{"id":16833,"date":"2016-08-23T14:00:54","date_gmt":"2016-08-23T18:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/?p=16833"},"modified":"2016-11-21T16:48:45","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T21:48:45","slug":"reflections-christ-suffering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/2016\/08\/23\/reflections-christ-suffering\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on Christ and Suffering"},"content":{"rendered":"

How does God show Himself? He shows Himself in Elijah, recognized as a man of God<\/em>,\u00a0and He shows Himself in Christ, recognized as a prophet and as a visitation of the Divine.\u00a0But we see in Elijah and in Christ, despite the kinds of intimacy with God which they\u00a0enjoy, that neither stands apart<\/em> from human suffering; on the contrary, they share<\/em> in it;\u00a0and it is this very fact which, in the fulness of time, will be seen to be crucial. Their\u00a0solidarity in suffering is not in tension with their intimacy with God, but on the contrary it\u00a0attests<\/em> to it. Solidarity in suffering will be recognized as the profoundest sign that God is\u00a0present to them and, through them, present to the world. We might say that they bear the\u00a0weight<\/em> of God, and to bear this weight is not just to be alongside<\/em> those who suffer, but is\u00a0to go all the way, and to suffer with<\/em> them.<\/p>\n

So Elijah, the man of God, has been cast into wilderness and drought, fed only by ravens\u00a0and drinking from a dwindling stream. He encounters the widow of Zarapheth and finds\u00a0in her one utterly impoverished as he is, gathering sticks to prepare a meal which she\u00a0anticipates will be her last. Later he encounters her dead son. Elijah and they share and\u00a0meet in deprivation<\/em>: and it is in<\/em> deprivation, in the kind of encounter that only the poor\u00a0can have with the poor, that God is unveiled. The same is true of Christ\u2019s encounter with\u00a0the widow of Nain and her dead son. This is, first and foremost, an encounter within<\/em>\u00a0suffering humanity, as the suffering of the Word made flesh encounters the suffering flesh\u00a0He became; and in this encounter, in this co-\u00adsuffering, God is disclosed. He is not met as\u00a0one who, from afar, offers a sovereign and superior relief. He \u00a0relieves human suffering\u00a0from within<\/em>, by having first established solidarity<\/em> with it, transforming it only in and\u00a0through embracing it.<\/p>\n

And this Divine impulse \u00ad- let us call it Love<\/em> \u00ad- reaches its consummation in Christ, Who is\u00a0not just a messenger<\/em> of the Divine, like Elijah, but brings God Himself, the Son of the\u00a0Father incarnate in the Holy Spirit. And it is precisely because<\/em> of this, because Christ isn\u2019t\u00a0a representative<\/em> of God but is God in Person<\/em>, that His embrace of human suffering is\u00a0more radical<\/em> than Elijah\u2019s, both more extraordinary<\/em> and more encompassing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It is more extraordinary<\/em> because human suffering, as such, is alien to God, as it can never\u00a0be to a man like Elijah. It is something God can encounter only by throwing Himself\u00a0entirely outside of Himself, emptying Himself into what is other than Himself, for the\u00a0sake of those whom He will find there. And it is more encompassing<\/em> because, when God\u00a0empties Himself in this way, He fashions an embrace of suffering in excess of what any\u00a0man, even a \u2018man of God\u2019 like Elijah, could achieve. When God casts Himself into our\u00a0flesh, the human life that He leads, seized by the infinity of the Divine, opens and offers\u00a0itself to all<\/em> humanity, so that the suffering which He endures is not just one instance<\/em> of\u00a0human suffering, but establishes a pattern to which human suffering of every kind can be\u00a0conformed. All human suffering, without remainder, is capable of participating in the\u00a0pattern of the suffering of the man Who is God, so that each one of us, in suffering, can\u00a0suffer fruitfully in union with Him.<\/p>\n

