On Sunday, we began a conversation that we need to have but that, all too often, the Church has been too reluctant to have. We’re diving into the deep waters of suffering, asking: Why does a loving, all-powerful God allow pain and suffering?

It’s not an easy question and not one that we’ll pretend to have clear and concise answers for either. It’s also not a new question either. As we said on Sunday, the Book of Job, written some 3000 years ago, spends 42 chapters wrestling with it. Jesus’ own disciples asked it. You and I have probably asked it more times than we care to admit.

Brace yourself, I’m about to let the cat out of the bag with this series. Okay, while I think there are better ways of addressing this question than others, I ultimately don’t have much confidence we’ll arrive at a fully satisfying answer this side of the Resurrection. But. But. But. Even though there may not be a perfect resolution to the problem, this doesn’t mean there’s nothing of substance that can be said about it. In fact, I believe the Christian story offers more to the challenge of theodicy (that’s the big word used to describe all this) than any other religious or non-religious paradigm brings to the table. How so? Because, at the centre of this story is not an explanation to the problem of suffering, but rather a person… who suffers. And of course, it’s not just “a person” – it’s God himself. This is a God who doesn’t watch suffering from a distance but instead opts to step in and suffer with us. He offers solidarity with us in the act of suffering on the cross.

As an example, James Cone, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, draws a parallel that’s both unsettling and yet helpful: Jesus’ crucifixion and the lynching of Black bodies in America are not just historically similar—they are theologically linked. Both were forms of public torture meant to dehumanize and terrify. And in both cases, the world looked away. Yet God didn’t.

“The cross,” Cone writes, “is God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.” The cross is not just the place where sin is dealt with—it’s the place where God shows us he knows what it means to suffer unjustly, to be humiliated, to be abandoned. That’s powerful. I can’t quite articulate it (yet), but in the absence of any explanatory power, we are fit to remain silent when confronted by the God whose solidarity with us is found not in the overcoming or trampling of our own experiences of evil and suffering, but rather who enters into it directly, submitting to the worst that evil and suffering can deliver.

This changes everything.

It means God doesn’t just tolerate our pain or stand idly by as we endure it. He himself has felt it. He’s shouldered it. He’s still shouldering it alongside us. And somehow, mysteriously, that act of divine solidarity becomes the space where our hope for deliverance is born—not because the pain vanishes, but because we know we are not alone in it.

Now, I know, this is not a neat and tidy answer and it 100% sidesteps the question directly… and yet, it’s not nothing. In fact, I’d argue it’s the most honest, most costly, and most comforting thing that can be offered in the face of suffering: a God who knows suffering not by virtue of his omniscience but by virtue of his humanity.

This Sunday, Cory Hoogsteen will be guiding us further into this conversation. He’ll be helping us see how suffering isn’t just a problem to solve—it’s a relational weight we carry, especially when we love deeply. What if love itself invites vulnerability? What if pain is the cost of connection? Cory’s going to unpack this, and I’m confident it will stir something deep and important in all of us. I hope you’ll join us.