Earlier this week I was diagnosed with an abscess growing just at the base of my skull, on the back of my neck. I had presented with ear pain but when the growth went from golf-ball-sized to hockey-puck-sized, it was time for treatment. Since that initial diagnosis I've had considerable pain, along with two additional growths -- one on the mirror side of my neck from the first, the other is a substantial 3-inch growth on the top of my head.
The pain is nothing short of excruciating. I have trouble sleeping and laying.
For those who know me best, this is particularly scary. It's eerily reminiscent of cancer. I've been "clean" for five years.
All of this puts me to mind of thinking theologically about illness.
Some Christians say we should celebrate our sickness; that it's a gift God is using to teach us God's will. They try to emphasize God's sovereignty by describing cancer as a "gift" and "blessing" which is "designed for you by God". But language like that is offensive: It's offensive to a Christian understanding of God, and it is offensive to the real experience of human suffering.
Karl Barth put it this way: "[Sickness] is opposed to [God's] good will as the Creator and has existence and power only under his mighty No. To capitulate before it, to allow it to take its course, can never be obedience but only disobedience towards God. In harmony with the will of God, what man ought to will in face of this whole realm ... and therefore in face of sickness, can only be final resistance".
Sickness is related to God's will only as that which God rejects and negates -- it's an expression of the threatening power of chaos which God has set himself against. Those suffering with an illness may therefore be comforted not by trying to convince themselves that all this is somehow God's bitter "gift", but by recalling that, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, God has forever said No to darkness and death, and Yes to light and life. God's "sovereignty" is not an abstract principle of determinism, but it is the fatherly Lordship of God's grace, as revealed once and for all in Jesus Christ.