“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.”Isaiah 43:2

About three years ago, a five-year-old Moroccan boy called Rayan Oram fell through through the narrow opening of a 104 feet deep well and became trapped. Rescue efforts continued for four days and the story became global news. Hundreds gathered at the well and thousands more followed the story online and through the news. When Rayan was eventually retrieved from the well on a Saturday evening, the crowds at first greeted his emergence with cheers, until it became known that what was being retrieved was not a living boy but the body of a child who had died scared and alone in the darkness.

I remember hearing about that story at the time. It has become obvious to me that stories affect us differently as we grow older and have different experiences in life. And this one got to me, not least because I thought about my own children and imagined them in a similar situation. Words cannot express the awfulness of such a thing. And it is only natural, when confronted by such events, to turn our gaze upwards and to ask why it is that a loving and powerful God would allow such horrors to occur to a child.

This is a short sermon, so a full and satisfactory answer cannot be given here if it ever could. But, in my view, certain things should be ruled out, such as that this child had committed a crime that merited his death, or that God willed the tragic and lonely death of this five-year-old boy to bring about some greater purpose in his plans or (even more horrendously) to bring himself a greater measure of personal glory. Many theologians have speculated along these lines and to my mind these answers are not only contrary to the revelation of God and of Jesus Christ in Scripture but there are abhorrent and should cause us moral outrage.

Again, this is just a brief reply, but there are perhaps two things of any substance to be said about this. The first is that the world that we live in is tragically separated from God as a result of a cosmic catastrophe that is aften called “The Fall”. The world that we live in is not the world as God intends it but the world that suffers as a result of the rebellion of conscious angelic and human agency. God will bring about a restored creation through the power of Jesus Christ’s cross and resurrection, but that is not the world we live in now.

The second point I want to raise is the main focus for this sermon. I remember thinking about Rayan Oram at the time of his death that the only way that any sense can be made of it is to believe in a merciful God who was present to Rayan at every moment, through every second of his suffering. And, at the moment of his death, to believe that God immediately brought Rayan into his presence to be comforted and to consoled, and to rejoice with him forever.

In this, I am reminded of a moving passage in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. A holy man called Zosima is confronted by a mother stricken with grief over the death of her two-year-old son. She has lost the will to believe and even to live and cannot go on with the pain. She comes to the Elder Zosima seeking advice. Among other things, Zosima says to the grieving mother:

The Continuing Problem

The problem of pain, suffering, evil, and death is a constant theme of Scripture. This morning we have a reading from the Book of Isaiah, a book which is all about this theme: the God of Israel says to his people over and over again, “Trust me, not in the nations, not in your own strength, and I will deliver you. I will help you. Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine.”

And there may have some legitimacy in the response of Israel at times, when the people wondered how exactly their God could be said to be faithful: he didn’t keep us from sinning against him, he allowed us to be taken into exile in a foreign land, we have suffered humiliation and grief at the hands of the Gentile nations.

In their suffering and grief, we can see something of our own as Christians when things do not go as we plan and when we suffer terribly: I thought God loved me. I thought he cared about me. How could he when he has allowed me to go through all of this?

The Providential and Personal Presence of God

My answer to this, again, is the presence of God. In the Book of Isaiah, and throughout the Old Testament, we see something of what might be called the providential presence of God: God providing for his people through the events of history and making himself known through miraculous events and theophanies such as the burning bush, the pillars of cloud and fire, the cloud of glory in the Temple.

This providential presence was an awesome thing and God would point to his track record and say to the people, “I have delivered you before. I will do so again.” We hear it in our reading from Isaiah today, “Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine.”

But God has gone even further than this and, in Jesus Christ, has given to the world what we might call his personal presence: he took flesh and dwelt among us.

The Baptism of Christ, which we read about today in the Gospel of Luke, illustrates this in a particularly profound way. It is not recorded in Luke’s Gospel, but elsewhere John the Baptist is perplexed at the notion that Jesus would be baptised by him. Why? Baptism is for repentance and the washing away of sin. John was clearly troubled at the notion that this might be appropriate for Jesus. And so should we be. Why then was Jesus baptised?

Part of the answer to this question is certainly because through his baptism Jesus was inaugurating the Sacrament of Baptism. He was given it his stamp of approval, as it were. The Church Fathers talk about how Christ’s holiness made holy the waters of baptism so that now those waters cleanse us and make us holy when we descend into them.

But there is another aspect to Christ’s baptism relevant to our theme today and that is Christ’s profound identification with us even in our sin-blighted and broken condition. In his chapter on baptism in Rowan Williams’ Being Christian, he decides to focus on this aspect, saying:

Some of you may have seen such icons. But the point is that Jesus’ descent into the waters of baptism is a powerful sign of his identification with us in the midst of our sinful, chaotic, messy, and painful circumstances. It says to us, from the very beginning of the story of the Gospels, that Jesus is willing to come into the midst of our brokenness and to get his hands dirty. God is not aloof to our suffering, to our sin, to our shame, to any of it. He is profoundly involved in Jesus.

The Baptism of Christ is like a little picture of the Gospel: Christ descends into the waters of chaos, death, and hell only to rise again in glory through the power of the Holy Spirit. His baptism is, in this sense, a foreshadowing of the cross and the resurrection.

And this, to return to my theme, is part, at least, of the answer to our sorrow, our suffering, our sin, our grief in this world. We may not be able to explain it all satisfactorily, but we do know that God has entered into it as deeply as he possibly could have done in Jesus Christ: he has suffered rejection, he has suffered torture, he has suffered death, he has suffered hell, just as many of us have and as many of us do.

Part of my exhortation to you today then is to recognise this: that Christ is present to you in your grief and your pain. That you can know his consoling presence as you draw closer to him. And that there is hope on the other side of whatever cross it is that you bear. Christ is even close to you in the midst of your sin, and desires to bring you out of it and to give you new life. Don’t wallow in despair or self-pity or doubt. Come to Christ in the depths, and he will deliver you.

A Further Challenge

But there is one further thing to say about this. Consider the words of Joseph Ratzinger, who said of Christ’s baptism:

There is undoubtedly a singular work of Christ that we trust in and by which we benefit. But there is also a further calling. For if we meet Christ in the depths of his suffering-for-others, this means that we must be willing to be where he is. What I mean is that we are to be willing to suffer for others too. If Christ puts himself in the mess, in the chaos, in the darkness, in the midst of suffering, for us, then we are to be willing to do that for other people also. If we meet him in the depths, we must be prepared to meet others there too.

In this way, not only is our suffering transformed into something meaningful, but our encounters with those who suffer can be too. We are not just sitting with people who suffer hopelessly, but we are journeying with them as the presence of Christ in their lives.

I invite you to think about this for a moment: what are the messy, difficult, unpleasant, unappealing situations in your life? Who are the people involved in them? Who are the sick? Who are the lonely? Who are the difficult? Who are those far from God and from hope? Perhaps these situations and people fill you with repugnance or even disgust. I would bet that those situations are precisely the ones that the Lord is calling you to be present to.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you,” says the Lord in our reading from Isaiah. These words find their ultimate truth in the waters of baptism, which Christ embraced so that he might truly identify with us in our suffering, in our grief, in our death. He calls us to be where he is, to know his presence and therefore his peace, but to be with others too – to suffer with them and to bring his presence to them. May we be enabled by the power of the Holy Spirit to respond to this calling.