by William J. Stuntz

The title of this series is “Faith and Hope in Hard Times.” It’s both a good title and a good topic — one I’ve thought a about a lot in recent years. I want to tell you a bit about my own “hard times,” and then tell you about three things I’ve learned by living through those hard times.

Most of my life, I enjoyed a level of comfort and success that was and is vastly better than anything I had expected or anything I deserved. This used to bother me quite a bit. I became a Christian in my mid-20s, after reading C.S. Lewis. And in my late 20s and through my 30s, I often wondered why I had been given such a good life. I married the only woman I’ve ever loved; Ruth is both unfathomably beautiful and incredibly talented. We have three terrific kids, whom Ruth and I adore and who, much to our surprise, actually seem to like their parents. (I don’t know how that happened.) I have a job that I love, and that pays well. Sometimes I would ask God: Why have you been so kind to me? Why have I gotten such an easy life?

I don’t ask those questions anymore. A little over nine years ago, when driving home from a family vacation, we got a flat tire, and I pulled over and started to change it. Something bad happened at the base of my back. Ever since, my lower back and the top half of my right leg have hurt. I had had a back operation as a teenager in the mid-1970s — they call it a fusion; the doctors take bone from your hip and lock two vertebrae together so they can’t move. To beat back the pain, I’ve had two more fusions in the past nine years, plus dozens of injections, multiple rounds of acupuncture, physical therapy, and psychotherapy — and literally thousands of pills. None of these treatments worked. My back and my right leg hurt every waking moment, and they hurt a lot. Most days, I feel like someone has beaten me with a baseball bat. A better way to describe the phenomenon goes like this: living with chronic pain is like having an alarm clock taped to your ear, with the volume turned up — and you can’t turn it down. You can’t run from it, because it goes where you go and stays where you stay: chronic pain is the unwelcome guest who will not leave when the party is over.

A few months after my back turned south, my family and I moved north: we lived in Charlottesville, Virginia until the summer of 2000, when I accepted a job at Harvard and we moved here. Our family began to come apart. One of our children suffered a life-threatening disease, and Ruth’s and my marriage seemed to be unraveling. I thought I was losing my family. Those crises have faded with time: our once-sick child is healthy and happy, and Ruth and I are in reasonably good shape these days. Even so, those crises rocked the foundations of my life. Early last year, another piece of bad news did the same: in February 2008, doctors found a large tumor in my colon; a month later, my cancer was promoted to stage four when the doctors found two more tumors in my lungs. In the past year, I’ve had two cancer surgeries, and between five and six months of intensive chemotherapy. I’ve been off chemo for a few months, but I’m still nauseous much of the time and exhausted most of the time. Cancer kills, but cancer treatment steals — it takes a large share of the life patients have, as though one were dying in stages. You get some of that stolen life back when the treatment stops, but only some.

Today, my back and my right leg hurt as much as they ever have, and the odds are overwhelming that they will hurt for as long as this life lasts. Cancer probably will kill me sometime in the next two years, three if I’m lucky. I’m fifty years old.

That’s my story. Here are the three things I’ve learned as I’ve walked this sometimes frightening road. First, our God enjoys healing broken bodies — but that’s not all He enjoys. He also relishes taking the worst things in our lives and using them to bring about the best things. Second, Jesus saves sinners — but that’s not all He does. Jesus’ sacrifice also changes the character of living with pain and disease. Third, our God remembers us in our suffering — but remembrance isn’t all He feels. Incredibly, miraculously, the God of the Universe actually longs for and grieves with us in the midst of our hardship.

I’m going to say a bit more about each of those lessons, and then I’ll stop and take questions.

First lesson: God usually doesn’t remove life’s curses. Instead, he redeems them.

Joseph’s story makes the point. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him and sold him into slavery, after which he was taken to Egypt. There, he was a servant in Potiphar’s house, where Potiphar’s wife made advances on him which Joseph quite properly refused. Potiphar’s wife accused Joseph of trying to rape her, whereupon Joseph was thrown in a dungeon.

The story then takes a strange turn. Because Joseph is in that dungeon, he winds up being in a position to interpret Pharaoh’s dream, after which Joseph is taken out of the dungeon and becomes, in effect, Pharaoh’s prime minister. In that role, Joseph makes sure that enough grain is stored away to keep the nation from starving in the midst of the drought he knows is coming. The drought comes, just as Joseph had said it would, and the nation survives, just as Joseph had promised it would.

Joseph was victimized by two horrible injustices: one at the hands of his brothers, the other thanks to Potiphar’s wife. God didn’t make those injustices disappear: they were real and they were awful, and they remained real and awful. But God used those injustices to prevent a much greater injustice: mass starvation. When Joseph later met with his brothers, he said this about the transaction that started the train rolling: “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” That doesn’t mean that slavery and unjust imprisonment are good: rather, the point is that they produced good, and the good they produced was larger than the evil that was done to Joseph. Evil was twisted back on itself, like a gun barrel that is turned so that it aims at the would-be murderer firing the weapon.

Joseph’s story foreshadows the central story of the gospels. The worst day in human history was the day of Christ’s crucifixion: a supremely unjust punishment inflicted on the One Man who, in all history, least deserved it. The best day in human history happened two days later, when that same Man turned death itself against itself — and because He did so, each one of us has the opportunity to share in death’s defeat.

That is God’s trademark: He takes lemons and makes lemonade. Acorns fall to the ground and are buried, and great oaks arise from them. Farmers scatter fertilizer across their fields (think about what that means), and life-sustaining food grows from them. Dirt and water — meaning mud — provide the nourishment through which the loveliest flowers bloom. Down to go up, life from death, beauty from ugliness: the pattern is everywhere.

Christians err when we imagine that God is supposed to heal all our diseases. That is not promised to us, not in this life. Instead, we are promised the opposite: Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble” — not “might have,” but “will have.” But while God doesn’t promise to take my cancer or my pain away, He does promise that something good will come from those illnesses. Romans 8:28 says that “in all things, God works for the good of those who love Him.” Cancer and chronic pain remain nasty things, enemies of all who love life and beauty. My faith doesn’t tell me otherwise. But it does promise me that God will bless me in the midst of it, and will use the worst of my suffering to produce something good and beautiful.

I may never know just how or precisely when that happens — which is fine by me. It’s enough to know that God has promised that I do not suffer in vain, that my pain is not empty. What we do when we find ourselves in unpleasant circumstances has value. God sees to it. That is an enormous mercy.

Second lesson: Jesus saves sinners — but that’s not all He does. Jesus’ sacrifice also changes the character of suffering, gives it dignity and weight and even a little beauty. Cancer and chronic pain remain ugly things, but the enterprise of living with them is not an ugly thing. God’s Son made that so when He gave Himself up to be tortured and killed.

Two facts give rise to that conclusion. First, Jesus is not only good; He’s also beautiful. Second, suffering is not only painful; it’s also ugly. This is one of the surprising features of cancer and chronic pain. To me, those conditions have a reality that is almost tactile — as though I could see, hear, smell, and touch them. And those conditions are foul, like fingernails on a blackboard or the smell of a skunk that has just been cornered. Some days, I feel as though I were wearing clothes covered with sewage.

Some days — but not most days, because the manner of Jesus’ life and death permanently changed the character of lives lived with pain, nausea, and impending death.

The best way I know to explain it is this. Try to imagine Barack Obama putting on a bad suit or Angelina Jolie wearing an ugly dress. The suit wouldn’t look bad, and that dress wouldn’t be ugly. These are incredibly attractive people. Their attractiveness spills over onto their clothing, changes its nature, changes the way other people respond to it. If Obama or Jolie wear it, it’s a good-looking outfit. If they wear it often enough, it becomes a good-looking outfit even when you or I wear it.

God’s Son did something similar by taking physical pain on Himself. He didn’t make the pain itself into something beautiful. But He made living with that pain a larger and better enterprise than it had been. He elevates all He touches. Here’s another example of the same point: Before His public ministry, Jesus made tables, or whatever it was that ancient Middle Eastern carpenters made. Think about that: God Himself made wooden tables. That fact lends dignity and value to all honorable work. God Himself bore unimaginable pain. That fact lends dignity and value to the lives of all those who live with pain every day.

The idea is nicely captured by a line from one of my favorite movies. The Shawshank Redemption is about a prisoner who was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. That prisoner escapes by crawling through a sewer line until he’s outside the prison walls. The narrator describes it this way: “He crawled through a river of shit, and came out clean on the other side.” I believe God the Son did that, and in part, He did that for me — so that I too might come out clean on the other side. That truth doesn’t just change my life after I die. It changes my life here, now.

Third lesson: our God promises to remember each one of us, but that isn’t all he feels for us. He also feels longing: the kind a lover feels for his beloved.

When Jesus was dying, one of the two convicts crucified with him said this: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus responded by telling him that he would be in paradise that very day. As we use the word “remember,” that story sounds off, as though the thief on the cross and the Son of God were talking past each other.

The story sounds off because the concept of remembrance means something very different in Scripture than in our culture. To us, remembrance means recall — I remember when I connect a student’s name to her face, or when I can summon up some fact or the image of some past event. That kind of remembrance is a sterile, passive enterprise — it happens entirely in the mind; remembering requires neither action nor emotional commitment. In the Bible, remembrance usually means two things: first, holding the one who is remembered close in one’s heart; and second, acting on the memory. When God tells the people of Israel to remember that He brought them out of Egypt, He isn’t just saying “get your facts right.” Rather, He is saying approximately this: “Remember that I have loved you passionately. Remember that I have acted on that love. Hold tight to that memory, and you act on it too.”

There is a passage in Job chapter 14 that captures that sensibility. This has become my favorite passage in the Bible; I want it read at my funeral. Job is talking with God about what will happen after Job dies. At one point, Job utters these words: “You will call, and I will answer. You will long for the creature Your hands have made. Surely then You will count my steps but not remember my sin.”

The second sentence is the key to that passage — and it belongs among the most amazing words ever spoken, in this language or any other. The key concept in that marvelous sentence is not remembrance; it’s longing. Job longs to be free of his many pains. God longs for relationship with Job. Satan seeks to use those pains to destroy that relationship, to sow hate and bitterness in its place. But our God is not so easily defeated. He is the lover who will not rest until His arms enfold the beloved. To Job, the curses Satan has sent his way are a mighty mountain that cannot be climbed, an enemy army that cannot be beaten — but in comparison with God’s love, those curses are at once puny and, ultimately, powerless. As are my pains, and yours.

Our faith is no mere set of abstract propositions. Philosophers and scientists and law professors like me are not the people in the best position to understand the Christian story. Musicians and painters and writers of fiction are much better situated — because the Christian story is a story, not a theory or an argument and definitely not a moral or legal code. Most of my colleagues and students believe my faith boils down to a series of dos and don’ts. That is nearly the opposite of the truth. Our faith is what C.S. Lewis called the myth that became fact. Our faith is a painting so captivating that you can’t take your eyes off it. It’s a love song so sweet that you weep whenever you hear it. At the center of that myth, that painting, that song stands a God who pursues us as lovers pursue one another. It sounds too good to be true, and yet it is true. So I have found, in the midst of pain and heartache and cancer. So may you find in the midst of your own hard times.

I believe each of us longs for that God; I’ve longed for Him all my life — though I didn’t always realize it. Here’s the amazing news: He longs for me, and He longs for you too. God grant that we would remember that truth, and act on it.

Bill Stuntz is the Henry J. Friendly Professor at Harvard Law School. Below, you’ll find his interview with Jeff Barneson, featured at Following Christ 2008 .