Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
It presented as just what I thought was a standard toothache. A left hand side on the bottom. And so I went to the dentist and they looked at it and thought it looked a bit more serious and a bit beyond their remit. So then they decided that they'd refer me on to a hospital not far from us and after
Waiting for six weeks to hear back from the hospital, nothing happened. And then I got in contact with their dentist and they were a bit puzzled. But then they told me the paperwork had got stuffed up. So the whole procedure had to begin again. So another six weeks, had to wait another six weeks. In the meantime, it got worse.
You're listening to Ben Shaw, and this is maybe one of the strangest, most difficult interviews I've ever done. He's a minister of religion, an amazing musician, and one of my oldest mates. He was the lead guitarist of the band that I sang for for years in the silence. And he's reliving some of the most painful and upsetting moments of his life.
The day he heard two words that make all the difference. It's cancer. In this episode, we're delving into that frightening world. According to the World Health Organization, cancer is the second leading cause of death internationally, accounting for an estimated 9.6 million fatalities in 2018 alone. That's one in six deaths.
But cancer isn't just a medical battleground. It's a spiritual one as well. Through the ages, myriad human voices have cried out, my God, why? I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academic and its extraordinary new book, The New Testament in Its World, by N.T. Wright and Michael Byrd.
Every week we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. Music
Cancer is an undiscriminating disease. It can appear in almost any part of the body and in any age group. Each year, 300,000 cases of cancer are diagnosed in children alone. Friends of ours from church recently lost their beautiful five-year-old daughter to cancer. I dedicate this episode to them.
Cancer afflicts every country on earth. The poorest, of course, suffer the most because they can't afford the high costs associated with prevention or treatment. And the costs for those who can pay are staggering. Cancer costs 1.16 trillion US dollars a year. But there's an even more expensive question. The question of suffering.
How do people who reckon there is some kind of good God in the world, which surveys tell us is most human beings, cope with cancer in the world? Back to Ben's toothache, where it all began. This is Ben's wife, my dear mate Karen. They thought it was an infected wisdom tooth at one stage. So in about June, it swelled up. Really bad sort of infection type swelling. Went on antibiotics.
And then in July that happened again and it wasn't right. So we'd basically taken matters into our own hands but we had to because it had swollen and my face was, yeah, looking like a chipmunk on one side. And they found something that looked like a cyst and they took the wisdom tooth out and did a biopsy of the cyst and didn't expect, they said this is just something we do, it looks really fine, it looks benign, it looks fine. And two weeks later you were
to come into an appointment at the cancer centre, which was slightly unusual and alarming. The bad news was a diagnosis of squamous cell carcinoma, a very large tumour in the jaw, the left side of Ben's jaw,
And he was told that he would have to have a mandibulectomy, neck resection and fibula free flap, which essentially means taking out the left half of the jaw and four teeth, everything, and reconstructing it using the fibula bone, which is the small bone in the leg, and a piece of skin to graft the gum. So that was essentially the...
news, but delivering that news was a beautiful professor who did it gently and told Ben that he would only be able to handle some of the news, and so gave it in four consultations. Wow. Do you remember when you first heard the word cancer? Well, when this news was first given, I was sitting down, Karen was by my side, and then he
Began to say, I'm going to take part of your leg and put it in your jaw and I'm going to rob six months of your life and change your life forever. Even though I was sitting down, I started to feel like woozy. And I said to him, I think I need to lie down. It's quite amazing to hear something and actually physically go,
this is gonna put me on the deck if I don't lie down. So yeah, thankfully there was a bed in the consultation room and so I lay down on that. - I remember you said to me, you asked him, what if you didn't do the surgery? And he said-- - You've got 12 months to live, maybe 18.
Cancer is so destructive, it's become a byword for anything that fundamentally undermines and systematically destroys things. We talk about political corruption as a cancer of the state. Buildings get concrete cancer. And if we're looking for an almost unattainable goal, we talk about the cure for cancer. Well, Professor Tim Morn is one of those researchers pursuing the unattainable goal.
