PROPER 17-B, August 31, 2003

It's been quite a few years now since Rabbi Harold Kushner's book When Bad Things Happen to Good People topped the best-seller list. I had heard about the book, called my local bookstore to order a copy, and waited anxiously to receive it. When the book arrived, I was rather disappointed. I thought I was ordering Why Bad Things Happen to Good People and not When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

I already knew what happens when bad things happen to good people. What I really wanted to know was why. That is the question I have to deal with all the time as a priest and even as a person. It's the "God Question." It's the the "Problem of Evil question." It is the question of anyone who has any faith in God. Why, we ask, if God is so good and so powerful and so loving, does God allow bad things to happen to good people? In fact, why does God allow bad to happen at all?

That is the question I was hoping Kushner was dealing with and would answer. Instead, he dealt with the question, "What next? What do we do after something bad has happened to someone good?" Kushner's answer was that we simply have to have faith. That is how he and his wife dealt with the aftermath of the sickness and death of their son from the aging disease.

A few weeks ago I went back to Spokane to help some former parishioners, good friends, deal with the tragedy of the death of their seventeen-year-old daughter Katy who was killed by a crocodile while they were on vacation in Africa. Like the Kushner’s Jack and Carol were asking God why this happened. We all were and we were not getting any satisfactory answers other than that bad things happen to good people all the time, sometimes very bad things to very good people. The only certainty we all had – Jack, Carol, their other daughters, their friends, all of us – was that somehow in some way our faith would see us through. But the question still remains: why do bad things happen to good people?

A good friend of mine, who is a professional pastoral counselor in a hospital, says that from his experience, every time something bad happens -- death, sickness, loss of a job, tragedy, divorce -- everyone goes through three stages. The first is the shock stage. When we encounter the loss, the death of a loved one, for instance, we are in a state of shock. There were over a thousand people in the Cathedral for Katy’s Service. Every last one of us was in shock. I still am every time I think of her. It takes a while to get through that period -- even when we have been anticipating that loss, that death, which, of course, we were not. During that period in our lives we do ask "Why?" But the answers we receive, if we indeed receive or perceive some answers, are usually incomprehensible. We are simply not in the state of mind to be able to understand why what happened has happened.

Once the shock begins to wear off, we begin to cope. That coping stage also takes time to work through. We continue to ask "Why?" but now we begin to comprehend some of the answer -- if there is an answer. But it is only when we finally begin to adapt to life without -- without the one who died, without the job, without the spouse, without Katy -- that we finally start to comprehend the loss. We all know people who never adapt, who are still trying to cope with the loss of a child or a spouse or a marriage, ten, fifteen years later. And they are not coping very well. They are holding only by fingernails of faith.

It was only when Rabbi Kushner and his wife got to the adapting stage in their grief process that they could begin to deal with what you do when a bad thing happens to you. Again, their answer was that our faith has to see us through. If one does not have faith, the process of grief and adaptation might be even more difficult. And there is a third possibility: we might lose our faith in the process. We could simply come to believe that a good God would not allow this terrible thing to happen. Thus, there is no God.

Yet, asking the question of why bad things happen to good people is only one half of the total faith question. The other half is the question, "Why do good people do bad things?" That is the question today's Old Testament and Gospel readings address.

In the first reading Moses is at a loss to explain and understand why his Jewish confreres continually do that which they know they should not do. He reminds them that every time they have done that which they knew was against God's wishes, something bad happened to them. And yet they continued to do it. Why, Moses wanted to know, why did they continue doing bad? Moses could not come up with a good answer. I suspect the people could not either.

So what Moses does is present the people with a set of laws and commandments in the hope that, if they strictly follow those commandments, they might not do bad things. Moses hoped that the Law would be a sort of preventative medicine. In many ways it was. Yet the people still kept doing bad things.

In the Gospel Jesus dealt with the same matter only in a different form. The Pharisees had come to make the laws of Moses so strict that it actually prevented good people from doing good things. If a friend was sick on the Sabbath and he lived across the street, you could not go and attend to his needs. That is what the Law said. And Jesus said that that was not only foolish; it was also wrong. The Law was made for mankind, not mankind for the Law.

And besides, Jesus says, both good and bad come not from following the Law but come from the heart. Keeping all the laws does not in and of itself make one a good person. One is good because one does good because one wants to do good and not because the Law says that one must do good. And then Jesus goes on, at the end of today's Gospel lesson, to enumerate all those bad things we good people do -- Law or no Law.

But the question that still remains is "Why?" Why do good people do bad things? I think Jesus gives us a clue as to why in that list. He saves the worst sin for last: foolishness. It is because of our foolishness that we good people continually do that which we know in our hearts we should not do: lie, steal, cheat, kill, covet and so forth. Fools that we are, we still sin.

Yet foolishness in and of itself still does not explain why good people do bad things. And make no mistake about it, we have to ask and answer that question. Unfortunately, most of us prefer to ask and dwell on the first half of the faith question. Instead of asking why we good people do bad things, we want to know why a good God allows bad things to happen in the first place.

If Jesus Himself were with us this morning, standing right in the middle of the church and we asked him why bad things happen to good people, I suspect He might say to us, "I'll answer that question for you if you first answer one question for me: why do you good people continue to do bad things?"

Besides, what if we knew why bad things happen to good people. What if Jesus told us that answer? What if Jesus told the Kushners why their son died, told the Reeves’ why Katy was so tragically killed, told the family of the last victim of a drunken driver why. They and we still would have to answer the other question: why we good people do bad things. In the end, you see, it does not matter why bad things happen to good people. That is not a God-problem so much as it is God's problem. God must solve that problem, answer that question in His own good time. For the moment God has chosen not to answer that question, at least to our satisfaction.

The real problem that exists and the real question that must be answered is why we good people still insist on doing bad things. That is the human question and we human beings are the ones who can and must answer it. Until we answer our question, we probably have no right getting upset because God hasn't answered God’s question.

Why did what happen to Katy happen? Why do bad things happen to good people? Only God knows. Why do good people do bad things? Only we good people who do bad things know that answer. To date, neither you nor I have adequately answered that question except, perhaps, to say that it was and is because of our foolishness that we do so. When we stop being foolish, then maybe we will no longer do bad things. Once we get to that stage of our life, then maybe we will have the right to ask God the God-question and honestly demand an answer. But by then we may have already found the answer.