In the New Testament where Resurrection stands at the heart of our faith, death is an affront to faith which compels the survivors to ask ‘why.’ The story of Lazarus (John 11) brings Martha, Mary and Jesus back together.  Often Martha’s words in v.21 are taken as an affirmation of her faith in Jesus, but reread the verse and place affliction in her soul – I think it is not misplaced. Mary is weeping and even Jesus is “deeply disturbed in spirit and troubled…giving a sigh that came right from the heart” (vv.33, 38).  All are plunged into a new depth of suffering, an experience of abandonment – Martha: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died” (v.21).  Is this not the same sense of abandonment Jesus experiences on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Matt 27:46). “It is not only the body of Christ, hanging on the wood, that was accursed; it was his whole soul also. In the same way every innocent being in his affliction feels himself accursed.” [Wiel, Waiting for God, 122]  Every grieving heart demands to know why we suffer, why we can be accursed. The inability to explain suffering is the gateway itself into the depth of affliction. The story of Lazarus also asks us to stop and see who shares our affliction – it does not offer us an avenue around or away from death, but asks to see the promise of Resurrection and who stands with us in death and beyond.

The Cross – It is particularly in the event of the cross, that Scripture encounters affliction and casts it large for each of us to see. “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”  How does the Father abandon his Son at the hour of the passion? Jesus faces the silence of God during the insults, the torture, and his crucifixion. And it scares us; it should scare us.

The disciples in John’s gospel provide the basic choices: enter into the mystery of the affliction, stay at the foot of the cross in the silence, in the absence, or keep your distance because there at a distance the terrifying can become idealized, easier to face.  One choice remains present and faces the boundary of meaning; the other turns away out of fear, and thus from the search for meaning.

Diogenes Allen, in Christian Belief in a Post-Modern World, speaks about this moment as the moment of conversion. He interprets Simone Weil as saying the experience of affliction eventually reaches the boundary when having searched for an answer, for meaning, one accepts that this world does not contain the answer – but that it possibly lays on the outside of the boundary of this world.  That is the moment of faith. Weil holds that you either turn toward and forever face the boundary or forever turn away.

The reliance on something beyond the boundaries of the self is part of the conversion and demands that one continue to love and endure, even when old habits of hate and fear arise. One must love and be open to the full experience of these old habits, because otherwise the trust in love is incomplete, and one risks falling into despair:

“Extreme affliction…is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul. … But through all the horror he can continue to want to love. … It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction…. He whose soul remains ever turned toward God though the nail pierces it finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe. It is the true center; … it is God….this nail has pierced cleanly through all creation, through the thickness of the screen separating the soul from God… It is at the intersection of creation and its Creator. This point of intersection is the point of intersection of the arms of the Cross.” [Waiting for God, 135-136]

This does not answer the “why” of affliction. But like Job, in the experience of affliction, if we continue to love, if we remain turned toward God, we will meet Christ crucified.  At least there we can answer the question of who suffers affliction with us. There the afflicted can join with Christ to cry out “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” – but at the same time know that these are the opening words to a psalm of deliverance which glorifies God for saving the afflicted one. The cry forms a horizon of confidence and praise against which Jesus’ cry of affliction is no less tolerable, but is nonetheless hopeful.