Suffering and the response to it – sympathy, compassion, and love – are very deeply bound up with the mystery of the Christian Gospel. God moves through suffering. God is revealed as love through suffering. It is through suffering that the love of God breaks through into the world. It is through suffering, as Paul said, that God comes to live within us. As with the individual, so with society. The Kingdom itself comes into being through pain: as it is written in Matthew, the prophesied nations rising up against nations, the kingdoms rising up against kingdoms, the famines and earthquakes, are the transformation of the world itself through suffering, through which the new creation will be born. Suffering is actively transforming the world.
Man is made in the image of God. The image of God is specifically rendered as Christ crucified; and this reveals the core commonality between God and man. The image of God, shared between God and man, is love coming into being through suffering. And at the deepest level of the structure of consciousness, this is what we are. We are all the same image; self-conscious awareness, capable of suffering, and capable, through Christ, of being transformed by suffering into self-transcending love. This is Christianity at its core.
The essence of human experience throughout history has always been suffering. The contribution of Christ was to transform suffering from something meaningless into something which brought forth the transformation of creation itself (a version of the “Christus Victor” theory.) As Isaiah says, “By his wounds we are healed”, “he took up our pain and bore our suffering.” Christ is with us, bearing the pain with us, transforming suffering into love. It is one of the meanings of the atonement. What was meant as futile was given purpose; what was meant for evil was transformed into good.
This is certainly not the only way Christ transforms – but it is a path that was prominent among the Apostles, and is covered in numerous places in their writings.
Above: The crucifixion: the mysterious juxtaposition of pain and the emergence of goodness, which is the image of God in man. In this instance, Cagide’s Christ of the Outstretched Hand, one hand is freed in the symbolic gesture of giving to the world.
Love enters through pain
In the finite world of relative things, we cannot know light without darkness. Wherever there is darkness there is an equal capacity for light. Wherever there is pain there is an equal capacity to perceive the inherent goodness in all things. And this is the purpose, value, justification, and reason, for pain and suffering. The love of God enters the world through pain and remains when pain is over.
Being of God, for whom “a thousand years are like one second,” the crucifixion stands outside of time, stretching backwards into the past and forwards into the future. It stretches backwards, in its salvific influence on those who had faith in the coming Christ of prophecy, and forwards in that it meets each suffering Christian in the present, and transforms them through their suffering, as Christ himself was transformed.
One suffering member within a church will bring the entire church forward spiritually. By meeting the pain of that person in prayer, we suffer with them, and share in their transformation. It is in this sense that prayer for another doubles as something that we also do for ourselves. By identifying with the pain of the other person and praying against it, we are transformed by their pain, just as they are.
The problem of evil
There are some things that can only be revealed in the condition of suffering. Some things can only be understood when we are in this condition. Illness has the potential to be the greatest transformative tool. Paul says “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is made complete in us.” No one has ever seen God – but God makes himself known to us through the felt experience of supernatural love that arises concomitantly with suffering. God comes to live in us through the experience of deep self-transcending love, sympathy, and compassion brought forth by the mechanism of suffering.
Suffering is necessary for growth. This provides one solution to the problem of evil. Suffering is there to bring God into the world. Suffering produces compassion, compassion is the source of love, and through love God comes to live within us. Through suffering we develop compassion for others, and begin, firstly, to understand the love of God for the world, and secondly, to become part of the love of God for the world. As Paul said, God comes to live in us.
The purpose of suffering is to bring God’s love into the world. Paul says “I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.” Our own suffering is necessary in order to complete the transformation that Christ has begun in us. Our own suffering builds upon what Christ has done, bringing more love into the creation for all. In these two ways, previously meaningless suffering is filled with meaning, and the “problem of evil” is answered.
Suffering brings the love of God into the world. Suffering is how we identify with all people, because all people suffer. We are “all one in Christ Jesus.” We are one because we are ultimately all of the same substance. Suffering unites all people because all people suffer. There is only one suffering because suffering is the same in all people. And likewise the same vision of God is there as the potential of all people who suffer.
The vision and image of God
The image of God is suffering transforming into love. The vision of God is the end state: suffering transformed into love. The vision of God is the vision of the love of God for the world; the love that brought creation into being; the love that brought God into creation at the cross. The vision of God is God having come to live within us (1 John 3:2).
