Incredible collusion

The Father and the Son have colluded in a thing most astonishing, a thing on the far side of our ability to be astonished. Justice cries out to be satisfied; something must be done. From the blood of Abel, to the prison camps of Siberia, to the nine-year-old who this afternoon died of leukemia, justice cries out.  These things must not be permitted to have the last word . . . All the Adams and all the Eves join with the brightest and the best of philosophers to declare that this is just the way the world is. And who is responsible for that? And with that question was born what philosphers call the question of "theodicy" -- how to justify to humankind the ways of God. And thus was God put on trial. If God is good and God is almighty, how did evil come about? If there is evil, how can an almighty God be good or a good God be almighty? - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

Beyond our ability to be astonished? Absolutely. Beyond our willingness to believe. The thing is, this final question is rooted in our inability to truly believe in eternity. We ask our questions as if sense must be made on the basis of this world and this life alone. These things - God is good, God is almighty, God made all things, evil exists - are incompatible if this world is all the reality there is, if this life is the only life. They are barely reconcilable if there is indeed another life that is better than this one, even perfect. Couldn't an all good almighty God have made this life perfect?

And thus we conclude that there cannot be a God. We kill him just as dead as we killed his Son. And rather than condemn humanity for our temerity, God loves us still. In love he created us, in love he reconciles us, in love he draws us into this life that he desires for us, in which we would never remain without tasting the true results of our will and our resulting death. He gives us the gift of having our own way so that we will eventually trust that his way is unspeakably better than our own. Is this why some of the angels fell?

What an incredible collusion. Indeed, we cannot credit it. Surely a God who could become man could have created us so that we did not need for that inscrutable event - the entire life of Jesus - to ever happen. Surely God could have created our world so that it was never corrupted. That would seems easier and more convincing than the plan he actually conceived and executed, we think, as if there were anything easy about the bringing home of a single human heart upon the shepherd's shoulder.

Indeed, rather than be carried home we have convicted God, and put him to death, and Jesus has carried out our penalty. And perhaps all of the "fulfillment of the law" was intended from the outset solely to give us a hope of recognizing him.