Why do bad things happen to good people?

Last week’s murder of Alan Henning has generated shock waves both here and abroad, a mixture of grief, anger and sheer incomprehension. Why did this happen to such a person? The only explanation we can possibly imagine is that a vital human connection is  missing in the psyche of the man who perpetrated this act. This is what shakes us. Something has been ruptured in this event, something which we take for granted with regard to our shared humanity – ours and those who murdered Alan.

This sense of rupture raises a number of questions concerning what it is to be human and whether there comes a time when people who commit such crimes have wilfully allowed themselves to be uncoupled from their own humanity. There is something about beheading another human being which suggests severance.

It also begs the question of whether evil is inculcated over a period of time and, if so, where does it come from? The one who indoctrinates another person into doing evil must himself, or herself, have learned evil from someone else. Or is a person born evil? This is one of the profound questions faced so courageously by Lionel Shriver in her book We Need to Talk About Kevin. Shriver’s book concerns evil and the individual psychopath. But ISIS represents collective evil, a quasi, even if wholly imagined, emerging ‘state’ which would be shaped and held in place by psychopaths.

The characteristic of psychopaths, whether they act as individuals or as a group, is that they seek out the innocent. Pogroms, holocausts and acts of ethnic cleansing are the work of a psychopath ‘collective’ hunting down and exterminating the innocent people they fear. Evil always fears what is truthful and good.

The murderous activity of ISIS will ultimately reveal itself as the act of  people who are afraid and, since fear generates more fear, their act creates shock waves of fear which extend outwards like earthquake tremors into our own hearts. This is the fear which we must all resist while at the same time asking why such things happen. The asking is important because it is part of faith, and therefore part of the resistance to fear.

Human beings have been asking why innocent people are allowed to suffer ever since they first questioned the meaning of their own existence, and the existence of God. But the question is, paradoxically, part of the answer, part of the meaning. Consequently, our humanity is diminished from the minute we cease to ask ‘why?’ in the face of evil and suffering. Persecutors have always known this, as do  powerful people who  inflict suffering and silence on those they control. In silencing them they seek to diminish or eradicate their humanity which is their inherent goodness and the truth which they speak. Their inherent goodness and unflinching truthfulness is also what makes for resistance in the face of evil and suffering, a stubborn refusal to accept what seems like God’s refusal to answer the ‘why?’ question.

Asking ‘why?’, is part of faith. It forces us out of complacent thinking in relation to suffering, especially when suffering obliges us to examine our views of God, including whether God exists at all. This does not mean that suffering is itself a good thing, as the prophet Job eventually realises. The book of Job seeks not so much to answer the question ‘why does God (if there is one) allow good people to suffer?’ as to expand the human heart’s capacity for faith in a God who, despite suffering, purposes all things to the good for those who love him, as the apostle Paul later writes in his letter to the church in Rome. Despite this, Job does not experience a happy ending. The children who died will not be restored to him. What he does learn, however, is that it is in suffering itself that God’s purpose for the good is worked and will be finally achieved.

The book of Job tells us that evil is overcome by the kind of faith which is rooted in a seemingly unwarranted love for God. It seems unwarranted because God appears indifferent to Job’s suffering. This brings us back to the goodness which was in Alan Henning and to our own ‘why?’ questioning in relation to his death. How do we deal with the fact that there appear to be no easy answers to the question? And how do we deal with the fear tremors which the event has generated, apart from engaging in retributive violence of one kind or another? We deal with both by joining with Muslims in asking the ‘why?’ question. As Christians, we also deal with it by the response already given to us in our own faith, the sure knowledge of the saving power of God enacted in and through Jesus Christ.

Faith in Christ is not a panacea. It does not lead to happy endings, or deny pain, or act as a guarantee against violence and evil. This is because faith is a proactive response to God’s loving invitation to live in union with him. It is a decision of both heart and mind, taken even in the face of evil and suffering. It is also ‘graced’ by God, so that it both frees and empowers.

Faith is a decision to ‘stand’ in that place which God chose to place himself, the place of human suffering and of death. The Greek word for ‘cross’ is rooted in the word for ‘stand’, Greek being the language of the New Testament. So to ‘stand’ in that place is to stand by the Cross of Christ where we find that we are accompanied, or rather met and embraced, by Christ in the suffering of innocent people like Alan Henning and in the grief of the vast majority of Muslims who deplore his murder.

The Cross is both the first and the last place where we encounter God as one who is totally ‘for’ all human beings, and in solidarity with them, especially when they suffer. In this mysterious way, he is the answer to the question.