One of my favourite T-shirts is a version of Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream, in which the agonised human face clutched in both hands is replaced by a dog’s, an Australian Shepherd to be precise. I call it “dog’s existential angst” because our canine companions share so much with us, including our misery.
Nothing speaks with more clarity about human existential angst than the Bible. It is utterly realistic about life and its inevitabilities, one of which is that no one spends long on planet Earth without encountering suffering. As the patriarch Job reflects in the Old Testament book named after him, we are born into trouble as the sparks fly upward. In other words, strife is inevitable.
Psalm 90, attributed to Moses, is a marvellous reflection on the frailty of humanity. Moses writes: “Our days may come to 70 years, or 80, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.”
It is a brutal statement about trouble and sorrow as part of human existence, but it is true, and it is intended to point us to the comfort and hope that believers find in God. Accept these facts about human life, Moses says, but at the same time he pleads to God “satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days … May the favour of the Lord our God rest on us.”
King David, in Psalm 8, writes of a truth that is as important as our frailty, and that is our exaltation in God’s creation. “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honour.” It is one of the treasures of biblical wisdom that such contrasting facts are held in tension, both true.
The unknown writer of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews is even more emphatic. In chapter 13, he writes: “God has said, ‘never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ So we say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid’.”
In the original Greek text, the negative “never” and “not” appears five times for emphasis, rather than twice as in the English translation. God’s grasp on the hand of those who trust in him will never slacken; nothing can come between him and them.
Here is the source of the best of the human spirit: our capacity to hope, endure, and persevere –
despite the circumstances.
Barney Zwartz is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity.
Barney Zwartz, a senior fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity, was religion editor of The Age from 2002 to 2013.
