(upbeat music) - Welcome to a new week on the Ask Pastor John podcast. We head into Thanksgiving in a few days and Pastor John, there was recently a discussion online among non-Christian philosophers and it started out with an old Woody Allen line he once said in a movie. He said this, "If one guy is starving someplace, it puts a cramp in my evening," end quote.

Which raises this question, can a person truly experience happiness without ignorance and apathy of the suffering of others? To be completely insensitive to suffering in this world is to be a sociopath. To be completely sensitive to the suffering of others, you would pretty much die of grief from the collective suffering of the world.

So if empathy means you cannot enjoy dinner with a starving child staring at you near the dinner table, yet your dinner can resume normally if that starving child exists behind a wall, does it seem that ignorance then is an important requisite for happiness? So here's the question, Pastor John, does my happiness require ignorance or even apathy with the suffering of others?

- I doubt that I have a fully satisfying answer to this, even for myself, and I'm not sure there is a theoretically satisfying answer that deals in quantities of knowledge and apathy and happiness. I suspect that the answer to this is found in becoming a kind of person in the image of Christ who learns how best to love within the limitations in this world of suffering.

But having said I'm not sure there is an answer, here's my best effort to say something helpful, at least this is what I preach to myself. Number one, the way I've approached this question in the past is to note that Paul said in Romans 12, 15, "Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep." And there are people who are weeping right now, and there are people who are rejoicing right now, even in our own circle, not to mention the millions who are weeping and rejoicing around the world.

And my answer to that paradox has been that Christians are always sorrowful at one level and happy at another level, and we give expression to the one or the other according to whether we are at a wedding or a funeral, even though we know at the wedding that a family is at the hospital right now during the wedding with the dying wife and mother, and we'll be there in a few hours probably, and we're not gonna ruin the wedding.

One of the most important pastoral verses in the Bible is 2 Corinthians 6, 10, where Paul says, "He is sorrowful yet always rejoicing." That's what I mean by saying Christians carry in their souls a sadness in this life that never goes away. And they carry a joy in this life that never goes away.

So that's my first observation from Romans 12, 15 and 2 Corinthians 6, 10. Here's a second set of thoughts. The parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 is relevant to the issue of dealing with the suffering of the world that's far away and near at hand. Jesus tells the parable in response to a man's self-justifying question, who is my neighbor, because he realizes he can't love everybody the way he loves himself.

And so he's trying to figure out, well, who don't I have to love like this? And Jesus doesn't like that question. He's not happy with the way this man posed the question. So he tells the story of the man who's beaten and left for dead on the side of the road, and the priest goes by on the side and doesn't help, and the Levite goes by and doesn't help, and a Samaritan stops and he helps him.

And Jesus ends the parable like this. Which of these three do you think prove to be neighbor to the man? He switched the question. Prove to be neighbor to the man who fell among robbers. And the man said, well, the one who showed compassion. And Jesus said, you go and do likewise.

And that's the end of the story. That's the end. He's not gonna deal with this man anymore. In other words, it seems like you don't solve the problem of the commandment, love your neighbor, by figuring out who qualifies and who doesn't. Like, who can be excluded? Who are my non-neighbors?

Good, I don't have to worry about them. Rather, you become a kind of person who can't pass by on the other side of the road when there is suffering within your touch. Take the opportunities to love and serve at hand, and you will prove to be a kind of person that God wants you to be.

Jesus healed people in his past. He didn't heal the American Indians. And he didn't heal the Chinese. And he didn't heal the people in India in his day. He healed the ones along the road who cried out that he could reach out and touch. And then with a clear conscience, he sat down and feasted with the publicans, because even there, he was a physician, meeting with people because he loved them and wanted to do them good, even at their parties.

So that's my second cluster of thoughts around Luke 10, the parable of the Good Samaritan. One more set of thoughts. Yes, it is necessary that we be ignorant in order to be happy. But what I mean is that it's necessary that we accept our finitude. Only God is not ignorant.

Only God knows all the suffering in the world. If we knew all, we would be contenders for deity, and we know what happens to contenders for deity. They lose. So ignorance, accepting our finitude, is essential for our creaturehood and therefore for our happiness. The reason God can be infinite in knowledge and infinite in happiness is that only God has other infinite attributes that make it possible for him to handle infinite knowledge.

Only God has infinite wisdom and infinite goodness to see how all the suffering of the world will someday fit into a plan that makes sense of it all. We don't. We don't have that capacity. Therefore, we can't handle that kind of infinite knowledge. So in our case, I would put it like this.

The more our knowledge of suffering increases, and today it does, the more the other godlike attributes must increase, not to make us God, but to be more like God. The other godlike attributes have to increase lest we be crushed under the weight of simultaneous multiplied empathies or hardened with self-protecting indifference.

These other attributes that I'm thinking about are things like greater capacities for mercy, greater capacities for compassion, on the one hand, and a growing grasp, this one's really essential, a growing grasp of biblical truth that gives some meaning to the suffering of the world, even the suffering we can't reach and what is happening to people out there and what meaning that might have.

If these other godlike attributes don't increase in us in proportion to our awareness and our experience of suffering, we're gonna be overwhelmed. So in the end, my sense is that we should all immerse ourselves in the life and the teaching and the work of Christ so that we learn with Him in real experience what it is to be sorrowful and yet always rejoicing, always seeking to spread that joy to as many as we can.

- Yes, thank you, Pastor John. And this leads me to ask another philosophical question about happiness, and that is, are smart people less happy? Ernest Hemingway said so, but I wanna hear from you, Pastor John, tomorrow. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.

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