest will certainly repeat these words in every liturgy) , so we are unable to question "Does God still?" - answer either "yes" or "no." So who is to blame for the pain, I do not know, but I know who suffers with us - Jesus.

How can understand
while creating in the world evil? Do not need to understand it - have to fight with him. Overcome evil with good, as the Apostle Paul calls us: treat patients, to dress and feed the poor, stop the war, etc. Tirelessly. And if not, if the force is not enough, then bow down before thy cross, then the clutch at his foot as the only hope.

"God is not one has ever seen." Only one thread connects us with Him - a man named Jesus, in whom all the fullness of God dwells bodily. Only one thread connects us with Jesus - the name of this thread love.

He died on the cross as a criminal. Painful. Shroud of Turin with terrible signs of bruising, with traces of the ulcer, for which modern pathologists to detail restores the clinical picture of the last hours of Jesus' life - that's really true sanctuary for the twentieth century. All the horror of death, no one and did not covered! Looking at the picture of Holbein's "Dead Christ", the hero of Dostoevsky said that from this picture you can lose faith. And what would he say if he saw the Shroud of Turin, or the Nazi concentration camps, or Stalinism, or just a morgue in the children's hospital in 1995?

What happened next? At the beginning of the 20th chapter of John's Gospel we see Mary Magdalene, then Peter and John, and feel the piercing pain that permeated everything in the spring morning of Easter. Pain, anguish, despair, fatigue and back pain. But this is a piercing pain, the same piercing despair, which so vividly tells the Gospel of John, I feel like every time at the grave of a child ... and I feel pain, tears and despair, I believe - you truly risen, my Lord.

While writing this essay, Clara died, then Valentina, died last Andrew - three coffins. One boy told me the other day, he does not believe in an afterlife, and so afraid that he is a bad Christian. I told him this, that the difficulty with perception, with regard to life beyond the grave, show exactly the opposite - the integrity of his faith.

And here's why. One, not very young, a priest once told me that it is very difficult to judge and teach about the death of his parishioners not to fear it, because he had never of the people are really close to never lose. Honestly. Very honest. And it's very true. I was always afraid to look at yesterday's seminary, which is important, and gently, but a little cram down the mother who has lost a child, that in fact it is good that God has so blessed, so too do not have to grieve.

"God is not dead, but alive. For all live to him "- yes, this tells us Christ in his Gospel (Luke 20.38). But to this news came to the heart, each of us needs some personal experience of poverty, grief and loss experience, plunging us into the abyss of this despair, anguish and tears, we need not days or weeks, and years of piercing pain. This message is part of our heart - only without anesthesia, and only through their own losses. As a school it is not a lesson learned. I would argue, the one who thinks that believes, without having gone through this experience of pain, is mistaken. This is not faith, it is touching the faith of others, to whom we would like to emulate in life. And more: the one who claims to believe in immortality and in this case refers to the relevant page of the catechism, do not believe in God and an idol, whose name - his own selfishness.

The belief that God all are alive, is given to us only if we are doing everything possible to save the lives of those around us, but if we do not camouflage etoyu faith in a purely selfish purposes, not to grieve too much to fight over whose- s life, or just not to hurt.

But where did evil in the world? Why do kids get sick and die? I'll try to make a guess. God gave us the world ("Here I have given you" - Genesis 1:29). We're all together, fuck up his fault, if not all, in so many troubles. If we talk about the war, our wines are always visible, the disease - it is visible is not always, but often (ecology, environment and poisoned, etc.). Peace in the biblical sense of the word, the world lies in evil, that is society, or we're all together, that's who to blame.

In our temples of the holy icons is quite an important place belongs to "Descent into Hell" - Jesus on the icon shows going down somewhere in the depths of the earth, and at the same time and in the depths of human misery, despair and hopelessness. In the New Testament of the event did not say, only in the Apostles' Creed is about is two words - descendit ad inferos («descended into Hell"), and quite a lot in our church hymns.

Jesus not only suffers himself but also descends into hell, there to share the pain of others. He always calls us to him, telling us: "For me, come quickly." Often we try to really go after him. But then ...

Here we try not to see another's pain, zazhmurivaem eyes, stop up their ears. In Soviet times, we have hidden disabilities on reserves (such as on Valaam), so that no one has seen them, as if regretting the psyche of his countrymen. Mortuaries in hospitals are often hidden in the back yard so no one would ever guess that there are sometimes die. And so on., And so on. We now consider ourselves non-believers, if we try to play with death in a "cat and mouse", pretending that it does not, as taught by Epicurus, retreating from it, etc. In other words, not to fear death, we use a kind of analgesic.

If we think of ourselves as believers, we do not better say that it is not terrible, that it is the will of God that we should not grieve for the deceased, because thereby we murmur against God, and so on. One way or another, but like an unbeliever and fenced off from the pain she hides itself from instinctively, as if from a blow on our hands upraised, that is, too, if you do not use drugs, then at least an analgesic.

This is for you. But for others we are doing even worse. A person who hurts, trying to convince that he is mistaken, and it seems, because he does not love God, etc. etc. As a result, a man who is bad, hard and painful, we leave him alone with the pain, throw one on the most difficult place in life of the road.

And we ought to just go down with him to hell after Jesus - feel the pain of those around, in its entirety, and the bareness of authenticity, split it, go through it together.

When my cousin died octogenarian sister, with whom they are together in one room lived all his life, about a year later she told me: "Thank you that you have comforted me, and just always been close." I think that this is the Christian to be close together, as you can to comfort someone who has lost money or put grease stain on the new suit, or a broken leg. Console - it means to show that what happened to someone, not much trouble. By the death of a close relationship is no consolation. Here it is more than immoral.

We - the people of Holy Saturday. Jesus
 
is removed from the cross. He has probably risen since this tells the story read during the Mass the Gospel, but no one knows about it. Angel has not yet said: "He is not here. He is risen, "this no one knows until it just felt, and only those who have not forgotten how to feel ...

In 1995.

The priest Georgy Chistyakov (August 4, 1953 - June 22, 2007): The philologist, historian, theologian. The priest of the Temple of St. Cosmas and Damian in Moscow and the rector of the church of Our Lady in the Children's Republican Clinical Hospital, a member of the Board of the Russian Bible Society and the International Association for the Study of Fathers of the Church, the rector of the Orthodox public University based protoireem A. Menem, head of the cultural history of MIPT. I read in the MIPT lectures on the history of Christianity and the history of theological thought.

Source: "Orthodoxy and the World"