c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) Sunday morning. Our class talks about homosexuality and Christianity. It’s nice enough, as such discussions go. Compassionate, informed.

Sunday afternoon. I scan my shelf of books and select a slim volume called “Night,” by Elie Wiesel, a classic I acquired but never read.

It’s far from my first exposure to Holocaust literature. But eyes open when they open. Two hours later, I see why organized religion tiptoed away from the “God is dead” quandary of the 1960s and its underlying “problem of evil.”

I understand why mainline churches have spent the past four decades engaged in increasingly shrill debates over in-house concerns, and why market-sensitive churches took the sunnier course of upbeat gatherings of like-minded people exchanging simple answers to complex questions.

I understand why the pope’s earnest attempt to apologize for history but to dodge institutional culpability fell flat.

Wiesel was 15 years old when Nazi troops swept into Hungary. It was 1944. The war was nearly over. But Germany’s genocidal zeal hadn’t waned.

Jews in Wiesel’s village were herded into ghettoes, stuffed into cattle cars and sent to Birkenau, Auschwitz and Buna. As huge smokestacks belched the stench of burning flesh, Wiesel watched his mother and little sister be sent off with the females. He never saw them again. He watched his father be beaten. He himself was beaten for whatever small infraction his guards could find.

He saw children and grown-ups tossed into roaring ovens, some still alive when tossed. A young man told of feeding his own father’s body to the fire. Jews who violated mindless rules were beaten or shot.

One day three Jews were hanged. One was a child, who took 30 minutes to die. A Jewish onlooker moaned, “Where is God?” Wiesel heard the question and said to himself, “Here He is _ He has been hanged here, on these gallows.”

When Jesus talked of his suffering, this is what he meant. He didn’t mean frustration at work, tight finances, a lost love, the confusion of adolescence, the downside of aging, or any of the myriad misfortunes that dog our days, some trivial, some serious.

He meant evil. He meant suffering at the hands of evil. He meant being rejected by the self-righteous. He meant the degrading partnership between oppressor and oppressed. He meant swaggering officials, night roundups, casual violence, small men carrying big cudgels.

He meant being beaten for the sheer delight it brought his captors. He meant being mocked, as if he were the cause of his own murder. He meant being executed publicly, to frighten others. He meant dying in despair.

Yes, life is a difficult affair. God meets us in our agonies, no matter how small. Religion is a bearer of respite. But the suffering of his Son was deeper than any of that. And the challenge of responding to him is deeper than answering momentary woe. For Jesus saw the face of evil _ the empty eyes, the smirking mouth, the brutal hand, the vacant soul.

When Wiesel wrote his book after a long self-imposed silence, no publisher would touch it. People wanted to forget. It was a time of growth, John Wayne-type heroes and “Mickey Mouse Club.” We wanted to rescue Berlin from communists, bad strangers, not walk a killing ground where civilized people like us behaved like monsters.

But evil’s camps are the ground on which faith is either broken or born. Not in solemn assemblies, not in happy hymns, learned preaching, or quiet places where the serene smile on the troubled.

The question of all time _ “Where is God?” _ must be answered in an Auschwitz, or its more recent counterparts, or not at all. And the gospel’s answer _ that Jesus looked in that same face of evil and suffered in the same way on an ugly hill _ must not be too hard for us to bear.

We cannot tiptoe away, turn inward, or indulge our morbid fascination with sex. We must hear our own echo of Wiesel’s answer: God is there, hanging on the gallows.

For evil never rests. If there be faith, it cannot lie in temporary respite from toil and trouble. Faith lies in God’s victory over the darkness itself.

DEA END EHRICH