Here is a question someone asked on my Dreams and Resurrection Facebook page: If Jesus was truly who he claimed to be, instead of performing random miracles, why didn’t he just present medical and natural knowledge time has only given us at the expense of suffering?
My response: That is an excellent question. I wish I had a short, snappy answer that would awaken all minds hearing it like a million light bulbs turning on all at once. But I don’t. I’ll try this instead: I believe that if God could make it possible for us to experience only joy with no suffering, he would do it. Since we suffer, then He can’t do that. But I do think that He can make it so that we can experience such a joy that we don’t mind that we also suffer. I have felt it. God could have guaranteed that there would be no suffering by not creating us in the first place. But that’s like saying that suicide is the surefire cure for suffering. And it would be, if death were permanent unconsciousness. But I am not aware of any reasoning, deductive or inductive, that leads to the conclusion that one’s own death is equivalent to losing consciousness and never regaining it. We have strong inductive evidence that death is not permanent unconsciousness in that we die to the world of our dreams when we awake every morning. And I can’t imagine, from my own first-person perspective, being permanently unconscious. I am willing to pay the price of suffering for the experience of joy.
Jesus’ message was that the kingdom of God is near. He healed particular people whom he encountered because he felt love and compassion for them.
That clause “if Jesus was who he claimed to be” is unfortunate, I think. This is something I think C. S. Lewis is wrong about. He makes it sound like Jesus lords it over us. I think Jesus was telling us we are children of God just as much as he is. And he was telling us that we will have, or in some sense already have, the cure for all suffering, which is the joy that makes us not mind that we suffer. It doesn’t follow that we should glorify suffering or not bother to relieve it when we are able. That it does not follow is the lesson of the healing miracles.
If Jesus had revealed the natural and medical knowledge that we have discovered over the intervening centuries and that has allowed us to alleviate suffering, then you could ask why God didn’t do it sooner, from the very beginning. But what He has done from the very beginning is to create the conditions under which naturalistic humanism is worth pursuing. It is worth pursuing only because death is not permanent unconsciousness and because there is a joy such that one doesn’t mind suffering. Naturalistic humanism alone, without those conditions, could never deliver us from fear and anxiety about suffering, death, and meaninglessness.