(1) A Catalogue of Human Suffering.
What a catalogue of suffering there is in those verses! That’s my first point this morning. One incident tumbling in on top of another, so that the woman with the bleeding interrupts Jesus before He can even reach the ruler’s dead daughter.
(a) It starts with that bereaved parent: ‘While he was saying this, a ruler came and knelt before him and said, "My daughter has just died. But come and put your hand on her, and she will live" ’ (v. 18). There will be some here who have watched a child die and will know the intensity of this man’s grief: to see a young life cut off in all its promise. Others here will know the pain of a miscarriage, or a still birth, and other family grief. But then ...
(b) A chronic invalid comes into focus: ‘Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak’ (v. 20). Her problem was probably gynaecological – some sort of uterine haemorrhage. Whatever, she had found no human remedy in twelve years. Her condition, moreover, may have made her ceremonially unclean, condemning her to loneliness and isolation. So she should not have even been in the crowd around Jesus at all. Probably each of us knows someone confined to their bed, perhaps in a nursing home or a hospital ward, by chronic long-term illness, and the loneliness and the isolation of that situation.
(c) Then two disabled men, suffering from the physical handicap of blindness: ™‘As Jesus went on from there, two blind men followed him, calling out, "Have mercy on us, Son of David!" ’ (v. 27). How we take our sight for granted, don’t we? I find it hard to imagine the suffering involved in that particular handicap. And then ...
(d) There was a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk: ‘While they were going out, a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus’ (v. 32). It’s not actually clear what is meant by that expression ‘demon-possessed’. There seemed to be abnormal psychological disturbance as well as the inability to speak in this man; and many of us here today could testify to the very great suffering involved in mental or nervous disorder. If you have battled with depression or watched someone close to you struggle with it ... I had a dear uncle who only found his way out of that struggle by ending his life with his own shotgun, sitting under a tree in an Oxfordshire wood. And the anniversary of his death will come around again this Wednesday. I sometimes think there is no greater human suffering than sensing the erosion of our own sanity.
It was a suffering world in which Jesus walked; pain would have been far more evident then than it is today. Our National Health Service was launched 6 months after I was born, with the slogan ‘Safety from the Cradle to the Grave’ (some may have wanted to ask "But what about after that?") But we do enjoy today an extraordinarily pain-free existence compared to most of the rest of the world’s population and to all earlier centuries. Yet we still experience and witness enough pain to know (and this is my second heading this morning) ...
(2) The strange Ambiguity of Human Suffering.
You see the sceptic finds the existence of pain an insuperable obstacle to belief in a good God. Bertrand Russell (the atheist philosopher) wrote, ‘I can imagine a sardonic demon creating us for his amusement, but I cannot attribute to a Being who is wise and beneficent and omnipotent the terrible weight of cruelty and suffering and ironic degradation of what is best that has marred the history of man.’ In other words: how can there be a good God in control of the world where there is so much suffering? Aren’t you moved to doubt His existence from time to time by the spectacle, or the experience, of suffering? To my shame I admit that even quite minor suffering (a bit of backache or a bad cold) changes my attitude to God. And certainly there are certain sorts of faith which are struck a fateful blow by suffering – mere optimistic wishful thinking, looking on the bright side, "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds". That sort of outlook cannot cope with pain, just as the optimism of the early 18th Century was blown away by the Portuguese earthquake which occurred 244 years ago tomorrow, killing in just 6 minutes, 30,000 of the inhabitants of Lisbon, as they thronged the churches to celebrate All Saints Day, 1755. If you’ve ever read Voltaire’s Candide you will be familiar with what that did to 18th Century optimism. A faith that is mere credal orthodoxy will not be able to cope with suffering either. Nor will a faith that is actually a sort of psychic technique for securing health, wealth and happiness.
