Man's greatness and misery
Undeserved suffering
Christians cannot "explain" suffering either. However, they are able to trust God and know that suffering is not God's declaration of bankruptcy and the end of His love. How is this possible?
We try to reflect: suffering can purify. Without a heavy blow, life may remain too superficial. Often, suffering permits us to look behind the facade of things. According to E. Bloch, "Misery teaches us to think". And K. Jaspers said: "Suffering finally wakes up the human being." Suffering can make man more mature. It also can break him. We take off our hats in admiration for some people who have gone through suffering. The French thinker Gide said: "I believe that there are certain gates that only illness can open."
Suffering can have a warning function. Physical pain may indicate a dangerous disease and thus may help to advance life. Suffering can teach us to pray ... but also to swear! We must always try to give suffering a purpose. But the question remains: Could there not be another way? Does purification, maturity, and warning have to hurt so much? Reflecting this way, we do not find a real answer to the question whether suffering makes sense.
Does the Bible give an answer?
Many people spontaneously connect suffering with a penalty for sin. In fact, this view is predominant in many parts of the Bible, especially in the Old Testament: Suffering as penalty, for guilt which may be hidden and unconscious. But this is not the only tenet of the Old Testament. In Job - one book of the Old Testament is named after him - a man is presented who revolts against incomprehensible suffering and argues with God. He is not the "enduring, tolerating Job" who is wrongly referred to time and again, but the Job who rebels and rises up against God.
Job shows that the suffering human being does not have to be silent, that God does not resent his accusation. Quarreling with God does not mean being an atheist. It is finally in the middle of his suffering that this complaining Job experiences his God. His friends, who tried to give Job many explanations for his suffering and who scolded him for incessantly accusing God, are reproved by God in the end.
It is Jesus who does away with the one-sided declaration that suffering is a penalty for sin. When His disciples see a blind man and ask "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered: "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be manifest in him" (John 9,2). The connection between sin and suffering cannot have been so obvious after all.