“Behind every crucifix, hidden, for we cannot see him, stands our Risen Lord.”

“Behind every crucifix, hidden, for we cannot see him, stands our Risen Lord.”

Today’s gospel raises the difficult question of suffering – seems to indicate that misfortune is not a punishment from God, sometimes people suffer through no fault of their own.

It seems to be a fact of life that most, if not all, of us face suffering and hardship at different times in our lives. Even those who seem on the outside to have everything going for them – when you delve deeper they have their own troubles too.

Why some things have to happen we may never know in this life – may be we don’t have the capacity to understand yet. But we are given a promise, in one of St Paul’s letters: “All things work for the good of those who place their faith in God.”

To illustrate what this could mean someone once told about an incident that they saw while staying in a hotel. They were sitting in the lounge of the hotel and there was a piano there. A little girl came over and sat on the stool and started to play – just hitting the keys, random notes, just plink plonk. A man came and sat behind her – the girl continued her random plonking away, but the man started to add notes above and below her, and somehow out of her random notes he created something beautiful. The man’s name was Bela Bartok – the famous composer and the girl was his daughter.

Julian of Norwich was a famous mystic and visionary and in her visions Jesus once gave her a message: “I never said that you would not be tempested (go through difficult times) but that you would not be overcome.”

“Behind every crucifix, hidden, for we cannot see him, stands our Risen Lord.”

In the times when we face the cross, when what is happening to us can seem random and even senseless, Jesus stands behind us just as Bela Bartok sat behind his daughter and he asks us to trust him that he can make something wonderful out of our lives, that even our mistakes and our tragedies can somehow be brought together in a way we can’t yet understand but for which one day we will thank him.

That is his promise: “All things work for the good of those who place their faith in God.”