Why I stopped saying ‘God has a plan’ at funerals

Three years ago I preached at the funeral of a boy of sixteen who drowned in a dam outside Chitungwiza. His mother sat in the front row. I had prepared carefully, and somewhere in the middle of the sermon I said what I had heard preachers say all my life: that we cannot understand it now, but God has a plan, and one day we will see that nothing was wasted.

I watched her face close. Not in anger. In loneliness. I had told her, in front of everyone, that her son's death was part of something good. She was the only person in the room who knew exactly how far it was from good.

I have not said that sentence at a funeral since. This essay is my attempt to explain why, to myself as much as to anyone.

The philosopher's version and the preacher's version

The problem of evil, in its philosophical form, is an argument. If God is wholly good, he would want to prevent suffering. If he is all-powerful, he could. Yet suffering exists, and much of it seems to serve no purpose. So, the argument concludes, either there is no such God, or we have misunderstood him.

A theodicy is an attempt to answer that argument by giving God's reasons. The word itself was coined by Leibniz, whose Theodicy (1710) argued that this is the best of all possible worlds: every evil in it belongs to a whole that could not have been made better. John Hick, in Evil and the God of Love (1966), gave a different reason, drawn from the early Church father Irenaeus. The world, he argued, is a place of soul-making. Moral and spiritual growth needs real dangers, real choices and real pain, and a world without them could not produce the kind of persons God intends.

These are serious arguments by serious people, and I still read them. But notice what happens to them at a graveside. "God has a plan" is Leibniz in four words. "He is making you stronger" is Hick. In the seminar room they explain why a perfect God might permit suffering in general. In the front row they become explanations of why this boy had to die. And no mother can hear that without being asked to accept her son's death as worth it.

What Job's friends did right, for a week

The Bible has already told this story. When Job loses his children, his wealth and his health, three friends come to comfort him. The book says something about them that preachers rarely quote: they sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and none of them spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.

That was the best thing they did. Then they opened their mouths. For chapter after chapter they explain Job's suffering: he must have sinned; God is disciplining him; the wicked always fall in the end. Job answers them furiously, and he accuses God as well.

And at the end God speaks to Eliphaz and says that his anger is kindled against the three friends, because they have not spoken of him what is right, as his servant Job has. The friends defended God, and God rebuked them. Job accused God, and God said Job had spoken rightly.

I have read that verse many times. I take it to mean, at the very least, that a defence of God which wounds the sufferer is no service to God.

Ivan's ticket

The strongest objection to theodicy I know is not in a philosophy book but in a novel. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan tells his brother Alyosha, a novice monk, a series of stories about cruelty to children. Then he says that even if there is a final harmony in which everything is explained and every tear answered, he does not want it if it was bought with the suffering of a single tortured child. It is not God he does not accept, he says. He simply, most respectfully, returns him the ticket.

Ivan is not arguing that God does not exist. He is saying that some explanations would be obscene even if they were true. A plan that required that child's suffering is not a plan he can praise.

Several philosophers have taken Ivan's side without giving up faith. Marilyn McCord Adams argued that for the worst evils, the ones that seem to destroy the meaning of a life, no general reason of Leibniz's or Hick's kind will do. If God is good, she thought, he must make each such life good on the whole for the person who suffered it, from within that life. Kenneth Surin and others went further and argued that theodicy itself is a mistake: it treats suffering as a puzzle to be solved by spectators, when the Christian response is to stand beside the sufferer.

What I say now

I am a lay preacher, not a theologian, and I am not sure which of these positions is true. But I am sure about the funeral.

At funerals now I do three things. I say the name, many times, because grief is about one person and not about suffering in general. I read a lament, often one of the psalms that complain, so that the mother hears that the Bible has room for her anger. And I say what I believe and no more: that God is with her in this, not that God arranged it.

Our Shona word hunhu has helped me here. A person is a person through others, and a community shows its hunhu at a funeral not by explaining but by staying. In my village the women sing through the night before a burial. Nobody explains anything. They are Job's friends in the first week.

St Paul tells us to weep with those who weep. He does not tell us to explain to them why they are weeping. The theodicies may belong in the seminar, where they can be argued with. At the graveside, the most faithful thing I have found is to say very little, and to keep sitting on the ground.