‘The cross is little
understood today,’ a spiritual person remarked sadly. Has it ever been
understood? In the past you got a stress on suffering which perverted
Christianity into ‘crosstianity’, the idea that you are only pleasing to God
when you are suffering, and the more suffering the better.
All sorts of errors lie
behind this attitude and what a blasphemous caricature of God! Fear and hatred
of matter—one becomes spiritual the more one is removed from matter and this
means the body and the emotions-which is utterly unchristian because inhuman;
together with the notion that we are redeemed by suffering, that since Christ
suffered we must suffer too… [But] it was love that redeemed us, love that did
the Father’s will no matter what the cost, love that was total surrender.
It was through suffering
but it was not the suffering itself that brought us to the Father. It is
because suffering is a fact in human life from which there is no escape that
Christ suffered. He suffered because we must suffer. He accepted our human lot
and transformed it into the path to glory.
Reflection – It is quite possible that
one of the most urgent and pressing needs for clarification and correction
today in our culture is our attitude towards and understanding of suffering.
Today and tomorrow on this blog I have some good simple teaching from Burrows
on the matter which give at least the beginnings of insight into it.
The reason, of course, that this is so urgent
today is that the world (in my estimation) is heading into a period of intense
tribulation and turmoil. This is not apocalyptic speculation on my part.
Economists and political analysts have sounded the warnings here, not wild eyed
prophets.
Essentially, the prosperous nations of the
world are going bankrupt, and there is no sustainable way forward. Demographic
winter is coming, with an rapidly aging population of Baby Boomers facing a
crisis in both health care and social security that is simply unresolvable, and
far too few young people faced with shouldering the financial and human burden
of this unsustainable system.
The reason euthanasia is being pushed so hard
in so many jurisdictions is that those who have crunched the hard numbers are
well aware that our health care system cannot possibly cope with the number of
sick elderly people there will be in the next twenty years. ‘Kill ‘em all’ is,
for some at least, a viable course of action. I won’t even touch here upon the
global political-military scene which is alarming at best.
All of which to say that our attitude towards
suffering is a relevant, nay urgent, matter in the year 2013. Hard times are
coming. So Christ’s choice to redeem us through, not suffering, but love, is
something we need to contemplate.
It is true that we can focus on the sufferings
of Christ to an unhealthy degree. As Chesterton put it, “He died on a cross; he
did not live on one.” A morbid focus on suffering and death makes for a gloomy,
weird religion. But… he did suffer. And it was his love for us that brought him
to that, and it was indeed the depth of love expressing itself in his embrace
of suffering and death that redeemed us all.
Suffering is indeed an inevitable feature of
human life. No one gets through this world unscathed by it. We need to go
deeply into the fact—the sheer fact—that God has done something to suffering by
His entering of it to change what it is, what it means, what it does to us,
where it can take us.
Suffering and death without God are simply
defeat, futility, tragedy. Suffering and death with God are transformed into a
way of love in the world, and so become the path to glory.
We don’t really know what the next decades are going to bring us, although the one thing we do know is that there will be a great number of elderly people who will lack adequate medical care. But once we get that Christ has entered our human lot with its joys and its pains, that God’s love and God’s life has penetrated to the very heart of the human tragedy, and that suffering is not simply suffering, but is a sharing in God’s redeeming love, then we are equipped to face whatever the world will throw at us, and move with confidence and faith into the glorious future God opens up for us in his gracious merciful love.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.