“We shall not find God where we think we should look for Him, namely, in a supposed height. . . We must be ready to be told by Him that we shall find Him precisely where we do not think we should look for Him, namely, in direct confrontation with and at the very heart of our own reality, which, whether we like it or not, reduces itself with the crumbling and tottering of all our previous genuine or illusory possibilities and achievements to the one painful point where each of us is stripped naked, where each is suffering and perishing, where each is engaged in futile complaint and accusation, where each is alone. The lonely man of Gethsemane and Golgotha, the lonely God, then comes together with lonely man isolated in his deepest need. Each of us can then say that in this place, even though he is forsaken and alone, he is not forsaken and alone, since the crucified man Jesus Christ, and in Him as the Son of God God Himself, has also stooped down and come to this place and been forsaken there. There among the smitten and abased, among whom we would prefer not to reckon ourselves, God has raised His throne (Is. 51:17), the throne of the glory of His grace in which, at His own cost, He has made peace between us men and Himself, justifying and sanctifying as His covenant partner fallen and wretched man, and saving him for eternal life with Himself.” – Karl Barth[1]Church Dogmatics.IV.70.1
“Suffering in Christianity is not only not meaningless, it is ultimately one of the most powerful media for the transmission of meaning. We can stand in adoration between the cross, and kneel and kiss the wood that bore the body of our Savior, because this is the means by which the ugly meaningless atheistic suffering of the world (the problem of evil) was transmuted into the living water, the blood of Christ, the wellspring of Creation. The great paradox here is that the Tree of Death and Suffering is the Tree of Life. This central paradox in Christianity allows us to love our own brokenness, precisely because it is through that brokenness that we image the broken body of our God–and the highest expression of divine love. That God in some sense wills it to be so seems evident in Gethsemane: Christ prays “Not my will, but thine be done,” and when God’s will is done it involves the scourge and the nails. It’s also always struck me as particularly fitting and beautiful that when Christ is resurrected His body is not returned to a state of perfection, as the body of Adam in Eden, but rather it still bears the marks of His suffering and death–and indeed it is precisely through these marks that He is known by Thomas.” – Melinda Selmys
“The cross of Christ was the price of his obedience to God amidst a rebellious world; it was suffering for having done right, for loving where others hated, for representing in the flesh the forgiveness and the righteousness of God among men both less forgiving and less righteous. The cross of Christ was God’s method of overcoming evil with good. The cross of the Christian is no different. It is the price of one’s obedience to God’s love toward all people in a world ruled by hate. Such unflinching love for friend and foe alike will mean hostility amid suffering for us, as it did for them.” – John Howard Yoder[2]He Came Preaching Peace
“Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goads of the promised future stab inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present. If we had before our eyes only what we see, then we should cheerfully or reluctantly reconcile ourselves with things as they happen to be. That we do not reconcile ourselves, that there is no unpleasant harmony between us and reality, is due to our unquenchable hope.” – Jurgen Moltmann[3]Theology of Hope
“The cross is not a sign of the church’s quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church’s revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s. The cross stands as God’s (and our) eternal no to the power of death, as well as God’s eternal yes to humanity, God’s remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices. The overriding political task of the church is to be the community of the cross.” – Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon[4]Resident Aliens
“Being redeemed and quickened by the blood of Christ, we ought to prefer nothing to Christ, because He preferred nothing to us, and on our account preferred evil things to good, poverty to riches, servitude to rule, death to immortality; then we, on the contrary, in our sufferings are preferring the riches and delights of paradise to the poverty of the world, eternal dominion and kingdom to the slavery of time, immortality to death, God and Christ to the devil and Antichrist.” – St. Cyprian[5]Exhortation to Martyrdom
