I’ve preached on “suffering” before.
In fact, one lady at the door told me, “Preacher, I never knew “what suffering was” until I heard you preach. Now I know, for sure.”
Once a long-winded preacher had been going at it for about an hour straight and it didn’t seem at all like he was even close to losing speed.
He said, “I’m really on a roll here, and there’s a lot more that I want to say, but Jesus has just told me to stop, so let’s end the service right here and now.
At which point, the pianist on the baby grand piano stood up and yelled out,
“Let’s stand and sing, ‘What a friend we have in Jesus!’”
This is a text about a falling tower and about a Royal sadistic governor…
Everybody still talks about that day; it was a day of tragedy and injustice.
People were going about their business when they were suddenly and brutally killed. And, strangely enough it was at the hands of the Royal Governor, one Pontius Pilate, by name…
And what about the tower that fell oh so suddenly?
Towers remind us of strength and security–and when a tower falls and people are killed, we feel a “little less secure.”
The “initial reaction” was shock; then people began to ask the inevitable questions:
Where are you safe today?
Are you safe anywhere?
Why those pilgrims were not even safe at the Temple in Jerusalem…and if you are not safe in God’s Temple…where are you safe?
Why were those innocent people killed?
Why did the tower fall?
Where was God during all of that?

If Jesus were here in the flesh, we could sit down in front of him and ask him,

“Jesus, what about those passengers who were killed on the most recent jet liner to fall out of the skies?”
And hey, remember those 3,000 people who were killed when the World Trade Center was attacked and fell?
He would look at you with those eyes that you could never forget and say, “Do you suppose those people were worse sinners than anybody else who has ever gotten on an airliner or went to work in skyscraper?
Or what about those 3,000 in New York City–were they worse people than anybody else? NO–but unless you repent, you will perish, too.”
We may not like his answer, or his “non-answer.”
You come with a deep, troubling philosophical question, “Why do good people suffer?” and he basically refuses to answer it; instead he turns the question into a statement about “your own spiritual condition.”
A conversation with Jesus is never dull or boring and always enlightening! Kind of…
It’s okay to ask the question about suffering.
Christianity and the Bible can easily endure the light of honest intellectual scrutiny; it has for 200 centuries.
So, you don’t have to check your brain at the door when you come to church.
This idea of suffering has puzzled us for untold centuries.
There is an entire theological or philosophical study called “theodicy.”
It asks the simple question: If God is entirely good, and entirely powerful–why is there suffering?
Some people look at what the Bible says about God and then, look around in the world and say, “The character of God and the reality of suffering contradict each other!”
What’s the answer?
The question in the minds of Jesus’ audience was, “Did those people suffer and die from Pilate’s cruelty or from the tower falling?” The assumption was, they must have been “bad people” to suffer like that.
There is a “tendency for some of us” to look at someone when they are suffering and to think, “Maybe they are just getting what they deserve.”
After the 9/11 attack, President Bush declared the following Friday to be a Day of National Prayer and Remembrance and a service was held at the National Cathedral in Washington–and Billy Graham was the main speaker.
In his message, Graham spoke of “the mystery of suffering.” He said, “I have been asked hundreds of times in my life why God allows tragedy and suffering. I have to confess that I really do not know the answer totally, even to my own satisfaction. I have to accept, by faith, that God is sovereign, and he’s a God of love and mercy and compassion in the midst of suffering.”
Graham said next, “For the Christian, the cross tells us that God understands our sin and our suffering, for he took upon himself in the person of Jesus, our sins and our suffering. And from the cross, God declares, ‘I love you. I know the heartaches and the sorrows and the pains and the hurt that you feel. I love you.’
The story does not end with the cross, for beyond the “tragedy of the cross” there is “the empty tomb.”
We know the rest of the story, that because of the Resurrection we can have eternal life, for Jesus conquered evil and death, and hell.
Yes, there is hope.
And “no” those people did not deserve to suffer as they did. Suffering happens. It is a part of life and living as we know it to be.
Amen.