THROUGH UNTRUE

During Pope Francis's audience with the youth held at the University of Santo Tomas in 2015, a little girl asked him: “Why does God allow us children to suffer so much...?”  She could not finish her question because she started crying. The Pope took the girl in his arms and embraced her. He could only offer silence in response.

It was the same answer that he gave when he celebrated the Mass in Tacloban City, one of the cities heavily damaged by Typhoon Yolanda. Wearing a yellow raincoat to protect him from the lashing wind and heavy rains, he humbly admitted that if someone asked him why God allowed such tragedy to happen, he could only offer silence. 

Silence hardly eases our troubled spirit when we suffer or when disasters, wars, crimes, misery, and poverty fester in our midst. We want to know why God does not intervene when the strong do what they like while the weak suffer what they must.  Why doesn’t God make His voice heard by those who want justice, not on Judgment Day, but right here, right now?

Faced with the deafening silence of God, we echo the lamentation in the Book of Job: “I cry to you and you do not answer me. I stand, and you merely look at me.” (Job 30:20). This is a stinging complaint raised against God who remains silent amidst one's daily afflictions. 

Many of us desperately want God to punish bad people, afflict with terrible disease the power-hungry and corrupt politicians, turn terrorists into pillars of salt, rain down brimstones on the homes of greedy businessmen, send locusts and other pests to destroy drug lords and pushers, and tip the balance of justice in favor of the suffering and oppressed. 

In short, we want God to do the killing for us. We want Him to exact the vengeance that our flawed justice system cannot procure for us. Sad to say, even if God is all-powerful, He does not seem inclined to do that. He can save us from the devil, but He would not save us from ourselves. 

The downside of God’s love is His absolute respect for human freedom. History has shown that God has supreme confidence in our ability to decide even if we seldom know how to use it. Freedom is our greatest gift and our heaviest burden. 

If God respects our freedom, why is it so difficult for us to allow Him the freedom He is entitled to? God is beyond our control. We have no right to reduce Him to a benign, tamed deity who is there to answer our every complaint. Besides, God knows that during difficult times, words are hollow and powerless.  It is futile to second-guess God's intentions. The silent God puts to shame the televangelists who delight in predicting how God would react to all sorts of troubling, unjust, and wildly unpredictable situations. 
In our Gospel reading today, Jesus saw people lining up to be healed, fed, consoled, and liberated from sin and other afflictions (Mark1:29-39). He did not bother Himself with the question, "Why does God allow innocent people to suffer?" Instead, He went about doing what must be done to give witness to the truth that God loves us in our weakness and fragility, in our sickness and suffering. 

Jesus is God's compassion personified. He is God's love in motion. Jesus gratuitously gives of Himself to prove that silence does not mean absence.