a constant note in the Bible. Hope persists regardless of circumstance because the loving God persists, prevails, and promises.
Anchor #5. Head Toward the World’s Suffering.
God is love in eternal being and thus in earthly action. The people of God are to join the divine action by being filled with God’s Spirit and focusing their attention where God’s attention is focused. We are to love as God loves.
Whatever the philosophical debates about the origins of suffering, God’s focus is on doing something about it in the present that we are experiencing. Suffering is central to the fact and meaning of God-with-us in Jesus. It’s also central to the intended reality of our lives of faith. We are to represent Jesus in this evil-laden and suffering world by relieving the suffering of others, even at the cost of our own suffering.
Some pain is intended by the Creator. There is, after all, a pain that makes becoming possible—see chapters ten and eleven. But much of the suffering that now exists surely was not intended by a loving God because it works only toward destruction. It’s just “evil,” “live” spelled backwards. Again, we must put an end to the “why” questions and shift to doing God’s healing work. What did Jesus tell his disciples on that Mount of Transfiguration? I’ll paraphrase. “You can’t stay here forever absorbing this spiritual high, protected from the pain. Go back down to the masses who suffer. Get your hands dirty and feed my sheep!”
The Heart of Biblical Revelation
The resurrection of Jesus made plain that God had been with us and for us as the Son hung and died on the cross. The empty tomb means that the cross is never the end of the story of Jesus or of ourselves and our suffering. We certainly haven’t been given all the explanations about the causes of suffering in particular cases. Mystery remains. What we do know is that darkness already has been overwhelmed by light. Given the resurrection, even the cross glows with glory! That doesn’t answer all of our questions, admittedly, but it does point in the right direction and brings hope to the jaggedness of our faith journey.
This is the heart of biblical revelation and thus of Christian faith. What’s God’s primary response to human suffering? It’s God’s personal identification with it in Christ. The main answer to the problem of pain is the pain of God. We must not shy from the thought of God in pain. You’ll find this quote elsewhere in the book: “God’s problem is not that God is not able to do certain things. God’s problem is that God loves! Love complicates the life of God as it complicates every life.”
This loving complication means that God’s power ultimately reveals itself “in divine solidarity with the sufferer, that is, in the ‘weakness’ of suffering love.”26 God really was with us in the suffering of Jesus. God wasn’t only remotely with us in Jesus’ suffering and death, there by proxy and at a safe distance, only illustratively. God really and fully was there as Emmanuel, “God with us.” We typically speak of the sacrifice of Jesus when actually we should dare to say more. God in Jesus was self-sacrificing as an act of amazing love.
The Cross of Jesus, high point of suffering and divine revelation, looks back to the fall in Genesis and forward to the day when there will be no more tears.
The cosmic significance of the cross is this. God the Father was choosing to meet our suffering with that of his own, addressing the suffering caused by our sin with presence and personal pain. Because of the depth of divine love, God was voluntarily participating in our suffering, the innocent suffering for the guilty, in order that the pain of our guilt could be purged of divine judgment and cleansed of final power over our existence and destiny. The big words are incarnation, voluntarily assuming and suffering in our flesh, and atonement, suffering in our flesh so that we again could be at one with God.
To see this God on the cross is to know this God’s true heart. The cross should cause us to love this God, turning from sin and receiving forgiveness and new life. But it’s always our choice. We can look at amazing love and melt in full repentance. We also can look, hate on, and die an unnecessary death. If we receive and are renewed by divine love, what happens to us? Seeing the suffering love that is God, we are enabled to become agents of that love in a suffering world. We are to become models here and now of what God is always and everywhere. We will never be God, of course, but with God in us and serving through us we can function as apostles of divine love.
Given where Christ now is, at God’s right hand, where are we to be if filled with Christ’s Spirit? We are being drawn toward the suffering of the world, just as God was and is. Suffering love is a reality at God’s very heart and also at the center of our calling as God’s children. Karl Rahner once put it well in an Easter homily:
Christ is already in the midst of all the poor things of this earth, which we cannot leave because it is our mother. . . . He is in all tears and in all death as hidden rejoicing and as the life which triumphs by appearing to die. He is in the beggar to whom we give, as the secret wealth which accrues to the donor. He is in the pitiful defeats of his servants as the victory which is God’s alone. He is in our powerlessness as the power which can allow itself to seem weak because it is unconquerable.27
Beautifully said! Given the loving heart of God now shared at great cost for us, where and how should we be as God’s faithful children? We are to be with those who are suffering just as God has graciously been with us.
Biblical faith reports that who God is and what God has done and is doing is for the sake of this creation. The new creation in the blood of Christ is intended only secondarily to “get people to heaven.” Primarily, it’s intended to make the disciples of Jesus “responsible, grateful, and joyful citizens of earth.”28 God being with and identifying with us brings pain to God; our identifying lovingly in God’s name with this creation and its troubles will bring pain to us. So be it! So says the entire Bible with its signposts and truth anchors.
God Will Show the Way Even When There Appears to Be No Way
We learn something important as we move along the jagged pathway of Christian faith. Resurrection trumps crucifixion!
One reason why it’s so hard to understand the will of God is that there are three of them.
The Christian community relies on the Bible for its primary understanding of the revelation of God. We saw in the previous chapter that this sacred source speaks often about suffering. There are some mixed messages. There also are several sure truth anchors for our thinking and believing. Relying on these anchors, we now will identify key elements of belief that helpfully orient us as we travel the jagged path of faith throughout our lives in this troubled world. Together they form the basics of a Christian theology of suffering and authentic discipleship.
The Threefold Path
Suffering penetrates and shapes the very meaning and trajectory of Christian faith. In our personal experiences it tends to follow the threefold 8-9-10 path of 2 Corinthians 12:8-9-10. The experienced trajectory of a Christian’s suffering moves through the troubled terrain of a life of faith in this broken world. It goes from verse 8 (we say: “Take the Pain Away!”), to verse 9 (God says: “My Grace is Sufficient!”), and finally leads to verse 10 (the fact is: “Weakness Can Be Strength!”). We who belong to Christ can go from shock and denial (v. 8), to a greater awareness of the divine dimensions of the situation (v. 9), and finally to our being transformed into the image of Jesus, allowing God’s love to be realized in and ministered through us in spite of and sometimes even with the help of suffering (v. 10).
Wherever
