“The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.” (Anon.)
“Anyone can experience the ‘what’ provided they have a ‘why’.” (Nietzsche)
Introduction
A friend handed on a book journaling one woman’s battle with the same disease (cancer) from which my wife is suffering. This story confronted me again with the importance of finding meaning through suffering and death.
Sadly, this seems to be a message we do not want to hear. The discipleship crisis in the church, one constantly hears of sexual immorality, and the social dysfunction in society, amphetamine use in WA is up to twice the national average, point to an overall failure to experience meaning.
Society’s Loss of Meaning
In 1972 I became a Christian because I was obsessed with the quest for the meaning of life. All the youth movements of the time were seeking something bigger than the self. The Jesus Movement into which I gravitated was only one manifestation of a wider youth wave, on the streets with us were the Hare Krishna’s, other Eastern cults, the Children of God sect, socialists and so on, all with a “good news” message.
Something drastic has changed in the last generation. Under the weight of ever increasing affluence, our culture has abandoned the quest for meaning and we are hurting terribly inside.
The famous psychoanalyst and concentration camp survivor Victor Frankl commented on his observations of prisoners, “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose…He was soon lost.” As Frankl saw it, whatever is meaningful is endurable, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”
But what if nothing is meaningful? The atheist philosopher Nietzsche said that since we have “killed God” Western culture has become weightless – there are no longer any absolutes. In a world without meaning people become obsessed with the selfish – gratification of drives and instincts (hence recreational drugs, extreme sports, Big Brother).
As a “post- Christian” nation we on a desperate search for something that can cover over our painful inner lack of meaning. Addictions (to substances, T.V., sport, sex, goods, New Age religions) plague those poor souls whose lives have been cut off from any spiritual anchor.
Pathetically, the popular church answer to the vacuum of meaning is a combination of therapy and entertainment. We are dominated by motivational lifestyle messages in the atmosphere of a big band flavoured with pop psychology and doses of happiness. This is not essentially different from the vocational (“success”) and recreational (travel, sport, media) strategies which offer diversions from the disturbances of life and avoid the questions of eternity. Since we are made in the image of God these tactics cannot truly fulfil – boredom plagues the young and depression is an epidemic in culture and church.
Meaning through Suffering and Death
Suffering and death are not mere accidental tragedies but indispensable to God’s purposes for humanity. (A truth suicide bombers understand.)
Sin is self -centredness. After sin entered the world, God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—”” (Gen 3:22) The key to this puzzling text is that suffering and death are the only agencies powerful enough in human experience to destroy the radical self – centredness of sin.
This principle was even true of Jesus, “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.” (Heb 2:10.)
What makes Jesus suffering uniquely redemptive is that he continues to fully seek God when his suffering seems meaningless. “Jesus cried with a loud voice,…“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”” (Mark 15:34). Without the experience of miracle or the manifest presence of God, Jesus exercises a purely naked faith, he loves God solely for Himself. Only through this sort of suffering was Jesus able, on our behalf, to love as God loves us, absolutely and unconditionally.
It is the victory of Jesus’ faith on the cross (1 John 5:4) that reveals that in the seemingly meaningless pains of life we are mysteriously being drawn to conformity with the beloved Son (Rom 8:29). When the pain is extreme enough the insight is deep enough to tell us that suffering itself is one of the highest of God’s transforming gifts, “For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake,” (Phil 1:29).
An Unconforming Generation
God is about to release in the West a generation of young followers of Jesus who will reject prosperity without purpose, spirituality without holiness, competition without compassion, church without mission, conformity without crucifixion.
This will be a genuinely Jesus – centred generation who will not follow the bland forms of self – centred gratification dominating in the world and in the church. They will have tasted sex, drugs and rock and roll to the full and left it all behind. These on fire young people will know they have something better than anything sensory stimulation can provide. Who would want to turn back to the mundane every day world of materialism and hedonism when the real world is filled with angels and awe and the mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus, with sufferings for his sake (Mark 8:30)?
Conclusion
The suffering and apparent emptiness that God has ordained in your life has meaning (Rom 8:28). It is there so that the next time he puts someone in your path who is despair in you can minister into their situation through the faith of the cross. You can begin to fulfil the meaning of your life in helping them to find the meaning of theirs, in becoming like Christ in his great victory over all self – centredness.