A Christian Perspective on Suffering

As I sat in the audience of an apostolic conference on mental health, my mind was a bit preoccupied by a tragic event that happened earlier in the week. It wasn’t even an event that was directly related to me other than my being there, but still it affected me; perhaps due to my own life experiences. A young man had jumped to his death at the hospital where I worked. I don’t have any more information on it than that. I don’t know why he jumped; I don’t even know if he was a patient or not. But still, I was so unsettled by the event that it sat with me through this conference on how to pull lessons in mental well-being and resilience from the bible.

One of the presentations was on the theology of suffering. I can’t say that I was one hundred percent attentive to the whole thing, as my mind drifted to the imagined despair of the young man that committed suicide. But I was snapped back into reality for a moment as the orator’s gravelly voice said, “…not even his mother was spared suffering as she wept at the foot of the cross…” In that instant, I was sort of plucked out of my own head and planted back in my own body to sit with what was just said.

“Not even his mother was spared from the suffering of seeing her own boy murdered and tortured to death.” We don’t often think of the crucifixion like this. I know I didn’t, but I think there was something uniquely “special”, for as horrible of a tragedy as it was, to bear witness to someone’s final act of desperation and be confronted with the reality of Jesus’s suffering.

In Christianity, we often hear the phrase “the body of Christ”. It’s used quite often to evoke the sacrifice that Jesus made to pay for the sins of man. It is also used to refer to the Church itself, that we, as believers in Christ, are the “Body.” So why haven’t I ever connected human suffering, as unjust as we may live it, as being part of the “Body of Christ”? He even tells us in Luke 9:23, we have to be willing to take up our cross daily, if we are to follow him. So, let’s get into suffering.

First, I have reconciled “suffering” in human existence with a few rationalities. If we are to know anything, and really appreciate anything for what it is, it’s likely necessary to also know what it is not. No? For example, knowing “joy” and what it feels like and means is likely possible through knowing the absence of “joy”; but to really appreciate “joy”, perhaps we need to experience “’pain”. I have accepted that as a valid reasoning. Furthermore, it seems likely that suffering exists not as a result of God, but as a result of “us”. God created us, gave us everything to take care of and gave us rules and guidelines to follow so that we can do so with care, and then let us go do it. Not to say that God abandoned us, but rather let us grow on our own. So, if we suffer, for a lot of things, they are likely the result of our own actions to ourselves, to others, from others, from past generations and to future generations who haven’t come yet. Basically, we all live in a very interconnected and closed-circuit world with knock-on effects from everything that has ever happened in ways we still don’t understand. A good example of this was pointed out in the book “Freakanomics” by Steven Levitt. If you haven’t read the book, it is a great read, but here is not a space to tackle such a topic. Regardless, I’ve realized that suffering is a partial consequence of existence. It can be great or little, long or short, individual or communal, etc., but in any instance of suffering it is deeply personal, meaningful, traumatizing and emotional.

Now, let’s add in the idea that we are the “body” of Christ. What happened to Jesus while he walked among us? Was he the most popular kid? Was he loved by everyone who met him? Was he even treated the way he treated others? Jesus was born into the underbelly of the society he grew up in. He was a Jew in the Roman Empire; directly a compromised place in society. He was not scholarly; he was the son of a carpenter; a tradesman that toiled with his hands.

As he came into his own, he was not well-received. The chiefs and priests and leaders of his community despised him because he represented a threat to their power. Not because of his status but because of his wisdom, his essence, his purpose. Worse yet, he knew all of this and had to grapple with it. How many among us struggle with self-esteem because someone doesn’t like our Instagram or Facebook posts? How many of us buckle because we get passed up for a promotion at work or because we weren’t invited out for drinks with colleagues? I stated ealier that suffering can be little or great, but it doesn’t change the fact that we suffer for very little things on a daily basis when Jesus struggled with outright rejection from his own community as well as from those oppressing that community, all the people he was sent to save.

So, Jesus suffered rejection. He also suffered ridicule, criticism and the bad faith of those around him. He was ridiculed as the derogatory “king of the Jews” as he was tormented during his torture. He was criticized for every good deed because the minor details and infractions to Jewish law were more important than healing the blind. Constant disbelief and bad faith surrounded every act at a large scale and consumed the masses, even in face of all he had done. Jesus knew social suffering.

He surrounded himself with questionable characters. I say this not as a criticism, but rather as a point. Jesus invested in people’s character traits and core values rather than who they were in society or what they had achieved. He chose people who were capable of learning and growing because of their flaws, not in spite of them. (Simon) Peter, could not forgive, struggled with forgiveness, and was the foundational member of which a church of forgiveness was built on. Jesus’s entourage did not improve his station in life, but instead made it more difficult as he often had to even wrestle with them to get his messages and teachings across.

His inner circle betrayed him, denied him and doubted him. How often are we let down and it gets the better of us? How often do we ask, “Why is this person allowed to get away with all of this…” Have we ever been betrayed to the death? To torture and death?

Jesus was lied to, chastised and insulted. He was arrested, beaten and flayed. He was spit on, cursed at and damned by the very people who admiringly listened to his sermons. He was abused worse than any living creature could imagine and did so willingly, because it was his purpose. He carried his own device of torture through a crowd of hatred and mockery that pursued him to the site of his own death. He was beat and whipped the entire way. His friends, family and countrymen watched it happen. Those who loved him had to watch and know that they played a part in it happening. No one was spared the suffering that was inflicted upon Jesus. And those that were in the crowd suffered their own actions, maybe even without knowing it.

Jesus hung on the cross with his beaten and broken body, ripped flesh exposed to the sun as sweat and blood and tears mixed together, stinging the already pulsing pain running through his body. Struggling to breathe and just exist, he hung in torment and torture for hours upon hours in the hot sun. He hung there, dying, as a bloody mess with his poor and helpless mother, heartbrokenly weeping at his feet. Jesus know physical suffering. In all of this, Jesus forgave us. He said “forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

As the “body” of Christ, we will suffer. It’s just part of life here on earth. But more than that, Jesus put himself through that and let it happen. If we are the “body”, then it follows that our suffering comes from our own hands, in one way or another. And so, forgive them, they know not what they do, is another way of saying we don’t realize what we are doing to ourselves and others. Suffering doesn’t come from God; Life comes from God; Free will comes from God; suffering comes at our own hands. Just as Jesus showed us all that we can do to him and to each other, he showed us that there is healing after it all; there is triumph and joy after it all; and that Forgiveness comes from God, at a price, but from God.

As my thoughts come back to the poor man who lost all hope and took his own life in an act of desperation, I am reminded how easily we can lose track of all that matters and all that brought us to where we are and how far away love can feel. How in the shroud of desperation and hopelessness, perhaps a reminder that a perfect man without sin, loved us so much that he climbed on a cross and was tortured to show us that even the worst things can be not only forgiven, but overcome.