“The test of whether we have truly found the peace of God will be in how we face the sufferings which befall us. There are many Christians who bend their knees before the cross of Jesus Christ well enough, but who do nothing but resist and struggle against every affliction in their own lives. They believe that they love Christ’s cross, but they hate the cross in their own lives. In reality, therefore, they hate the cross of Jesus Christ as well; in reality, they are despisers of the cross, who for their part, seek to flee the cross by whatever means they can. Whoever regards suffering and trouble in their own life as something wholly hostile, wholly evil, can know by this that they have not yet found peace with God at all. Actually, they have only sought peace with the world, thinking perhaps that they could cope with themselves and all their questions with the cross of Jesus Christ; in other words, that they could find an inner peace of mind. Thus, they needed the cross but did not love it. They sought peace only for their own sake. When sufferings come, however, this peace quickly disappears. It was no peace with God because they hated the sufferings God sends. Thus, whoever feel only hate for the sufferings, sacrifice, want, slander, and captivity in their life, however eloquently they may otherwise speak about the cross, they hate Jesus’ cross and have no peace with God. But whoever love the cross of Jesus Christ, whoever have found peace in him, they begin to love even the sufferings in their life, and in the end, they will be able to say with Scripture, ‘We also rejoice in our sufferings.'” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer[6]“The Secret of Suffering”
“But that heavenly way is set forth as difficult and hilly, or rough with dreadful thorns, or entangled with stones jutting out; so that everyone must walk with the greatest labor and wearing of the feet, and with great precautions against falling. In this He has placed justice, temperance, patience, faith, chastity, self-restraint, concord, knowledge, truth, wisdom, and the other virtues; but together with these, poverty, ignominy, labor, pain, and all kinds of hardship. For whoever has extended his hope beyond the present, and chosen better things, will be without these earthly goods, that, being lightly equipped and without impediment, he may overcome the difficulty of the way. For it is impossible for him who has surrounded himself with royal pomp, or loaded himself with riches, either to enter upon or to persevere in these difficulties. And from this it is understood that it is easier for the wicked and the unrighteous to succeed in their desires, because their road is downward and on the decline; but that it is difficult for the good to attain their wishes, because they walk along a difficult and steep path. Therefore the righteous man, because he has entered upon a hard and rugged way, must be an object of contempt, derision, and hatred. For all whom desire or pleasure drags headlong, envy him who is able to attain to virtue, and take it ill that any one possesses that which they themselves do not possess. Therefore he will be poor, humble, ignoble, subject to injury, and yet enduring all things which are grievous; and if he shall continue his patience unceasingly to that last step and end, the crown of virtue will be given to him, and he will be rewarded by God with immortality for the labors which he has endured in life for the sake of righteousness.” – Lactantius[7]The Divine Institutes
“A man is not really patient when he is willing to suffer patiently only as much as he thinks fit and only at the hands of those he chooses. If he is really patient, he won’t mind who makes him suffer; his superior, his equal or someone below him, a good, holy man or a peevish, unpleasant one–it’s all the same to him. Whenever things go against him, no matter how often or how gravely, no matter who or what is at the back of it, he takes it all thankfully from the hand of God, counting it a substantial gain; because in the eyes of God no trouble endured for His sake, be it never so trivial, can be allowed to go by without earning merit.” – Thomas a Kempis[8]The Imitation of Christ
“Compassion has become a deadly virtue in our society that can no longer make sense of suffering. We have lost the root meaning of the word compassion, meaning to “suffer with.” A follower of Christ may be able to set individual suffering within a larger drama of the confrontation of the Kingdom of God with the principalities and powers that killed Jesus Christ. In a society in which personal choice has overtaken such a grand narrative, however, suffering and truth become dissociated, and we come to believe that our highest calling is to eliminate any suffering at any cost, even the cost of truth. As a result, we decide with Dr. Kevorkian that those for whom we can do nothing are better off dead. We kill in the name of compassion because we are convinced that we must bring suffering, life and death under our control. We have lost the apocalyptic vision necessary to see life in death and suffering, and to abide patiently with those whose suffering we cannot alleviate in the hope that their suffering might have dignity and meaning.” – William Cavanaugh[9]“Absolute Moral Norms and Human Suffering: An Apocalyptic Reading of Endo’s Silence”
Notes