You could quite convincingly argue that the question of the relationship between the bad things that happen, and God, takes up most of the Bible, in questions like "why has Jerusalem been conquered?" This question also relates to our experiences: everyone asks "why me, God? Why did this happen to someone I love"?

A perfectly orthodox answer is to say that God does everything for a reason, which we often cannot see. The prophets declared that the Temple was destroyed because Judah had sinned, and God was fed up with their faithlessness. Job’s friends suggested that Job should be happy about the dreadful things that happened to him, because God was giving him a chance to repent of his sins. And one thing at least that this explanation gets right is that God is in charge, and is responsible for what happens.

A different approach suggests that some or all of the bad stuff that happens is not done by God: either because it is done by evil, or because God has created a universe according to rules, and must now let it work according to those rules. Both of these suggestions fail for the same reason: if God is truly God, then He permitted evil to exist, and He has the power to change any rules if He so wishes. A God who cannot do this or that, might be like the Greek gods, but not like the LORD, the creator of heaven and earth, of all that is.

It could be that evil itself is not real, but is the absence of God, as a shadow is only the absence of light. Further, the image of God as a ‘blind clockmaker’ will not do: the God Christians worship is not detached from His world, but intimately involved in it: He became part of it as Jesus, and continues to be so in Sacraments, and as the Spirit in our hearts. So we cannot suggest that God can escape responsibility for the bad things that happen.

It is right to say that God’s ways are simply too mysterious for us to understand. We fall too easily into the trap of imagining God as a space alien – like everything in creation, only bigger and better. But God is unimaginable to us, because He is outside all space and time and matter, more different that we can know. The idea that we can explain these mysteries is deluded.

But He gave us our questioning intelligence, and often we have a pressing need to ask "why". Moreover, this unknowable God continues to reveal Himself to us physically in this world, and much of our knowledge of Him in the Bible comes from generations of His worshippers asking this very question "why?" So it seems right to ask this question, even if we know already that we can’t answer it.

I have never been comfortable with the idea that God deliberately does everything that happens and that even the bad stuff is for our own ultimate good. I certainly believe that good can come out of the worst things, which isn’t the same as saying that they happen deliberately for that reason, and it’s easier for me to believe that the things that happen to me are deliberate than to believe that God is testing others, or testing me through the things that happen to them. But if I can’t then bring myself to say that these things are sent to test us, but equally I know that God is responsible for everything that happens, what can I say?

In the end we must all look to Jesus, and when we do, we see God willingly emptying Himself, out of love for us: this is the shape of every relationship that God has with creation. To make the universe in the first place, God pulled Himself away from one small, not-God space, and then He gently and unobtrusively entered back into that space as part of it, fully human in Jesus. Then He exposed Himself to every grief and pain that we experience, bearing them with us.

So in Jesus’ suffering and death, we see not just the physical agony of one man, but also the self-emptying love of our Creator giving birth to and sustaining creation, permitting all of this pain (as well as beauty) for some unknowable loving purpose of His own. In the end, there is no answer to the bad things that happen, but I cannot see God as their deliberate author: rather, He is for me that love that gives us hope that all these things will be perfected, in the way that the blemishes of a piece of wood can be incorporated to make a greater beauty.

In the words of Thornton Wilder "we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning".