When God Stops Explaining
God With Us #2 - The Incarnation and the Problem of Suffering
You’re reading the second post in our Advent series ‘God With Us’. Last week, we explored why God became this specific person in this particular place. This week: what it means that God enters our suffering rather than explaining it from outside. New posts each Monday through Epiphany.
“They say she has weeks, maybe days.”
Emma’s mum, diagnosed with aggressive cancer four months earlier, despite every prayer, every medical intervention, every desperate bargain with God.
It was the second week of Advent. The church had just lit the second candle—the prophets’ candle, the one about God’s promised presence with the suffering. The reading that morning was from Isaiah:
“a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.” (42:3)
I thought about that as I headed to the hospital later that day. Emma’s mother was the bruised reed. Emma was the smouldering wick. And the question was whether God’s presence meant anything when the bruising continued, and the light kept dimming.
When I arrived, Emma didn’t ask “why”—she’d moved past that. Her question was quieter, harder:
“Where is God in this? Everyone keeps saying he’s got a plan or this will make sense someday. But I don’t want explanations. I want him here. Is he here?”
I almost offered theodicy—free will, soul-making, the greater good. Then I remembered where we were in the church year. Advent. The season that sits in darkness, lighting one candle at a time, admitting that the light hasn’t fully come yet. And Advent’s answer to suffering isn’t an explanation from outside but a presence within. God doesn’t solve the problem of evil philosophically. God enters it personally.
The Explanations That Wound
When suffering strikes, well-meaning people offer explanations. I’ve said some of these things myself, grasping for anything to fill the terrible silence:
“God has a plan.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “This will make you stronger.” “God never gives you more than you can handle.”
These phrases attempt theodicy—justifying God’s ways to humans, making suffering make sense. And the people offering them usually mean well. They’re terrified by suffering too, desperately wanting to say something, anything, that might help.
But notice what these explanations do: they position God outside the suffering, looking on with purposes we can’t see. God becomes the playwright who wrote this painful scene for dramatic effect, the teacher giving a stern test for our growth, the architect with blueprints we’re too limited to understand.
This God explains suffering but doesn’t share it. Instructs from a distance but doesn’t draw near. Has reasons but offers no companionship.
Last week, we explored why God chose this particular baby in this specific manger. This week, we see what it cost God to make that choice. The scandal of particularity we examined has implications for suffering. If God truly entered this flesh, this vulnerability, this risk of pain—then God knows suffering from inside, not just outside.
The incarnation suggests something radically different from theodicy’s explanations.
God Jumps In
Remember the metaphor from last week? I said the incarnation is like God jumping into the water when your child drowns, rather than shouting swimming instructions from the shore. The same logic applies here. God doesn’t stand at a distance explaining suffering’s purpose. God enters the depths with us.
Jürgen Moltmann’s theology emerged from experience. As a German prisoner of war after the Second World War, watching his country’s devastation and wrestling with the Holocaust, traditional theodicy rang hollow. How could anyone justify such horror as part of God’s plan? How could you tell a mother whose children died in the camps that “everything happens for a reason”?
His breakthrough came through the cross, but it started at Christmas. In The Crucified God, Moltmann argues that God doesn’t answer suffering with explanations but with participation. The incarnation means God enters human pain, making it God’s own pain. The God-with-us we celebrate at the manger culminates in God-forsaken-by-God on the cross.
This isn’t masochism or what some feminist theologians rightly call “divine child abuse”—the idea that God requires blood payment to forgive. That’s not what incarnation theology claims. God doesn’t need Jesus’s death to be able to forgive. Rather, God enters suffering to destroy it from within, not to endorse it.
It’s divine solidarity. God responds to human anguish not by explaining why it must be but by experiencing what it is.
But the vulnerability begins at Bethlehem. Mary doesn’t give birth to a divine visitor wearing a human disguise—she births God, genuinely subject to human limitation. Remember John’s visceral language from last week? “The Word became sarx”—not just flesh but raw meat, bodily tissue, the stuff that bleeds and bruises and breaks.
