I want, in this post, to think about suffering. And, in particular, suffering as a Christian.
This isn’t an easy topic to address. Often, as Job’s friends found, we are too quick to speak when others are in pain.
Yet as a pastor I encounter suffering a lot. I, of course, experience my own pain and struggles with bereavement, depression and physical illness. I also have the privilege and burden of walking through dark valleys with others and trying to help them see Christ even in the midst of their difficulties.
The way of Jesus speaks to these times as loudly (and perhaps louder) as it does to times of blessing and joy.
Before we go any further I need to acknowledge that much of what I am saying today is influenced by the work of a much greater mind and teacher than myself: Pope (now St) John Paul II in his letter On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering. It is hard going in places but is the product of a one of the great modern theologians and philosophers; I recommend it.
Summary
Whenever I preach or write, I always try to think about a summary of what I’m going to say, distilled down into a sentence or two. Here’s today’s:
Suffering is a part of the human condition and is evidence of evil. Yet Christ has walked that path, can meet us in the midst of suffering and use it to bring goodness and salvation in us.
The Nature of Suffering
My own reflections on suffering in this context began with the story of Jesus healing a blind man in John 9.
The account opens with Jesus seeing a man who was suffering. He suffered physically – he had never been able to see – and economically – he was a beggar.
The man’s situation began to prompt the questions that sooner or later come to everyone: why? Why is there this pain? What is the meaning of it?
These questions are universal. To experience suffering is a uniquely human thing. Animals experience pain, certainly. But they are not aware of themselves and of their pain. The mental aspect is not there and so the experience is fundamentally different.
The problem of pain is not easy to answer.
When faced with, or experiencing, suffering it is tempting, as the disciples showed, to reach for the language of blame. Surely it must be this man’s fault? Or if not him then his parents?
Jesus resists that line of logic: Sometimes suffering is the direct result of human sin – either our own or someone else’s. We don’t have to think for long to come up with examples.
But often, perhaps much more often, we suffer and there is no one directly to blame. It is fruitless to cast around for villains to accuse. Jesus doesn’t bother with that here.
Suffering isn’t always the direct result of sin but it is indicative of the presence of evil. Evil, in Christian thought, comes from a lack of, or the absence of, a good. We suffer because of a lack of something we need.
In that sense our experience of suffering is a pointer to the fact that the world is not as it should be – that it has gone wrong in some way that we cannot fully grasp.
That is why the problem of evil is so profound and also why it is ultimately evidence for the existence of God. After all, on an atheist view of the world in which all there is can be reduced to mere matter, there is no explanation for why we experience pain as “bad”. “Bad” and “good” are meaningless, non-existent ideas. For the atheist, there is no reason to believe we ought not to experience pain.
We intuitively know this is not true. Everything within us revolts at the suffering we experience and see around us. “This should not be” scream our hearts as the memory buried deep within us of a Creator who loves us and does not want this for us stirs within.
Jesus’s Response to Suffering
Suffering, then, is profoundly linked to our experience of being human. It speaks of evil but is not always (or even often) a direct response to anything we, as individuals, have done.
What is God’s response to that suffering? What is his response to any form of evil?
For Christians the answer begins and ends with Jesus.
The heart of Christianity is Jesus’s claim that:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.[1]
In other words, God sees the world of evil and death, of pain and suffering, and offers himself in Christ to bear it, to confront it and to redeem it.
In Jesus, the Son of God, was willing to step into our world to face its evil and to bear its suffering, to bear our suffering, in order that he might save us.
Isaiah, the Old Testament Jewish prophet, predicted exactly this in a stunning piece of poetry that anticipated and described how the Messiah would come and suffer with us in order to redeem us.
In Christ, therefore, suffering is no longer a place forsaken by God, bearing the darkness of death and rejection of good. Rather it is a path that God himself has trod and which he has used to bring life.
In a small way we see this marked out in John 9.
- Who saw the blind man? Jesus. Jesus sees us in our pain.
- Who healed the blind man? Jesus. Jesus is the one who comes to fix our pain.
- Who found the man when everyone else rejected him? Jesus. Jesus is the one who finds us and comforts us in our suffering.
- Who would be tried by the same court, and bear the weight of their rejection and scorn? Jesus.
God’s response to suffering is not to deny it but to walk through it in order that it can be turned to good.
Encountering Christ in and Through Suffering
Now we should notice that suffering does not stop because we have become Christians. That is never promised, nor should it be expected.
Jesus told us that those who wish to receive his life must first take up their cross and follow him. The path of a follower Christ is inextricably linked with suffering even as his own path was.
In our reading the blind man obeys Jesus and receives a huge blessing in the grant of his sight. Yet immediately his suffering switches from disability and poverty to rejection and exclusion.
At the end of the story, however, it is he who has been accepted, has received light and no longer lives in darkness, while those who were powerful and apparently healthy have been revealed to be blind.
The man’s suffering has remained a source of pain and grief. Yet it has become an opportunity for him to encounter Christ. It is through his trials and his pain that he comes to see and understand who Jesus is and to receive the life that he offers.
Christians suffer even after they have come to Christ.
Yet, our suffering now is not hopeless or meaningless. Rather it can be an opportunity for us to encounter Christ (who himself walks through suffering) and so to come to a deeper understanding of him and in turn be changed to be more like him.
As we suffer as Christians, we are united, in a deep way, with the experience and life of our Master. That does not mean that our pain is not real, our frustrations not deep anymore than his were.
Rather it means that God is there with us in the midst of it, sharing it, and using it to bring us closer to him and to work something of his redemptive power in us.
In Salvifici Doloris, Pope John Paul explains that:
Suffering is, in itself, a trial of evil. But Christ has made it the most solid base of the definitive good, namely of the good of eternal salvation. By his suffering on the Cross, Christ reached the very roots of evil: those of sin and death. He has overcome the author of evil which is Satan, and his permanent rebellion against the Creator. To his suffering brother or sister, Christ opens and gradually unfolds the horizons of the Kingdom of God: of a world converted to the Creator, of a world liberated from sin, which is being built on the saving power of love. And slowly but surely, Christ introduces suffering man into this world, into this Kingdom of the Father, in a certain sense via the very heart of his suffering. Indeed, suffering cannot be transformed and changed by a grace from outside, but from within.
St Paul puts it like this:
For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.[2]
We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.[3]
The End of Suffering
Ultimately, Christian hope is not merely that suffering itself can be redeemed and recast as an occasion either for our own encounter with Christ or for love to be demonstrated between people.
The final consolation, the final reassurance, for those who suffer with Christ is that this pain is not the final word. Nor, does it ultimately lead to death. Rather when we walk this road with Jesus, we can be assured that our journey ends in life; abundant, overflowing life.
We are people who not only see Christ crucified, bearing the weight of our suffering and sin on his shoulders, but Christ raised, offering light and hope to all who will receive it. He came into the world so that that light may be offered to all who are in darkness.
[1] John 3:16-17
[2] 2 Corinthians 1:5
[3] 2 Corinthians 4:8-11
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