He is Professor of Clinical Oncology and the Director of the Oxford Institute for Radiation Oncology at the University of Oxford. He oversees dozens of programs designed to understand cancer better. I asked him to go back to the beginning. What is cancer? Cancer is a disease of cells and if you think about a cell it is the most extraordinary, complex, brilliant organisation
It's more complicated than a Formula One car. It has feedback mechanisms which control it and our bodies are made up of these wonderful little things called cells. And cancer is a disease when those control mechanisms begin to go wrong. So we have brakes and we have accelerators on all of our cells which control it. And some of the key mistakes that happen due to mutations or
Loss of genes can be analogised to losing your foot brake or your hand brake. And imagine driving a car when your foot brake doesn't work and your hand brake's failed and then your foot's stuck on the accelerator and then the steering wheel falls off. The engine keeps going and it's chaos. That's what cancer is. Cells that have lost control and are beginning to behave autonomously.
What are the worst cancers? I mean most deadly by numbers in our Western societies.
Well, I think pancreas cancer is the most deadly in terms of the number of patients who die of it out of the proportion who get it. So pancreas cancer has been the one where there's been the least progress. Prognosis is still less than 5% survival and it hasn't shifted in the last 30 years. The ones that people most commonly die from, well, the big four are lung cancer,
bowel cancer, breast cancer and prostate cancer. And it does vary across the world according to how much people smoke. In high smoking areas lung cancer is always the top, where smoking is getting less, then the others jockey for top position. You lead research teams and work out multi-million dollar grants for research teams and so on. So can you tell me,
Where is the most interesting or hopeful research today? What is the most interesting or hopeful lines of research to combat cancer? Well the biggest news in the last five years has been the introduction of effective immunotherapy. So that is basically switching on the immune cell to recognise cancer as foreign and to be able to kill it
and the first drugs in that space have been called checkpoint inhibitors and it's kind of like taking the blindfold off the immune system. And those work in cancers where there are high levels of mutations.
For Ben and Karen, immunotherapy wasn't an option. Yeah, he said, there is no choice. You have to have this. And the only way to get rid of it is surgery. And this is the only surgery. He was admitted to hospital on 29th was the surgery. Yeah, so 16 hours of surgery the first time. So that was doing the first procedure. And then he had the emergency. You had a blood clot. Yeah, yeah, the...
operation basically failed um i had a twisted artery is that right and then so there was no blood flow through the new jaw new jaw so thankfully i mean i was completely out of it but thankfully one of the nurses cottoned onto this there was a machine plugged into my jaw basically that was monitoring the blood flow and the pulse rate and everything and um
Yeah, they realised there was something wrong. So they had to get the surgeon back in who had already just done 16, 17 hours of surgery. And they did a further four or five hours surgery to correct what had happened. Do you have any recollection of all that? Or was it just those days of the work? Oh, well, no, I was completely out of it. So I came... The only thing I can remember is from when I got out of the surgery the second time. Yeah. Yeah, so... And even those...
Probably the first 24 hours were a bit hazy. Everything is... Oh, crystal clear. For Karen, yeah. Karen is a medical professional, but it wasn't enough to insulate her from the grief of watching her husband go through the ravages of cancer. Can you put in words what you feel? I think you and I had a conversation where the first time I...
cried was with you just because I had to be strong. I'm in a new job. I'm a director in this hospital. I'm trying to be strong for Ben. I'm keeping it together and it's that crisis mode that you go into. My lifeline to people was the group that I'd set up and that yeah the whatsapp group where people were praying and I was sending messages but it was just like my heart was being squeezed.
I, there were moments I thought I was going to lose him. Just, I'd just turned 50. So, um, a month before and I thought I'm a widow at 50. And then breathing issues, post-surgery, vomiting through the trachea pipe, all this sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, yeah, having a trachea is, I now sympathize with people who've had tracheas now because they are horrible. It's, it's,
The trachy Ben's talking about here, of course, isn't the daggy sweatpants Australians call trachies. It's a tracheotomy, that life-saving surgical procedure where they cut a hole in the windpipe and insert a tube so the patient can breathe. It's brilliant, but it's pretty awful, and it sometimes doesn't work. They're bad enough in themselves, but when they get a little blocked, then it's really...