Luke’s Gospel makes the vulnerability concrete:
“She … wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.” (2:7)
And with mortality comes the capacity to suffer.
What Was Not Assumed Cannot Be Healed
The early church fathers understood something crucial here. Gregory of Nazianzus, a fourth-century theologian, provided a principle that became foundational:
“That which was not assumed cannot be healed.”
Think about what this means. If God avoided any aspect of human experience, that aspect would remain unredeemed. So God had to embrace the full catastrophe—birth, hunger, exhaustion, betrayal, torture, death. Christmas through crucifixion, cradle to cross.
Athanasius argued that God’s assumption of human nature—including its mortality and pain—meant human suffering was taken into God’s own life and there transformed. Not explained away but redeemed from within.
Contemporary theology extends this insight. If God became flesh, and our flesh is continuous with all creation—stardust and cell division and evolutionary time—then God’s solidarity reaches deeper than we imagined. The cancer ravaging Emma’s mother is part of creation’s groaning. God doesn’t stand outside it explaining its purpose. God enters that groaning too, making it somehow God’s own.
When Emma asked, “Is God here?” the incarnation answered: Yes. Not as an external fixer but as a fellow sufferer. Not explaining why cancer exists but present in the ravaging, in her mother’s weakening, in Emma’s grief.
The Song We Sing From Exile
We sing this every Advent— “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” But have you noticed what we’re actually singing?
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
shall come to thee, O Israel.
Advent doesn’t pretend we’re not mourning. It doesn’t rush to “Joy to the World.” It sits in the exile, names the mourning, and then—only then—dares to hope: “Emmanuel shall come.”
Emmanuel. God-with-us. Not God-explaining-to-us. Not God-fixing-it-all-immediately. God with us. In the exile. In the mourning. In the darkness of Advent’s long nights.
The Advent liturgy knows this tension intimately. We light candles in darkness, admitting the darkness is still there. We read Isaiah’s prophecy that doesn’t promise explanation:
“He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces.” (53:3)
The coming Messiah won’t answer suffering from outside. He’ll know it from inside.
This is what Advent prepares us to receive: not a God who explains everything but a God who enters anything. Not answers but presence. Not reasons but solidarity.
When Solidarity Becomes Hope
This suggests something important about how suffering might be transformed. The transformation doesn’t come from understanding why it happened but from knowing you’re not alone in it.
Three days later, Emma’s mum died. At the funeral—held between Christmas and New Year in a nearly empty church whilst everyone else celebrated—Emma told me something I won’t forget.
“When Mum was dying, I kept thinking about what you said. That God doesn’t explain it but is there in it. And there was this moment, two nights before she died, when I was holding her hand and it just... felt true. Not that God had reasons. But that God was there. In the room. In her weakening. In my fear. I can’t explain it better than that. But it helped.”
I thought about Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s tomb, even though he was about to raise him. The tears were real. God grieved death’s brutality. The incarnation means God’s “No” to suffering isn’t an abstract principle but visceral revulsion, the kind that makes you weep.
The story doesn’t end with shared suffering, though. Advent anticipates Christmas, which leads to Good Friday, which gives way to Easter. God’s solidarity isn’t the final word—resurrection is.
Easter doesn’t undo Good Friday. Jesus still bears the wounds. But it transforms their meaning. N.T. Wright argues that resurrection begins God’s new creation—the physical world’s restoration, not escape from it. This means the incarnation affirms material existence even whilst acknowledging its brokenness. Christmas says matter matters; Easter says this matter has a future.
For Emma, this meant: your mother’s body matters to God. Her personality, her memories, her particular presence—these aren’t accidents on the way to some pure spiritual existence. Resurrection promises the person you love will be restored, not replaced.
But we’re not there yet. We’re still in Advent, still in the waiting, still in the darkness. And the incarnation says God waits here with us.
An Advent Practice: Sitting With the Darkness
This week, try this simple practice each evening:
Light your Advent candle. Sit with it for five minutes. Don’t try to pray eloquent prayers. Just acknowledge where you encountered suffering today—yours or others’. Name it aloud if you can: “Cancer. Loneliness. That child on the news. The rough sleeper I walked past.”
