From William C. Placher’s “Narratives of a Vulnerable God”
How can a suffering God help? ...a suffering God can help, first of all, by being, in Alfred Nor Whitehead’s famous phrase, “the fellow-sufferer who understands.” To know in the midst of isolation that rejection and suffering often generate that someone always understands is in itself to be significantly empowered “to bear the pain, to resist the humiliation, to overcome the guilt.” Beyond that, God suffers because God is vulnerable, and God is vulnerable because God loves – and it is love, not suffering or even vulnerability, that is finally the point. God can help because God acts out of love, and love risks suffering. A God defined in terms of power is precisely not a reliable rescuer, because power provides no guarantee of concern, and power, in the way most cultures have most often used the word, too often grows out of a fear of vulnerability that makes really reaching out in love, with all the risks entailed, impossible.
God loves…and all the actions of creation begin. God loves…and that which…was not…or could not…or will not ever be…is. God comes to us and is with us without hesitation for God’s love bridges any and all separation…even when we try to create the separation and work to keep it in place. God’s love will risk all things in order to have us experience God with us…with us with no conditions. That is the truth of which we are assured in the Good News…the blessed assurance that can sustain and revive broken hearts or lives that have reached the end of all things.
Connection: To trust such a love is to live within the domain of the peace of God. We are each invited to venture into that realm of new life…today.
Your love, O God, is beyond our expectations and creates the possibilities in our lives that we would never let ourselves consider. Let your love be our love and let that love shape the very breath of our lives. Amen.
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