Where is God when it hurts? Where are we? Notes from Philip Yancey

Where is God when it hurts? Where are we when it hurts? 

(40 days after Christ's resurrection, He ascended from earth back to His eternal heavenly glory...)

Dealing with Christ's Ascension back to His Glory....

Jesus knew that the world He left behind would include the poor, the hungry, the prisoners, the sick. The decrepit state of the world did not surprise Him.

He made plans to cope with it: a long-range plan and a short-range plan.

The long-range plan involves His return, in power and great glory, to straighten out planet earth.

The short-range plan means turning it over to the ones [us] who will ultimately usher in the liberation of the cosmos.

He ascended so we could take His place.

"Where is God when it hurts?" I have often asked. The answer is another question, "Where is the church when it hurts?"

That last question, of course, is the problem of history in a nutshell, and also the reason why I say the Ascension represents my greatest struggle of faith.

When Jesus departed, he left the keys of the kingdom in our fumbling hands.

The problem showed itself early on.

Commenting on the church in Corinth, Frederick Buechner writes, "They were in fact Christ's body, as Paul wrote to them here in one of his most enduring metaphors--Christ's eyes, ears, hands--but the way they were carrying on, that could only leave Christ bloodshot, ass-eared, all thumbs, to carry on God's work in a fallen world."

I could fill several pages with such colorful quotations, all of which underscore the risk involved in entrusting God's own reputation to the likes of us.


Unlike Jesus, we do not perfectly express the Word. We speak in garbled syntax, stuttering, mixing languages together, putting accent marks in wrong places.

When the world looks for Christ, it sees, like the cave-dwellers in Plato's allegory, only shadows created by the light, not the light itself.

Why don't we look more like the church Jesus described? Why does the body of Christ so faintly resemble Him?

If Jesus could foresee such disasters as the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Christian slave trade, apartheid, why did He ascend in the first place?

I cannot provide a confident answer to such questions, for I am part of the problem. Examined closely, my query takes on a distressingly personal cast: Why do I so poorly resemble Him?

How can one sinful man, myself, be accepted as a child of God? One miracle makes possible the other.

I remind myself that the apostle Paul's soaring words about the Bride of Christ and the temple of God were addressed to groups of hideously flawed individuals in places like Corinth.

"We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us," wrote Paul, in one of the most accurate statements ever penned.

-- From The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey.

[Note: You can read Paul's two letters to the flawed church in Corinth in the New Testament of your Bible - the letters are titled, not surprisingly, 1 and 2 Corinthians. For other examples, you can look around you at some of us other flawed sons and daughters of God!]