It's so bad. When you feel yourself, you can't breathe properly. And I had that for at least two or three days. And then they finally cleared it. And that was just so relieving. Ben couldn't speak. He was writing on a piece of paper. So he would...
The frustration would come through by you writing and then banging the piece of paper saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe. Help me. One time you wrote in big letters, help me. And that for me was just heartbreaking. It's moments like these when you just can't hide from the question of suffering.
Loads of us ask it, whether we're believers or sceptics. A friend of mine is a Qantas captain, and one evening he was looking out of the flight deck window at thousands of bright stars in the night sky, and he turned to his first officer and said, look at that, it's hard to believe there's no God, hey? The first officer shot back, not when you've been through war and seen what I've seen. My mate quickly changed the subject.
I think it's generally agreed today, by philosophers in cool-headed moments anyway, that suffering can't be a knockdown argument against God. Not a logical one, anyway. The emotional questions are much more difficult. The popular intellectual argument usually goes like this. 1. An all-powerful God could end pain. 2. An all-good God would end pain.
3. Since pain exists, an all-powerful, all-good God doesn't exist. But there's a widely recognized problem with premise 2. We just don't know that an all-good God would necessarily end all pain. In order to sustain that argument, we'd first have to show that God couldn't, even in principle, have decent reasons for allowing a world in which pain is a reality.
In ordinary human life, there are plenty of examples where we ourselves, in good conscience, allow pain for decent ends, whether self-improvement, in medicine, with our own children, and so on.
None of these may correspond to God's reasons, that's not really the point, but if we, with our limited knowledge, can think of noble ends that justify pain, we just can't logically rule out that an infinitely wise God could have infinitely better ends in mind for allowing a world in which pain exists.
This discussion goes way back to Augustine in the 5th century, but it was Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century that set things in the clearest form, and his argument really stands.
If creating a universe with the capacity to go astray achieves nobler ends than creating a universe without the capacity to go astray, then an all-good God would choose to create the first kind of universe over the second. And since he's all-powerful, he'd be able to achieve those ends to the satisfaction of all.
And as I say, if we can imagine any case in life where a noble end satisfies the pain associated with it, we at least have an analogy for the divine plan. I offer this only as a response to those who say that suffering is a logical proof against God's existence. It really isn't.
But I imagine those of you who have really experienced pain in cancer or some other form will find all this logical analysis a bit tone deaf and beside the point. It doesn't really help with the ongoing practical and emotional problem of suffering. Those problems have been around forever and they aren't going anywhere soon. Professor Tim Morn again. There's evidence of cancer in an Egyptian mummy. So it has been around for a long time.
But we know that a lot of cancer is due to environmental factors like smoking, environmental pollution, the diet we eat, various viruses that we pass around between us which set cancer off, for instance, HPV and hepatitis virus. So there are lots of things that increase the risk of cancer, which are related to our modern society. How hopeful are you that in 50 years from now,
we will be able to conquer most cancers. I think in another 50 years, we will still have the problem of late presentation. So people turning up because cancer is subtle. It doesn't announce itself. And so we will continue to have late presentation in some, particularly the people who don't particularly join in with screening programs. We will still, cancer will never have one solution.
Struggling to find their own solution, Ben and Karen have made it to the intensive care ward. Ben can't speak. He's desperately writing, reaching for relief, and Karen is struggling to understand. It's a launch.
Ben throws two fingers at you and three fingers at you. Oh, yeah. Two fingers at you, three fingers at you. And then points to his head. Points to his head. And I'm like, think. Yeah. A nurse came in and I'd asked Karen to read. And you don't, but you didn't ask because all you did was two, three. And then point to your head, which is think about it. Two, three. I'm like, I'm trying to work it out. When he kept going, think it through. Psalm 23. Read Psalm 23. And then I was like, oh, I can't.
And then I'd start to read, and quietly, because you're in an intensive care unit, you don't want to read. And then he'd tell me to elevate my voice, speak louder, and then point to the nurse. Speak loud enough so the nurse can hear. So I had to read really loudly Psalm 23 in the intensive care unit, and he was nodding. The most beautiful thing in that whole time was when I'd read some scripture,
And you just, it was like a smile would come over your face. It's like, yep, I need it. I need this. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
It's amazing how vivid and powerful the scriptures become when you're in a situation like that. And I remember reading a quote somewhere that God sometimes puts us on our backs in order to get us to look up.
