5th Sun Lent, Year A
Fr. Albert
St. Peter Catholic Church, New Iberia
Why do bad things happen to good people? It is a perennial question, a nagging uncertainty that clouds our hearts and seems to darken our faith in an all-powerful, all-loving God. It is the classic argument against God and a favorite of most atheists. If he were really all loving, all-good, and all-powerful, why does he not intervene and stop all the suffering? If you or I saw a child drowning and did nothing to help them, people would consider us cowardly and cruel. To God, all of us are like children drowning and he could save us in an instant. Why is it not cruel for him?
God is not in heaven like the child using a magnifying glass upon an ant cause us pain. He does not cause evil to us; Jesus did not kill Lazarus. But God does allow evil to happen just as Jesus let Lazarus die. Still, we wonder, why?
In the first place, we can blame Adam and Eve for this broken world. Originally, God designed it so that we would not have to suffer or die. But, humanity lost that gift when we proudly rejected God’s design and tried to take his place – to make ourselves like God as the serpent promised. Bad things happen to good people because this world is fallen, broken, and ultimately, temporary.
In the second place, our idea of a “good person” can be quite vague and a bit inaccurate. Yes, we are created by God and loved by Him. Yes, we are naturally good, but we are also naturally fallen and corrupt. Our standard for being a “good person” usually boils down to being nice to people and not killing anyone. Those certainly help, but true goodness far surpasses that. As we learn from Scripture and from Jesus’ Christ’s own example, being good is a radical commitment. True goodness is willing to sacrifice for the sake of others. It is disciplined, humble, obedient, and completely reliant on God. Real “goodness” is the same thing as holiness, and that is not as common as we would like to believe.
Sometimes, bad things happen to people we think are good, but their suffering uncovers a hidden need to improve. It is no challenge to play at being good when all goes well, but it in the difficult moments that goodness is proven like gold in a furnace. We don’t give the medal of honor to a soldier who just shows up for his desk job from 9 to 5, but to those who face down great evil with great courage, to those who manifest their goodness precisely when bad things happen. Sometimes bad things happen to good people to make them better people.
Then there is a third, more mysterious reason we can introduce with a story. One day, St. Teresa of Avila was travelling by carriage to continue her work of reforming the Carmelite order. Suddenly, a wheel fell off broke off the carriage and Teresa was thrown out, hurting herself when she hit the ground. At just that moment, Teresa heard the Lord say to her “see how I treat my friends?” With saintly honesty, Teresa quipped back “no wonder you have so few of them!”
No wonder indeed. God let His own Son be tortured, mocked, and crucified and He loved no one more than His Son. What do we expect the others that God loves? This is one of the deepest mysteries of the Christian faith, but it is also our greatest asset. When suffering encounters goodness, real goodness, it produces love.
Consider this Gospel. “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was ill, he remained for two days in the place where he was.” Jesus love them so he waited? He waited because he loved them? How is letting him die a loving thing to do? Martha, Mary, and everyone else knows that Jesus could have stopped this if he just came sooner. But he waits, and he waits because he loves them, because he loves us. When suffering encounters goodness, it produces love.
The suffering and sadness cause Martha to produce love by strengthening her faith so she could proclaim that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of God.” The mourning of Lazarus’ friends and family “troubled and perturbed” Jesus, giving us a brief and most powerful verse of Scripture “and Jesus wept.” Jesus’ tears for His friend reveal his love to others who did not see it before.
Still, there are those voices “could he not have done something so that this man would not have died.” Could he have done something? Why bother with what he could have done? See what he will do, what he is doing now. “Take away the stone.” “By now there will be a stench!”: Do we believe enough to risk smelling the stench of death? “Take away the stone… believe and you will see the glory of God.” Not the glory of merely avoiding suffering, but facing it head on, enduring it. When suffering encounters goodness, goodness like Jesus Christ, it produces love. “Lazarus, come out!” When death rises up against this goodness, it not only produces the tears of love, it produces the resurrection! “Untie him and let him go.” Untie the bonds of worldly attachment. Untie the bonds of ignorance and pride. Let him go, liberate him from this broken world, and allow him to stride into eternal life.
“Now many of the Jews who had come to Mary and seen what he had done began to believe in him.” Would they have believed if Jesus just prevented the death of Lazarus? If he just willed the sickness away? Why weren’t the other healings, the other miracles enough before now? Why is this time different? Because when suffering encounters goodness, when it runs headlong against the God who is goodness itself, it finds only Love. Love that not only endures the challenge of suffering, but actually grows from it. We do not always know why a particular evil happens to a particular good person, but we do know that if we face that evil with faith, with the goodness of God, it will produce greater love and lead to everlasting life.