A God Who Suffers

I just finished my final course for seminary, so I now feel an incredible freedom to read any book that I choose to read! Yippee! I ordered a few used books off of Ebay, and I just finished the first book to arrive: "Night" by Elie Wiesel. It’s one of the most captivating and haunting books I have ever read. "Night" is Wiesel’s autobiographical account of living through the holocaust as a young teenage boy. If you have not read this book, I highly recommend it. It is difficult to stomach, but it is also inspirational and deeply moving.

In the most interesting passage of the book, Wiesel recounts a story of a likeable and sweet Jewish boy who is brutally hung to death by the Nazi SS. He writes:

“But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light was still breathing…And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. Behind me I heard the (a man) asking, ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows.’”

As a boy Wiesel passionately believed in God and even desired to become a rabbi, but the holocaust made him lose all faith in God. I wonder if his experience would have been any different if he had believed in a suffering savior, a God who descended to human form and suffered an atrocious death on a cross. I cannot pretend to imagine the horror that Wiesel suffered in the midst of Nazi oppression and the horrors of the concentration camps, but I wonder if his faith in God could have survived if he was a Christian and knew the suffering of Christ. It seems to me that the only faith that would have had a chance of surviving such a horrendous experience is the Christian faith.