And it upset me on my back and looking up to God, you know, thinking, not why is me or woe is me, but just reaching out to God, knowing that he was reaching to me. And I know the scriptures just became just more vivid. More after the break.
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.
68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.
It's interesting, having come out of the surgery and then you sort of see your face is skewered here and you've got a new groove in your cheek and that sort of thing, you kind of
Your looks do matter to you. I thought I wasn't so vain. I thought, oh, it won't matter. But then when you see yourself looking different and not quite the same, you go, I wish I did look the same. And so I've become shyer for walking into shops and I find myself my head down a little more or I'm turning the other way or I put my hand over my chin more.
Yeah, so you become a little more self-conscious. Ben talks about the fallenness of the world, a kind of discord that interrupts the melody of life. And somehow, he says, God inhabits that fallenness with us. Tim Morn, one of Britain's leading cancer warriors, says something similar. Does thinking about cancer as much as you do in your life dent your Christian faith? I mean...
How do you simultaneously believe in a good creator and this malignant thing in our bodies that you face day in, day out? Well, there's lots of bad things that happen in this world. And you only have to visit or work in an undeveloped or developing country to realise that there are many people who have a very, very tough life.
deal in this life. So there are lots of bad things that happen. Bad things happen to good people, bad things happen to all sorts of people in this world. And the amazing thing to me is that God operates in that environment and that he comes to meet with people and he walks with us in the middle of that bad stuff. He did that in Jesus and he does it in life now. So
He's not a God who fixes stuff. He's not in the sense of making everything nice and rosy. He's a God who inhabits our frailties and walks with us through our sufferings. And he's amazing. Press pause. I've got a five minute, Jesus. Ben, Karen and Tim all speak of God being present in the ugliness of the world.
I think this is one of the most unusual aspects of what the Bible says about pain and suffering. The most pressing question for those actually experiencing pain isn't why does God allow it, but where is He? What's His attitude?
I mean, when my daughter Josie hurts herself, she doesn't rush and ask, "Dad, why the pain? How will it be resolved?" She just wants to cry and she wants to know that I've got her, that I'm with her, that I sympathize. The Old Testament in the Bible invites everyone who wants to cry out to God.
My mate Ben mentioned Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd and all that. But the psalm immediately before it strikes a very different note. Psalm 22 opens with, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer. Pretty confronting stuff.
It's a reminder that sometimes crying out, my God, is just as rational, just as permissible as saying, the Lord is my shepherd. The presence of Psalm 22 immediately before the more famous Psalm 23 tells us that God is okay with both. God invites us to cry out to him.
But the most extraordinary part of the Bible's plotline is that God showed up in the ugliness personally. He himself has experienced rejection, injury, agony, a final breath. And this is nowhere clearer than in the crucifixion scene in all of the gospel. There, the cry of the anguished poet of Psalm 22 actually becomes the cry and circumstances of Jesus on the cross.
In his final moments, Jesus searched for words to convey his innermost feelings. And he cried Psalm 22. Mark 15 says, Which means, citing Psalm 22, This is not a cry of self-doubt from Jesus' lips.
This is a deliberate and agonizing identification with the suffering poet of Psalm 22. And so with anyone who's ever felt like crying, my God, why? This vision of God can comfort those who suffer, not just because he is all-knowing, but because he's experienced pain firsthand. God isn't passive, it turns out. Not distant, but involved and himself wounded.
It's a point made actually by one of the 20th century's greatest atheists, the Frenchman Albert Camus. Camus usually wrote of the futility of life, the unrelenting silence of the universe, but he admitted that he saw in the cross a potential answer to human longing for divine sympathy. In his essay, which became a book, The Rebel, he wrote these words:
The man-god suffers too, with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him, since he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha is so important in the history of man, only because in its shadow, the divinity abandoned its traditional privileges and drank to the last drop, despair included, the agony of death.
