Does God Punish?

Thomas Hardy says of the main character in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard, that “misery taught him nothing more than the defiant endurance of it.”   What does misery teach us?  What can it teach us?  Can it teach us more than just the fact that we must endure it?

This is a tricky topic, for suffering is a mystery--a mystery in the deepest sense of the word.  We all suffer, some much more than others; and some suffer under the same circumstance that others would consider a blessing.  

A lot depends on expectation.  The one who expects pain and finds only discomfort rejoices.  The one who expects luxury and finds discomfort is miserable.  We can be cheated or abused by a stranger and think little of it, but cruelty or mere neglect from someone whom we expected to love us leaves painful scars that last a lifetime.  Suffering and misery are never good, and yet good may come of it.  Misery does teach us, but what we learn depends a great deal on us.  

The prophets of the Old Testament repeatedly tell Israel and Judah to learn from their suffering.  What are they to learn?  They are to learn that their sins have separated them from their God.  Learning this, they are to repent, turning their attention back to God and ceasing to oppress their neighbors.  However, the correlation between misery and repentance is not a direct one. Turning to God seldom immediately changes our circumstances, although it may immediately change our attitude toward our circumstances, which makes a huge difference in how we experiences our circumstances.  

Some, like Michael Henchard, do not easily learn to turn to God in misery.  Henchard “could not help thinking that the concatenation of events...was the scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him.”  For the character Michael Henchard--and maybe for the author Thomas Hardy too--suffering is punishment.  Suffering is the “this” in the cry, “What did I do to deserve this?”  There is no answer to the question except the answer given in Genesis, an answer in the form of a story, not an explanation.  The questions itself reveals the problem: separation from the knowledge of God has resulted in a view of God as “a sinister intelligence bent on punishing.”  Like Adam and Eve in the Garden, our separation from God leads us to hide from God because we are afraid.  The shame of nakedness could have spurred Adam and Eve to run toward God, but it rather led them to fear punishment and hide.  Their view of who God is had changed.

Ultimately, Christ-God conquers misery by himself becoming the most miserable one.  He enters our misery and suffers with us, because of us, for us.  He suffers to destroy suffering through suffering.  He shows us how and what to learn from suffering.  He shows us how to turn to God and love our neighbor in the midst of suffering.  He shows us that suffering is limited, but Life is eternal--and that Eternal Life can begin even before the suffering ends.

We all die.  No suffering endures forever (unless somehow we choose it, but that is yet another mystery); however, the opportunity to repent, to turn toward God and to begin to love our neighbor, the opportunity to enter into Eternal Life, also may last only as long as our hearts beat on this earth.  Blaming God or our mother, or our illness or our society for our suffering only muddies the water and increases our anger and pride and misery.  Humbling ourselves brings peace in the midst of the storm, in the midst of the pain, in the midst of the misunderstanding and misery.  Humility lets us learn from misery.  Humility does not lead us to say that suffering is good, only that suffering is, and that I am no more or less an appropriate candidate for suffering than anyone else.  Humility enables us to turn to God, not as the Great Punisher, but as the Great Co-sufferer, the One who showed us the way to Eternal Life even in the midst of suffering.