Then say: “God, I don’t understand this. But I trust you’re here in it. I trust you’re the kind of God who becomes flesh, who enters darkness, who makes suffering somehow your own. Help me see where you were present today, even in the worst of it.”
The light doesn’t eliminate the darkness—you can still see it all around. But it promises that darkness isn’t abandoned. God is here in it.
End with this Advent prayer: “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Come into this darkness. Come into this pain. Ransom us from exile. Amen.”
So What?
For Those Suffering This Advent
Advent might be the hardest season when you’re grieving. Everyone else is celebrating, preparing, decorating for joy—whilst you’re sitting in darkness. The incarnation gives you permission to stay in the darkness. God came into our darkness, not to immediately fix it, but to be present in it.
If you can’t face Advent services full of “joy to the world” when your world is breaking—that’s alright. Jesus wept. So can you.
You’re allowed to grieve, rage, and question. God did all three. Don’t rush to find meaning. Maybe the meaning isn’t in the suffering itself but in God’s presence within it. Can you sense that presence, even faintly? Not as explanation but as companionship?
For Those Walking With Sufferers
The friend who’s grieving doesn’t need you to make their Advent merry. They need you to sit with them in the darkness. Show up. Bring food. Don’t require them to pretend Christmas cheer they don’t feel.
Stop trying to explain. Your friend doesn’t need theodicy; they need you present in their pain, the way God is present. Practise incarnational friendship—showing up, sitting with, bearing witness. Let your presence be the sermon.
When they say “Everyone keeps telling me God has a plan,” try this: “I don’t know God’s plan. But I know God is with you in this. And I’m with you, too. What do you need today?”
Resist the urge to say “God has a plan” or “Everything happens for a reason.” These phrases attempt to defend God but often wound people further.
For Those Feeling Guilty About Struggling During “The Most Wonderful Time of Year”
The Christmas industrial complex insists you be joyful. The incarnation says God entered the world as a refugee fleeing state violence, born to an unwed mother in poverty, announced to outcasts. The first Christmas wasn’t Instagram-worthy.
If this Advent is dark for you—illness, loss, depression, loneliness, doubt—you’re not failing Christmas. You’re living in Advent’s true spirit: honest waiting in darkness for light we haven’t yet seen.
For Churches and Worship Planners
Does your Advent liturgy make space for lament, or only celebration? The incarnation includes both “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” (the cry from exile) and “Joy to the World” (the celebration of arrival). If you’re only doing the second, you’re leaving out the people who most need Advent’s message.
Consider a Blue Christmas or Longest Night service for those struggling. Make it beautiful, not depressing—candles, silence, space for tears, hymns that name the darkness whilst pointing toward light. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”
Questions for Fellow Pilgrims
How do you experience the difference between someone explaining your suffering and someone sharing it? Which feels more like the incarnation’s promise?
Have you encountered explanations about suffering that hurt more than helped? What made them harmful?
Where have you sensed God’s presence in difficulty—not explaining it but simply being there?
How are you experiencing Advent this year—as a season of joyful preparation or as a season that names your darkness? What would it mean to let Advent be honest about both?
Next week: We’ll explore Mary’s Magnificat and discover why the first Christmas was inherently political. The God who enters suffering from the margins has something revolutionary to say about power, poverty, and God’s kingdom breaking into empire’s territory.
Going Deeper
Essential Reading:
Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (1974) - classic argument for God’s suffering
Denis Edwards, Deep Incarnation (2022) - evolutionary theology and Christology
Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion (2015) - see especially the chapter on divine participation
Pastoral Resources:
Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved (2018) - memoir rejecting toxic positivity
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (1987) - theodicy’s inadequacy after a child’s death
Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark (2014) - beautiful reflection on God’s presence in darkness
Biblical and Theological Background:
Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 101 - the unassumed/unhealed principle
N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (2008) - on bodily resurrection and new creation
Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999) - philosophical theology engaging real suffering