Christ did not come to end suffering. He did not come to answer the question of suffering. Christ came to fill suffering with His presence.
A common criticism of Christianity is that it tells believers that they will not suffer if they have faith. Indeed, I have often heard such nonsense preached and taught, and my own frustration comes in knowing that such talk is not only un-Biblical, but theologically unsound as well. It persists, however, because too many people want an out, a lifeline, a way to be yanked out of the messy world in which we live, thereby proving our own superiority over other run-of-the-mill human beings, and our own access to something higher and greater.
Such thinking is, sadly, also a remnant of a certain tendency to view religion as magical in some way, as some mysterious we-know-not-what that can relieve us of the burdens of life. Some of those burdens are horrific; today, 30-some people were killed in a car bombing in Baghdad. Two weeks ago, a small child was killed when her mother pulled out of a blind intersection and was t-boned by a car coming up the road onto which she was turning. Dr. Josef Mengele used to perform live vivisections on Jewish children in order to determine how their physiology was different from "Aryan" physiology. These horrors are real, they are a part of what it means to be human, and we cannot do away with them through some process of abstraction or through the hope that God will send us an invisible rope and yank us out and away from these horrors. The popularity a few years ago of the TV program Touched by an Angel, and part of the premise of the silly movie City of Angels is a symptom of this same magical thinking, using vaguely Christian ideas and symbols as a way of showing us just how there might just be this magical, invisible world with magical, invisible creatures whose sole purpose is our protection.
The answer that Lisa gave, the answer that the Christian faith gives, to the horrible conundrum of illness seemingly undeserved, draining us financially, emotionally, and psychologically, is not satisfying to many, because, it seems to me, too many critics of Christianity also suffer from the delusion that somehow, somewhere, God promises us a magical lifeline out of suffering. It just isn't true, and no amount of searching, no amount of praying, no amount of sermonizing claiming it is true will make it any less false. When critics site such nonsense as part of the reason for leaving faith aside, all I can say is that they may have many reasons not to like Christianity, but this isn't one of them.
The end of Lisa's sermon is a recapitulation of the Claudel quote. It isn't about answering unanswerable questions ("Why does God allow little children to suffer and die from horrible diseases?") but about being present in the midst of the situation and offering peace and hope and love that is stronger than the reality of suffering. I know that many find such an answer unsatisfying, but that is all there really is. To look for more, to desire more, is to search for that which will never be. It is to suffer from the delusion that God is David Copperfield, and the disease is the Statue of Liberty, which he can make disappear through some sort of strange and wonderful sleight-of-hand. God isn't David Copperfield, however, and while I have no problem with anger, even devout rage, at God in the midst of such situations (having been there myself on a few occasions), to try and construct an argument against Christianity based upon this reality fails in the end from the very thing rationalist critics accuse it of - a desire to believe in magic.
