Returning the Ticket
Literature is what brought me here.
About twelve years ago I began studying literature, from the classics to children's books. I chose the subject for one simple reason: I love to read. Good books enlarge our world. They allow us to inhabit other lives, wrestle with difficult questions and emerge changed.
Among all the writers I enjoy most and has remained with me more than any other: Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. It seems only right to give him his full Sunday name.
Dostoevsky was more than a novelist. He was an essayist, philosopher and a man who wrestled deeply with God. His questions were never superficial. They were born out of suffering.
In 1849 he was arrested in Russia, condemned to death and taken before a firing squad. At the last moment his sentence was commuted and replaced with years of imprisonment and exile in Siberia. As he and the other prisoners were marched away, an elderly woman stepped forward from the crowd and pressed a Bible into his hands. He carried that Bible throughout his years in prison, reading it repeatedly. It became the one book he was permitted to own.
I often think about that unnamed woman; I see no coincidence in her action.
She probably had no idea that her small act of kindness would accompany one of history's greatest novelists through the darkest years of his life. Nor could she have imagined that his experiences would eventually shape some of the greatest Christian literature ever written.
One book, in particular, has never left me: The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky employs a synkrisis between Ivan and Alyosha. At its heart stand two brothers whose different responses to suffering have challenged readers for well over a century.
Ivan is no shallow atheist who dismisses belief with clever slogans. He is haunted by one question: the suffering of innocent children. His rebellion is moral rather than intellectual. He is not merely saying, 'There is no God.' His cry is far more painful:
'It's not that I don't accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return Him the ticket.'
It is the most famous sentence in the novel.
Ivan is saying that even if Christianity were true, he cannot accept a world in which innocent children suffer. If this is the price of creation, he wants no part in it. He hands back his ticket.
Many people today share Ivan's struggle. When tragedy strikes, they ask, 'Where is God?' It is not always a question born of unbelief. Sometimes it comes from a wounded heart that cannot reconcile love with pain.
Dostoevsky never treats that question lightly.
Yet he offers another voice.
Alyosha, Ivan's younger brother, does not defeat Ivan in philosophical debate. In fact, he often seems to come second in intellectual argument. He does something far more remarkable.
He simply gets on with being a Christian.
He visits the lonely. He comforts the grieving. He sits with the broken-hearted. He forgives. He loves. He serves.
Dostoevsky quietly shifts the focus.
Instead of asking only, 'Why doesn't God do something about suffering?', the Christian begins to ask, 'What can I do for my neighbour?'
That question changes everything.
The elder Zosima expresses it in words that have echoed through generations:
'Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.'
How true those words are.
It is easy to love humanity in theory. It is much harder to love the difficult neighbour, the lonely widow, the frightened patient, the awkward colleague or the stranger everyone else overlooks.
Love in dreams costs us nothing.
Love in action demands our time, our patience, our forgiveness and often our comfort.
Perhaps that is where many arguments about God reach an impasse. We ask why God has not eliminated suffering while forgetting that He repeatedly calls His people to enter into it, to relieve it and to carry one another's burdens.
The Christian answer is not simply an explanation.
It is an incarnation.
The Son of God entered a world of tears, injustice, betrayal and death. He did not remain distant from suffering; He shared it. Then He sends His followers into that same hurting world as His hands and feet.
History is full of ordinary people who have done exactly that: the woman who handed a condemned prisoner a Bible; the neighbour who sits through the night with someone grieving; the nurse who quietly comforts the dying; the volunteer who visits the forgotten; the missionary who leaves home to serve strangers; the foster parent who welcomes a wounded child.
These people rarely make headlines.
Yet they quietly push back the darkness.
I often return in my mind to that elderly Russian woman.
She probably believed she was giving away nothing more than a Bible.
Instead, she helped preserve the faith of a man whose writings would challenge millions to think seriously about God, suffering and hope.
That is how God often works.
Not always through spectacular miracles, but through faithful people whose acts of compassion ripple far beyond anything they can imagine.
We do not fully understand why God permits suffering. Scripture itself never pretends to answer every question. The Book of Job permits us some insight, and the Book of Romans in Chapter 6:20 reads, ‘For the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own will, but because of the One who subjected it, in hope.
But we do know something about God; he admits it exists and explains Some reasons
We know that He transforms broken lives. We know that He shapes ordinary people into the likeness of Christ.
And wherever that happens, suffering does not have the final word.
Ivan returns the ticket.
Alyosha stays.
He stays with the lonely.
He stays with the suffering.
He stays with Christ.
Perhaps that is Dostoevsky's most compelling argument of all.