“This sickness will not end in death but in God's glory…”

John 11:4

These are strange words when you think about it. How on earth can sickness glorify God? The context is the raising of Lazarus in the gospel. We know that Jesus was a family friend and was genuinely grieving for his dead friend and with his sisters whom he loved dearly. And yet he seemed able to see beyond the grief and suffering to its ultimate purpose: the glorification of God.

Why should God be glorified in suffering? They say that all the world's great religions are in one way or another an answer to the problem of human suffering. Suffering is ultimately a mystery, and with it, of course, death, the ultimate act of suffering. Suffering and death are a denial of life, and we kick against both. We fight suffering and we try to prolong life. But what is God doing in all this?

It is worth reading the diaries of the young Jewish woman, Etty Hillesum, who volunteered to work in a transit camp in Holland for those awaiting deportation to Auschwitz. And in the suffering and anxiety of the people she was looking after and in the absurdly evil nature of what was going on in Europe at that time, she found God. Somehow, God was being glorified in the midst of evil. She even talks about the helplessness of God, a God to whom we pray so that he may be helped by us in those prayers, which seems to contradict everything we take for granted about prayer. Etty perished in Auschwitz.

And yet it is in the very weakness of God that his power is displayed, something that St Paul speaks of so compellingly: ‘when I am weak then I am strong' (2 Cor 12:10). And it is in that weakness, that seeming helplessness, that God is glorified. Why? Because the weakness, the helplessness, suffering, and the death are not the last word. They do not define who we are as human beings; they do not have ultimate power. That power lies with God, yet it manifests itself in weakness.

Our weakness and vulnerability in the face of the coronavirus pandemic is the very place where God will be encountered and his glory made manifest. And it is not because we are being punished by God, but because God in Jesus is with us in that helplessness, telling us that it does not have the final say. Even, dare I say it, those who go on to die glorify God because their deaths are not the end. That's why Jesus is able to say to Martha and Mary, ‘This sickness will not end in death but in God's glory'.

But, at the same time, we must pray that our loved ones, and ourselves, do not suffer and die as a result of the virus. Whatever the outcome, God will give us strength, in all sorts of unanticipated ways. And even death as a result of the virus is not the end, otherwise the virus is triumphant; it is not. God is triumphant, in Christ, in whom God is glorified in his Death and Resurrection, the celebration of which is the goal of our Lenten journey.

A meditation written by Fr Paul Graham O.S.A., Assistant General on the Augustinian Council for Northern Europe, including the Provinces of Ireland, England & Scotland, Poland, Germany, Austria and Slovakia

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