Camus was an atheist, but he knew something about the core of the Christian faith. If it's true that God knows our pain firsthand because he's experienced it, it follows that we don't just shout at God as the one ultimately responsible for this universe. We can run to him for comfort, knowing that he's been there, he understands, he's got us. Ultimately, that's what Christianity offers us in our past.
Not just some philosophy, but a story of the God who himself shares our wounds. You can press play now. Ben has been smacked across the head, literally, by his cancer. He's lost some things along the way, but he hasn't lost his guitar, nor his perspective. Is it recording? Yeah. So I have to ask the question, what on earth do you make of cancer from a Christian point of view?
How do you get your head around them? Well, both you and I know, perhaps more acutely than some others, of a world that's broken, which includes cancer and suffering and death. And so, having lost my mum when I was seven, seven years old, I was already attuned to a broken, fallen world that includes our bodies. So...
um in a weird way i was slightly prepared for it and i'd always thought all my life that you know one day i'm gonna get something you know none of us are gonna live forever so i was kind of prepared for it do you feel the pressure to act like you believe that stuff you've been preaching or are you really feeling those things i don't feel any pressure um none whatsoever i just really believe that um
Yeah, none of this has affected my faith whatsoever. It's strengthened mine. I think that I physically felt, even though there wasn't anyone with me during the whole procedure, particularly through the crisis period, just the Bible and the comfort through the Bible, I felt physical connection that I hadn't had before and also just...
That utter reliance on the Lord is something I've never needed as much. And there is something quite beautiful in Christ's tragedy that as a Christian, clinging to that promise of the Lord, I felt a physical comfort that I really haven't had before, even though we've had a few...
crises at church and walking through pain and suffering with other people. I haven't had that before and I actually look back on it even though it was tragic it was quite beautiful as well. I do believe the Bible. I do believe that it teaches us that we're in a broken fallen world that is in constant decay including our
I often tell people in my church that four things break in the Garden of Eden, our relationship with God, our relationship with each other, our bodies, and even creation itself is marred. And so I've been preaching that doctrine for years, decades, and now I'm just more of a visual living example of it.
I'm not pretending that this solves everything. I still ask questions. Watching my dearest mate go through cancer, still going through cancer, has challenged me. Not so much intellectually, but certainly psychologically, emotionally, spiritually.
I've been reminded again of what one of my favourite writers wrote a few years ago. Francis Buffard was a British atheist and intellectual who, through an experience of life's sadness actually, found himself almost accidentally an Anglican. He wrote,
We ask for a friend in time of grief, a true judge in time of perplexity. We don't say that God's in his heaven and all's well with the world, not deep down. We say all is not well with the world, but at least God is here in it with us. We don't have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we have a story.
For a Christian, the most essential thing God does in time, in all of human history, is to be that man in the crowd, a man under arrest and on his way to our common catastrophe.
Got questions about this or other episodes? I'd love to hear them and perhaps we'll answer them in our upcoming Q&A episode. You can tweet it to us at Undeceptions. Send us a regular old email at questions at Undeceptions.com or if you're brave, head to Undeceptions.com and press the little button to record your question straight through to us.
While you're there, check out everything related to this episode and sign up for the Undeceptions newsletter to get access to bonus content and plenty more from each episode. If you like this show, let me give a little shout out to Salt Conversations with Jenny. It's another member of the Eternity Podcast Network. Jenny Salt does these in-depth interviews with people whose lives have been challenged and changed by
by their encounter with God. I was recently in the hot seat with her and she has a lovely, gentle way of extracting exactly what she wants out of you. Anyway, give it a listen over at eternitypodcasts.com. Next episode, creation, evolution, the six days of Genesis, and all sorts of other completely uncontroversial things. See ya.
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced and directed by Mark Hadley. I can't wait till Kaylee Payne comes back from maternity leave. Love your work, Kaylee. Our theme song is by Bach, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band.
Editing by Bryce McClellan. Head to undeceptions.com. You'll find show notes and other stuff related to our episodes. And over the coming weeks, we're transforming undeceptions.com into a whole library of audio, video, and printable stuff from lots of communicators designed to undeceive and let the truth out.