Chaplain’s Corner: The Sorrow of God

“It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it means that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is his splendor.”

This quote by Nicholas Wolterstorff has come back to me as news reports have come out of Israel, each overwhelming and unimaginable in their horror. Images of mourning parents and dust-covered crying children. A fragile peace decimated in a matter of days in one of the most significant holy places on earth. So many innocent lives changed forever on account of the violent actions of a few. How can this happen? Where is God in this?

“How long O Lord?” This is not a new question. It appears often in scripture, most often on the lips of the psalmists and prophets. It is a question born out of an expectation that the Creator of all things is both compassionate and powerful to act in response.

A fully satisfying answer to this question may need to wait until we meet our Creator face to face. Yet we cling to the conviction that God does indeed care, and that God grieves and that God acts.

We come to understand the compassion, love and yes, sorrow of God, through the life, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, who wept at the death of his friend Lazarus and again over the city of Jerusalem and the destruction it would soon face. God, through Jesus, entered our suffering, and stands with us in solidarity with our grief.

Yet, to stop there, is to fall short of the calling Jesus set forth for us: to bring about a foretaste of the Kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven. This Jesus, who followed love all the way to a cross, forbidding Peter to take up a sword in his defense, is the Jesus we follow today. Let us cry out for peace, with our words as well as our actions, trusting that the God who mourns with us and over us, also works through us to bring peace and wholeness to all corners of the earth.