During that nightmarish year of 1933 somewhere between 7-10 million people died, one third of whom were children.

Rouse yourself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord? Awake! Do not cast us off forever! Why dost thou hide thy face? Why dost thou forget our affliction and oppression? Psalm 43:1,2

How can one speak of faith when faced with meaningless suffering and violence? And yet, it is by faith that our life is governed and everything that we do is based, eventually, on faith. The most obvious question is – what is faith and here, many answers can be given, but the most enriching and deepest is that we don’t despair of life. We live by the credo that there is meaning in our existence no matter how much we are challenged.

Rabbi Simelai states in the Babylonian Talmud that Moses had 613 commandments, David reduced these to 11, Isaiah to 2, and Habakkuk condensed them to one: ‘But the righteous shall live by his faith’.
Habakkuk 2:4

We often hear of the need to believe in Christ, to have faith in him, and this is true and important. But there is something else as well. We are not only saved by our faith in Christ but we are also saved through his faith, through his faithfulness to God and who God is, and here, there is something instructive for all of us.

In the creed, we recite that Christ is God and human without these two aspects being adulterated or mixed. He is totally and completely God and, totally and completely man. This is something that stretches our logical thinking but it is accepted on faith – by being faithful to what we know about Christ and what he has accomplished. One of the things that comes out of this is that Christ, as man, did not know his final fate. He lived on faith.

We sometimes do not appreciate the gravity in which Christ as man was placed. He teaches, he lives all the time as true man with all that this implies. He is arrested and goes to the cross not knowing, as man, whether his mission will be successful. In light of this, we can more fully appreciate the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.

This world is racked with pain and it is this pain that brings into question the reality and dependability of faith. Those people in 1933 had a question looming over them – why? And no answer came as they were forced to undergo a painful and lingering death.

And what does this do to our faith? How do we incorporate this act of savagery into our world view? And it is so easy at this point to blame God, to hold Him responsible. It is so easy to be overwhelmed by the unspeakable horror that was perpetrated by those who were, also, made in the image of God. But, maybe we are going about it in the wrong way by trying to find a cause and to somehow then rationalize this immense sea of suffering.

Let us explore this event from another perspective – that of faith in God, in Christ. Suppose that we are asked to pray for someone whom the medical doctors have termed terminally ill. There is no physical or organic basis for expecting healing – the person is, we are told, doomed to die. And we, in our faith, turn to God in prayer that the person be made whole. And sometimes – although this seems to be rare – the person is made well. But many times, the inexorable progress of illness is not stopped and the person dies. Have our prayers been in vain? Why have they not been answered? Why do we pray at all in these situations when the overwhelming evidence seems to be that nothing will change?

These difficult events in our lives try our faith in the faithfulness of God. Even if no physical miracle occurs, we still pray because we are faithful to God and what He has revealed about Himself. Our prayers are a protest against the way the world is. We look forward to an unfallen world where miracles are common and dying is foreign. But, we know that this is not the way it is right now – we still live in a fallen world, but we register our rebellion against this state of affairs through our prayers.

There are mysterious words written by St. Paul that we somehow complete Christ’s suffering. Maybe, in some way, the death of those innocents in 1933 contributes to the completion of Christ’s task of salvation of this fallen world. Just as Christ’s death at the hands of men saves us and transforms death, maybe the death of innocents, in some mysterious manner, contributes to the redemption of the world.

Sacred are the victims, for each dies in the place of someone whom fate allows to live. And though many may unwittingly or unwillingly die in the place of others, the sacrifice is no less sacred for the fact that fate chose those who would make it. Dark Rivers of the Heart, Dean Koontz

Some would question these ideas as merely a feeble effort to dampen the blows of tragedy. But, and this is where our faith comes in, we have seen a template in Christ and we apply it to others who were made in his image. It is through faith that we come to this understanding of tragedy.

And there is another point I would like to focus on. Sometimes, one hears criticisms of those who died, for not resisting, for not physically arising and struggling against the injustice that was being perpetrated against them. True, some did resist, but the vast majority did not. And do we here not have another echo of Christ’s behavior? Was he not led as an innocent lamb to the slaughter without offering one iota of resistance?

Let’s view this tragedy from another perspective.

How often does God transform a tragedy into an unexpected result, totally contrary to what the perpetrators of evil had in mind. There is a saying over the entrance to one of the monasteries on Mount Athos:

Die before you die, so that when you die, you will not die.

Indeed, these millions who died, died a death imposed on them and they ‘accepted’ this death. In a sense, they became like millions of monks in a very deep and mysterious sense – they became divested of all possessions, even their very lives. An atheistic regime, attempting to stamp out all vestiges of faith, ironically, has transformed the land into one vast monastery testifying to faith and trust in God, showing that without God, the greatest tragedies become the norm. The monks used to flee into the desert to escape the corrupt world, and here, evil men create a barren desert out of a fruitful land. The land that had been brimming with God’s bounty was now likened to a desert where bread is scarce. What evil human hands had wrought!

It is better for one man to die for the nation. Caiaphas

It is the underlying fact of our universe that we are interrelated and do not exist as solitary islands, but our actions do impact others in ways that may not even be known to us. And inexorably, in some incomprehensible fashion puzzling to our earth-bound minds, good does come out of tragedy. This is the essence of faith – evil does not have the final word. The final verdict is granted to good. And it is faith that enables us to see this and to live in hope. The rest of the world may scoff at us, and say that we are not being realistic, that we are living in fear of facing up to the brute realities of our lives, that we have lost contact with reality.

Our faith states clearly and loudly that the violence and death and persecution of innocents is not reality but a twisted understanding of reality and of how things should be. Yes, things at the present are inimical to belief that things will change, that good will have the final word. We resist the widespread view that it is futile to live in hope, that hopelessness is our lot. We are scoffed at as Christ was scoffed at by passersby while he hung on the cross and matters looked so dark and hopeless.

But even the rulers with them sneered, saying: “He saved others; let Him save Himself if He is the Christ, the chosen of God.” Luke 23:35

And we know what happened three days later. Jesus was vindicated showing that death and suffering are not something natural but an aberration that Christ has come to redress so that they no longer have the final say in man’s fate.

It is not easy to live by faith because the world seems to say to us so loudly that we are living in a fool’s paradise. We are refusing to accept our lot with some story of redemption and the world being made right. But it is the scoffers who are living in a false ‘reality’ who do not have the courage it takes to live by faith and thereby challenge the world order, the order that arises from a fallen world.

More in the next letter.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas.