Job. In the end, the only response was for Job to repent in dust and ashes for himself and for his friends. "My ears heard of you but now my eyes have seen you" (Job 42:5). Job and his friends had spoken recklessly. In the end, God vindicated Job's suffering. He restored wealth, health, and family to Job in a grand type of the resurrection from the dead. Yet the cause of Job's suffering remained hidden to him, a mystery disclosed only to the book's readers.
The theology of glory cannot account for the "innocent sufferer" or the victim of oppression, injustice, or genocide. Moralistic models of cause and effect fail utterly to deal with suffering. It makes good moral sense when the habitual drunkard develops cirrhosis of the liver; it makes no moral sense at all when her baby is born with fetal-alcohol syndrome.
Some people confronted Jesus with a political atrocity that sounds as though it had been ripped straight from the front pages of their tabloids. Pilate had slaughtered some Galilean worshipers and mingled their blood with their sacrifices. What did Jesus think?
His answer is a rhetorical question that cuts to the very heart of the theology of glory. "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus?" Can we discern the hidden mind of God or the spiritual condition of these Galileans by their awful suffering and death? Jesus' answer is a firm "No!" along with a warning, "Unless you also repent, you will all likewise perish." Then Jesus adds an atrocity of his own-a kind of "I'll see your act of political terrorism and raise you one construction accident." "What about those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them? Were they worse sinners than all the other inhabitants of Jerusalem?" Again, the answer comes back, "No! And I'm telling you that unless you repent, you will all likewise perish" (Luke 13:1-5).
The only response to suffering and death, whether by political atrocity or the sheer dumb luck of being under the wrong tower at the wrong time, is to repent, to have a metanoia-that is, a "re-cognition" or change of mind. We must think entirely differently about how God works in a fallen cosmos where death is the way of life. We must "re-cognize" our life in the midst of death.
The theology of glory assumes a fix-it God in a fixer-upper cosmos. All we need is some rehab and renovation-straighten up our morals with ten handy commandments, get our doctrinal ducks in a row, tighten those spiritual quads and abs with some liturgical aerobics, and we poor sinners are on our way to glory. But that way of thinking is dead wrong from the outset. We are not broken down but dead in sin (see Eph. 2:5). We can't be rehabbed any more than the dead can be raised with an aspirin and a bandage. We don't need rehab but resurrection.
Death and resurrection are God's modes of operation. Repentance in the face of suffering means that we drop dead to our preconceived notions of how God should deal with us and make the cross of Jesus our reference point. There we see how God has dealt decisively with sin, suffering, and death once and for all in the sufferings and death of his Son. The cross demolishes the categories of "good" and "evil." The evil of the cross is the good of our salvation. The miscarriage of Roman justice is God's justice for the sins of the world. The rejection of Christ by the world is God's reconciliation of the world. The innocent Sufferer is the sacrificial Lamb who takes away the world's sin. As Joseph said to his brothers, "You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good" (Gen. 50:20).
The theology of the cross is the paradoxical theology of the law and the gospel. The cross is both law and gospel, both the cursed tree and the tree of life. It is the death of God and the life of man, the punishment for our sin and sin's atonement.
In the same way, our own suffering and death in the flesh are both law and gospel. Death is law in the sense that it is the just wages for our sin. "The wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23). Suffering