Suffering: A Divine Vocation

There's a somewhat lesser-known work of Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick and Billy Budd and a host of South Sea adventure stories.

In one of his lesser-known works, Melville makes this statement.

He says, "Until we learn that one grief outweighs a thousand joys, we will never understand what Christianity is trying to make us." Now, when Melville makes that statement, I don't think that he's simply being morbid or pessimistic, but he is echoing a sentiment that we find in scripture itself.

For example, the wisdom literature of the Old Testament declares that it is better to go to the house of mourning than to spend our time with fools.

It's just one more case in point where we see how closely related the God of scripture is to the reality of suffering and of pain.

And in the first segment together, I mentioned this word, vocation.

And usually when we use this word vocation, we're referring to our career or to our life's work.

Whenever I meet someone the first time, I ask them what their name is and where they live, and then inevitably I'll say, "What do you do?" I'm inquiring about your vocation.

We have vocational tests.

We have vocational schools.

So this word is a very important part of our vocabulary.

But its root meaning, its classical meaning, is taken from the Latin word that means to call.

And the idea earlier on in our history when we understood that God calls people into various tasks and various occupations.

He doesn't just call people into the ordained ministry, to clergy and so on, but He calls people to be physicians.

He calls people to be involved in jurisprudence.

He calls people into productive enterprises of business and so on.

That this idea of vocation has to do with the fact that we are confident that as the Lord of history and as the Lord of all of life, God places His call upon people to perform certain tasks.

But we don't usually think of suffering or of dying as a vocation.

I haven't seen any vocational schools that give a diploma in suffering or, uh, or a place where you can go and study how to die.

And yet, if I understand what scripture is teaching about the nature of suffering and about the nature of death, I think that it is safe for us to see that there are times in a person's life where the call of God upon that person may not be to banking or to being a doctor or to being a minister or whatever.

But the call of God on the person's life for that portion of their life is to suffer, perhaps even to die.

As I said earlier, that may sound far out to you and radical.

So what I'd like to do in the rest of this segment is to show you something of the history of God's activity with people by looking again at persons whom we know God called to suffer.