SARAH’S LAUGHTER:
Doubt, Tears and Christian Hope
By Vinoth Ramachandra
Langham Global Library. 137pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 1 783 688 579
This is a book for those whose faith in God is tested by the evil, pain and grief that surrounds us in our embattled world. For those who ‘are angered not only by horrendous acts of human cruelty and deceit, but also by the callous slaughter of animals and the destruction of habitats’ (p.6).
From his opening analysis of the civil war in his beloved nation of Sri Lanka, Ramachandra, in the five chapters of this sobering yet ultimately hopeful book, covers a vast terrain of pain including his own. He mentions the death of his wife, Karin, only once early on in the book, yet this inevitably influences the text and the book is dedicated to her.
Scripture however also permeates the pages, with large quotations throughout especially as one might expect from the many passages of lament, the subject of the first chapter. The author also quotes Wolterstorff, from his Lament for a Son: ‘My wound is an unanswered question. The wounds of all humanity are an unanswered question’ (p.13). Ramachandra bewails the number of ‘lamentless churches’ which don’t permit such pain to be expressed.
The many unanswered questions in the book of Job are the focus of the next chapter. The author’s central point is that Job’s anguish is not so much about the fact of suffering but, rather, the religious attempts to explain it away. Ramachandra sees in God’s speeches that conclude the book – the gratuitousness of divine love, the sovereignty of divine wisdom, the patience of divine justice, and the particularity of divine engagement – as four sources of hope for Job and for us.
The Tears of God chapter explores the suffering of God over and with his people. Classical theism’s doctrine of the impassibility of God receives a challenge here as Ramachandra suggest its origins lie more in the pagan Plato and Aristotle than in Scripture. ‘God is not a passionless chess master moving pieces around a board or unilaterally directing a drama in accordance with a preordained script’ (p.45), and defends this claim with references ranging from Genesis to the prophets, before strengthening the point in his consideration of the life of Christ. He considers the language at the end of Mark’s Gospel indicates a marked change from the activity of Jesus to His passivity at the hands of those who tried and crucified Him. ‘This passivity, no less than our agency while fit and active, is part and parcel of the human condition’ (p.56). He rightly applies this insight to some of the key issues in bioethics, such as how we view the disabled or those suffering dementia and also how Christ’s example in suffering might help us in living through our own experiences of it.
The author’s longstanding emphasis on the care of the natural world shines through in the following chapter exploring natural evil and disasters. Having demonstrated the importance of all aspects of God’s creation, he ends with the reminder that ‘in the Biblical perspective, it is human sin that is the great evil and from which flow all the other kinds of evil and misery’ (p.105).
The final chapter looks towards our future hope as God’s people, but sees this hope as both a struggle and a sign of our vulnerability this side of its heavenly fulfilment. Yet it is also a prophetic way of life pointing others to the Christ who sustains it. He reminds us that ‘The church, that section of humanity which has glimpsed the dawn in Easter Sunday while sharing the agony of Easter Saturday in fellowship with the rest of humanity, seeks to witness to that dawn’.