But, if some sorts of faith are destroyed by pain, so is some atheistic scepticism. In my first curacy my telephone went in the early hours of one morning. It was a nurse in the local hospice to say that the wife of my neighbour had just died in the hospice, and would I go over and sit with him? This husband was a scientist and an atheist. She had been a believer. As we sat there together in those early hours, he said through his tears, "When it is test-tubes in a laboratory, atheism is fine. But when it’s your own wife, it just won’t do ... "
The old argument that faith is just a psychological crutch cuts both ways, because if faith can be a crutch, so can refusal to believe in God be a crutch: a crutch to prop up whatever lifestyle and attitudes I may want to choose for myself. The question is: which out of belief or unbelief makes best sense of the whole of life? Remove the concept of a good God and you do not solve the problem of pain. There may, then, be no theoretical reason why life should be happy rather than sad, but you and I have still got to live with the sadness. And again and again in human experience suffering turns out to be, not the death of faith, but its seedbed.
That is the ambiguity of my title to this point – for every Bertrand Russell there are many like the African schoolmaster who, after the dreadful massacres in Burundi in 1972, wrote, ‘Before this happened my faith in Jesus was more like an intellectual acceptance of the truth of the gospel. But now I know Jesus is real ...’
As she lay dying in the ghastly conditions of Ravensbruck concentration camp, during the Second World War, Corrie Ten Boom’s sister, Betsie, said to Corrie, " .. must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here." Suffering is often God’s megaphone to rouse those who are spiritually asleep, and it often engenders and strengthens faith rather than extinguishes it. So ...
(3) Faith in the face of Human Suffering.
We’ve seen a catalogue of human suffering. We’ve seen this strange ambiguity of human suffering. Now, faith in the face of human suffering. Let’s study the faith exhibited in these verses. Notice (a) in every case faith preceded the miraculous healing; it did not result from it – the ruler, the woman with the bleeding, the two blind men ... there was no human solution to their problem, and in their suffering they reached out to Jesus (and it appears that others did it on behalf of the hapless, helpless, mute demoniac). In their suffering there arose trust. Amazement (v. 33) and opposition (v. 34) followed the miraculous healings, but it was faith that preceded them. Faith based on the miraculous is a precarious thing. In fact, suffering is more likely to elicit true faith than miracles are.
But nevertheless (b) the faith displayed here is still weak and feeble. The ruler comes in desperation, discarding his dignity by kneeling, as a very last resort, to Jesus. The woman comes superstitiously, hoping to sneak up behind Him and touch the hem of His garment unawares. (Superstition often associates good fortune with touching things: we kiss the Blarney Stone, we bathe in the waters of Lourdes, or we just say of something with an uncertain outcome, "Touch wood" – a relic [I trust] of our superstitious past).
The two blind men displayed a faith which brought them to Jesus for healing, but it did not lead them to obey Him afterwards: ‘Then he touched their eyes and said, "According to your faith will it be done to you"; and their sight was restored. Jesus warned them sternly, "See that no-one knows about this." But they went out and spread the news about him all over that region’ (vv. 29-31). They reward His restoration of their sight with immediate disobedience to His will. And that poor mute demoniac is too helpless to articulate any faith at all for himself: ‘While they were going out, a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus’ (v. 32), he could not even bring himself to Jesus. It is a weak and feeble faith in every case.
But (c) then notice this: it did not matter in what agonised desperation the ruler cried out to Jesus, how gingerly and superstitiously the woman reached out to Him, with what mixed motives and disobedient hearts those two blind men followed Him into the house, how unformed and inarticulate may have been the faith of the mute demoniac – they were all dealt with by Jesus – not by the quality or quantity of their faith but by the object of their faith. Faith brings the Saviour and the sinner together. Notice the emphasis on the physical person and presence of Jesus in these miraculous healings: the ruler says "Come and put your hand on her" (v. 18); the woman says, "If only I touch his cloak, I will be healed" (21); in verse 25, He went in and took the girl by the hand, and she got up; in verse 29 Jesus touched their eyes and said, "According to your faith will it be done to you." The emphasis is not on the faith itself, it’s on the Person who was the object of their faith. You see, the question that Jesus put to the two blind men in verse 28 clarified two things – (i) that their cries were not just desperation but were also faith; (ii) that their faith was not just in God but also in Jesus: ‘When he had gone indoors, the blind men came to him, and he asked them, "Do you believe that I am able to do this?" "Yes, Lord," they replied. Then he touched their eyes and said, "According to your faith will it be done to you" ’ (v. 28, 29).