This is the meaning of St Paul\u2019s astonishing claim, in his Letter to the Colossians<\/em>, that in\u00a0his own sufferings he is making up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ. To\u00a0understand this, we have first to acknowledge that it is of course quite true that Christ did\u00a0not suffer in every conceivable way or, necessarily, to the greatest possible degree, and in\u00a0that sense we might think that kinds or intensities of suffering which Christ did not\u00a0undergo add<\/em> to, and so help to complete<\/em>, what His own sufferings lacked. But that way of\u00a0thinking, bizarrely, treats suffering purely quantitatively, and is certainly not what St Paul\u00a0intended \u00ad as if the point of Christianity were to maximize kinds and degrees of suffering.\u00a0No \u00ad St Paul understands perfectly well that in the true sense Christ\u2019s sufferings lacked\u00a0nothing at all. They constitute the uniquely exemplary and \u00a0ruitful pattern of all human\u00a0suffering, since they were born in obedience and abandonment to the Father and in\u00a0expression of redemptive love for the world. And yet, St Paul teaches us, this pattern is\u00a0meant to be shared<\/em>. Christ not only suffers for<\/em> the world, but in suffering He opens and\u00a0offers Himself to<\/em> the world, precisely so that, in its suffering, the world can share in His\u00a0work of reconciliation to the Father. And in this<\/em> sense, something is indeed lacking in\u00a0Christ\u2019s sufferings because, precisely as open and offered, they beg our participation in the\u00a0pattern which they establish. The point is not to demand that the world suffer. On the\u00a0contrary, suffering is simply inescapable; what Christ seeks is that the suffering of the\u00a0world should come to share in the pattern of His<\/em> suffering, and thereby draw us, not only\u00a0as beneficiaries<\/em> but above all as \u00a0participants<\/em>, into the mystery of Divine Love.<\/p>\n

The mystery of Divine Love is a mystery of God\u2019s solidarity with the human condition. The\u00a0Gospels offer us intense evocations of this extraordinary and encompassing solidarity of\u00a0the Divine with the human. The Son of God lives the frailty of the human condition, the\u00a0inescapable truth of our vulnerability and dependence, in an absolute, unreserved\u00a0commitment towards humanity and towards the Father. He comes before us as an\u00a0itinerant, as moving and being moved from place to place, with nowhere to call His own:\u00a0not only nowhere exterior, and accordingly homeless<\/em>, but also with no interior<\/em> space, no\u00a0opportunity for withdrawal and quiet self\u00adpossession, except on those occasions when,\u00a0pulling Himself away, He confronts, in obedience and abandonment, the silence and\u00a0emptiness of prayer, calling upon a Father Who does not reliably show Himself, any more\u00a0than to us, and Who finally, on the Cross, seems to disappear definitively. He comes\u00a0before us as harried by the demands upon Him, with who knows what feelings of being\u00a0incapable of answering to the kaleidoscope of human needs, including His own, which\u00a0press upon Him, unless by recourse to the One to Whom He owes Himself entirely, the\u00a0Father on Whom He depends for everything. And He comes before us as affected, struck,\u00a0struck down<\/em> even, by encounters with the misery that, first, surrounds<\/em> Him, and then\u00a0also, especially at the end, comes to inhabit<\/em> Him. He exercises a compassion and a\u00a0responsibility always threatening to overwhelm Him, until at last it does, transforming\u00a0itself, on the Cross, into an entirely inescapable weight, identical to His own<\/em> weight, a\u00a0weight He can no longer bear. Helpless, He goes to dwell among the dead. From this\u00a0extremity, only the hidden Father, to Whom He clings, can rescue Him.<\/p>\n

In Christ, the infinity of the Divine Son empties itself into the finitude of a single human\u00a0life, and that single human life, bearing the infinite dimensions of the Son Who lives it,\u00a0expands to invite shelter to every human life, in all its dimensions; and so, at one and the\u00a0same time, Christ brings God to all humanity and all humanity to God. Christ narrates, He\u00a0tells the story, of both man and God. He shows us what God looks like when He throws\u00a0Himself into human being, emptying Himself into our existence and becoming Himself in\u00a0us<\/em>. And he shows us what we<\/em> look like, when we unreservedly embrace the condition that\u00a0is ours and live the truth of our radical dependence upon the Father. He wants us to find\u00a0Him, and thereby and above all to find the Father. But we can do so only if He finds us\u00a0first, and so He comes looking for us exactly where we are, bringing Himself to us so that\u00a0He can bring us to Himself, and thence to the One Who sent Him. The human place, the\u00a0horizon of our finitude in all its forms, even our deepest sufferings, is therefore not to be\u00a0evaded or disdained. On the contrary, the human situation, in every one of its dimensions,\u00a0has become inestimably significant, irreplaceably precious. He finds us there, so that,\u00a0even there<\/em>, we can find Him. It is here and now -\u00ad in all the anguish of human life \u00ad- that we\u00a0must call upon Him and wait for Him, because it is only here and now -\u00ad wherever that is<\/em> \u00ad- and not elsewhere, that He comes and shows Himself, carrying us and taking us with\u00a0Him.<\/p>\n

By Fr Philip Cleevely, Cong. Orat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How does God show Himself? He shows Himself in Elijah, recognized as a man of God,\u00a0and He shows Himself in Christ, recognized as a prophet and as a visitation of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16875,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Crowned-with-Thorns-cropped.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8brX6-4nv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16833"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16833"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16837,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16833\/revisions\/16837"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}