Who deserves to suffer?
18-Dec-06
This headline caught my eye: “Rabbi claims holocaust dead ‘deserved it’”. Read the article and you’ll see that the headline is only slightly sensationalized. The rabbi is Ahron Cohen, an Orthodox Jew from England who recently spoke at the controversial holocaust conference in Iran. Cohen isn’t a holocaust denier, but he holds a point of view that is at least as old as Job’s comforters - that those who suffer deserve it, and those who inflict suffering could not otherwise succeed. Cohen’s beliefs about suffering shape his view on Israel (and this is what makes him so controversial): He believes that the modern nation of Israel was formed as an act of rebellion against God, who wills that Jews live peacefully in exile.
Laying aside Cohen’s anti-Zionist doctrine, it strikes me that Christians inhabit an entirely different universe of ideas about suffering. On one hand, we all deserve it “in one way or another” as Cohen so loosely puts it. “The wages of sin is death” says Paul in Romans 6:23. Jesus talked about people who died in a much smaller incident of anti-Semitism in Luke 13, and then he said: “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” (Luke 13:2-3, NIV)
On the other hand, at the center of our faith is the one true innocent man suffering without deserving it. The “punishment that brought us peace was upon him,” Isaiah says.
Grace is a wild, unlikely thing, isn’t it?
