About twenty years ago, my dad felt a sharp pain in his leg and had to be rushed to the hospital. Dr. Frasco—a top-flight vascular surgeon—found my family in the hospital waiting room and told us that he needed to operate, and that although there wasn’t time to explain, due to the complexity of my dad’s condition, there was a good chance he would have to amputate my dad’s leg.

Despite Dr. Frasco’s qualifications, it was tempting in this situation to question him, to be suspicious of his prognosis and his chosen course of action. My dad looked perfectly healthy from the outside. Maybe this surgeon was taking the easy way out. Maybe he’d rather get an amputation over with now rather than have to battle operation after operation so my dad could keep his leg. These were understandable thoughts, and they were thoughts that my mom, my brother, and I had and that we discussed.

But suppose that Dr. Frasco had come to my family and said that during the operation, my dad was going to need a significant number of blood transfusions, and that they were having trouble finding a suitable donor. And suppose further that Dr. Frasco—out of compassion for my father and for my family—offered to donate his own blood. And suppose even further that Dr. Frasco did this at the risk of his own life, perhaps because such a large quantity of blood was needed.

Now, in this situation, my response to Dr. Frasco would change markedly. Maybe I couldn’t explain to you the reasons why Dr. Frasco might have to amputate my dad’s leg, and maybe initially I had reason to be suspicious of his prognosis. But if Dr. Frasco had offered my dad his own blood, I would have been convinced that he was for us, I would have been convinced that we could trust him, and I would have been rightly convinced of this. Even if Dr. Frasco’s reasoning remained opaque to me, he would have done something so indisputably loving and so inordinately costly that I could only rationally conclude that he was for my family.

There are two ways to defend the goodness of a person when he or she is accused of wrongdoing. The first way is to explain the good reasons the person had for acting as he or she did. This is the more traditional approach to responding to the problem of evil, to respond by telling a story about why God might create and sustain a world that turned out like this one. But there is also a second way to defend the goodness of God against objections from evil and suffering—not by explaining goodness but by displaying goodness.

The Christian claim is that this is precisely what God has done for each of us. When he saw us hurting and in need of healing, he provided his own blood. He chose to join us in our suffering and to take on himself whatever suffering was necessary for us to be healed. He displayed his love in such an extravagant way that we have strong reason to believe that we can trust him, even when we don’t fully understand his ways.

Ironically, the famous atheist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said it best: “The gods justified human life by living it themselves—the only satisfactory [response to the problem of suffering] ever invented.”(1) Remarkably, Nietzsche was writing of the ancient Greeks here and, in his bias, didn’t make the connection to Christianity. As a Christian, however, I am very pleased to agree with him and then point emphatically to the cross of Jesus Christ.

At the cross of Jesus, we see the absolute uniqueness of the Christian response to suffering. In some religious traditions, the idea of God suffering is unthinkable; it is thought to make God weak. In others, to reach divinity is precisely to move beyond the possibility of suffering, to give up your attachments to other people so that you will never have to suffer for anyone. Only in Christ do we have a God who loves us enough to suffer with us, by us, and—ultimately—for us.

Vince Vitale is director of the Zacharias Institute and a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 30.

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There is something comforting about the many characters in the Christian story of which we know very little. There was more to the story of the woman who knew that if she could just touch the fringe of Jesus’s robe she would be well. There was more to tell about the woman who anointed Jesus with a jar of perfume, or the thief who hung beside Jesus on the cross. Yet, we are told only that they will be remembered. And they are. However “insignificant” their lives were to society, they have been captured in the pages of history as people worth remembering, people who had a role in the story of the God man on earth, people remembered by God when multitudes actually wished them forgotten. It is to me a kind reminder that our own fleeting lives are remembered by God long before others notice and long after they have stopped noticing.

We know very little about the man named Simeon, but we know he was in the temple when he realized that God had remembered him. Reaching for the baby in the arms of a young girl, Simeon was moved to praise. As his wrinkled hands cradled the infant, Simeon sang to God: “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation.”(1)

Simeon actually uses the language of a slave who has been freed. There is a sense of immediacy and relief, as if a great iron door has been unlocked and he is now free to go through it. God had remembered his promise even as God remembered the aging Simeon. The Lord had promised Simeon that he would not die before he saw the Lord’s salvation. Now seeing and holding the child named Jesus, Simeon somehow knew that he was dismissed to death in peace.

Marveling at this bold reaction of a stranger, Mary and Joseph stood in awe—and possibly horror. Upon laying eyes on their baby, a man entirely unknown to them pronounced he could now die in peace. They were well aware of God’s hand upon Jesus; yet here they seemed to discover that the arm of God, which is not too short to save, extended far beyond anything they imagined.

Simeon’s subsequent blessing and words to the young mother only furthered this certainty: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”(2) To these words as well, Mary and Joseph stood in awe and possibly horror.

In this Lenten season, followers of Jesus recall the horrific events of the cross, the sword that pierced this mother’s heart, and the passion of the one who continues to be spoken against. An old man in the temple hundreds of years ago, through a fraction of a scene in his life, reminds us still today that to look at Jesus is to see the suffering of the world and the salvation of God. As Father Farrar Capon notes, “[God] will not take our cluttered life, as we hold it, into eternity. He will take only the clean emptiness of our death in the power of Jesus’ resurrection.” Whether peering at the child in the manger or the man on the cross, the human heart is still revealed in its response to him. This is, in fact, our own most memorable feature.

Perhaps the small excerpts of the many fleeting lives we find throughout the Christian story were meant to capture this very sentiment. As the thief peered into the bruised eyes of Jesus on the cross beside him, like Simeon, he saw the salvation of God. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” he asked. And it was so.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Luke 2:29-30.
(2) Luke 2:34-35.

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