All Jesus’ activity in these two chapters, (8 and 9) of Matthew’s Gospel, which we’ve been studying this autumn has been giving clear identification signals. At the beginning of the service we had some words of the prophet Isaiah read, when he said that the coming of the Messiah would be a time when the eyes of the blind would be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped, the lame would leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb shout for joy (Isaiah 35:5, 6). Now it was happening – and the suffering, the disabled, the needy, the broken-hearted, recognised it. The indifferent observers might mock, as they did in verse 24, doubting His power to solve human misery. The religious experts, who could not deny the great miracles they were seeing and yet who dare not face the obvious conclusion to be drawn from them, tried to call in question His motive and His integrity: ‘But the Pharisees said, "It is by the prince of demons that he drives out demons" ’ (v. 34).
You see, the big issue is not ultimately: how strong is my faith? (whether we’re suffering or not). The big issue is: who is Jesus? Has He an answer to human suffering? Some today, as then, mock. Some, many, today, as then, call in question His credentials. But as then, we still live in a suffering world. We may have relieved some of the symptoms of suffering, but there’s still no human solution to the fact of suffering, the problem of pain. And it is the same Jesus who alone confronts us with an answer to suffering.
It is not faith that will hold us up in suffering. It is Jesus. The poverty and the inadequacy of much of the faith displayed in this passage (desperate, superstitious, disobedient as it was) are irrelevant. It is the identity of Jesus – which is why that last verse (v. 34) is so sinister.
I do not know what human suffering there may be here present in this building now. Many in this gathering are young. We may not have suffered much, nor seen much suffering yet. But we will. We will all suffer sooner or later: loved ones will die, disease will come, the years will steal many of life’s pleasures away. And there is only One who is the answer to all that: God’s Messiah, who suffered death on your behalf and mine, in order that none of our sufferings (however intense and bitter) might separate us from God. Do you know Him?
In the days of the Scottish Covenanters in the mid 17th Century, a Covenanter called Robert Cameron was killed and the English soldiery cut off his head and his hands and showed them to his father and asked him, "Do you know them?" He replied "I know them. I know them. They are my son’s, my dear son’s. It is the Lord. True, it is the will of the Lord who cannot wrong me or mine, but has made goodness and mercy to follow us all our days." That was not actually strong faith that Robert Cameron’s father showed. He didn’t play a sort of psychological trick on himself and managed to persuade himself that this was something good that had happened to him instead of something bad. It was a real knowledge of God, through Jesus – the God who does not promise protection from suffering; but who promises us His presence, in suffering, now, and His presence for ever in eternity to those who trust and believe in His Son.
I wish I could stand before you this morning and say that the Christian faith can promise you that you won’t suffer. But I can’t possibly do that. I would be a liar if I tried to say that to you this morning. But I can say this to you: that whatever life may hold, for anyone present here this morning, God offers you forgiveness; He offers you eternal life; He offers you a knowledge of Himself for now and for ever.
And it is by putting our hands into that hand that we can find - if not a philosophical, intellectual solution to the problem of pain (because I don’t think it is quite that) - an existential solution to the problem of pain: a way of living that can cope with whatever life throws at us, because we know that life is not all there is. There is One who stands beyond the grave, who will comfort us in the present and be with us for ever in heaven at the end of it all. And it is to Him that we must commit ourselves as I commit you now in Jesus’ name. Amen.