The image of God is represented iconographically as Christ crucified. This is ultimately what we are. Humans are revealed, in their base condition, in the image of God, to all be the same: the same pain, the same loss, the same brief hope quickly quashed; and the same potential, through Christ, for divinization, for the vision of God – the all-pervading love that set the universe in motion, the love too deep for words, that calls out to us all – the love that breaks into the world through pain.
Consciousness gives birth to love through suffering. Paul say “My power is made perfect in weakness.” Where suffering is, that is where God shows up. And we know from near death experience, and experiences during illness, that this is often literally the case. As the first Letter of John says “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” The glimpse of the vision of God is the goal this side of the resurrection. It is known in the Eastern church as theoria.
A jealous and angry God
The ancients called the punishment of nature the anger of God. Such a characterisation seems strange, even offensive, to the sensitive modern ear. However much this view of God may have been anthropomorphised, the ancients had no issue with the characterisation of God as angry. They knew that from anger came pain, and from pain came transformation, and were happy to call their God an angry God. They knew it, in fact, to be a mark of love.
Something similar fits with the other negative characteristics of God which are hard for the modern mind to reconcile, such as the “jealous” God of Exodus, or the “vengeful” God of Nahum. In ancient times, in a world in which more pain existed, the followers of the scriptures knew the value of pain and recognised it as a source of deep change. A God who they believed would punish them was a God they knew could change them. A God who would punish was a God to be valued.
Above: The statues of the saints that cry tears of blood for the world; the Vatican has generally been sceptical of such claims, but the image of the saints suffering for the plight of creation remains potent. Suffering brings God further into the world (Colossians 1:24). In many Christian denominations, every serious Christian is considered a saint.
Letter to the Romans
In Romans 8 we learn that the same suffering transforms both individual and society. Both have been caught as if in a painful birth which is bringing forth the new individual and the new society:
“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through groans too deep for words. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.”
The wordless groans in Romans are not prayer in tongues as this verse is often understood. They are groans of suffering, the suffering through which the spirit imparts in us understandings too deep for words, and drags us through pain into that incomparable glory that is already being revealed to those who live in Christ.
Suffering transforms. It transforms us. It transformed Christ, and it is transforming the world. There is nothing to fear in pain. God is there in the pain. He does not go away. He is there, stronger than ever, drawing us through pain into greater life. As Christ dragged the world, so he drags us.
Judgment
The Bible says there are bad things that can happen to us through judgment. What exactly these things are is not made clear, and they have been debated within Christianity for 2000 years without resolution. We have the Jewish notion of obliteration of the soul to eternal nothing, known in contemporary evangelical circles as “annihilationism,” the pagan Greek and Roman idea of an afterlife of eternal punishment for wrong doings, along with suggestions of a purgatorial experience in which some or all souls eventually move into beatitude, as understood in Catholicism, by numerous thinkers in Orthodoxy, and by the Universalists. In the condition of love we have no fear of any of this because we will already have begun to become a part of God. As John’s letter says, “The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” Through suffering, as the Hesychasts tell us, we can enter judgment already, and begin to pass out of it.
Prosperity theology
All of this seems very much in line with the majority of the experiences of the Apostles as recorded in the books and letters of the New Testament. Nearly every book and letter stresses that transformation happens through suffering. It is also very far removed from the typical Sunday message of prosperity gospel churches. So what remains of prosperity theology? It has its place, but is not exclusive.
Churches that place too much of an emphasis on prosperity theology tend to ignore one side of life – and the side, as people age especially, that is often the more prominent. There are a lot of Bible verses that do support prosperity theology. They support the notion that if we follow God’s commands we will succeed in health, wealth, and happiness. About half the time life is like is this. But the rest of the time – and more so in ancient times, more so in non-Western settings, and more so later in life than earlier – these things do not ring true at all. And when these things do not ring true is often when the greater lessons and greater growth is to be had. A church which focusses too much on prosperity theology tends to miss both the reality of how life is felt to be for many people, and also misses out on teaching about the greater opportunities to grow through what we might call the path of lack, rather than the path of plenty.
As Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is enough time in life for both pain and prosperity. There is a time for all things, and lessons to be had in them all.
The Catholic statues of the saints are said to cry tears of blood for the world. Tears of suffering become tears of compassion, which bring the love of God down to live on earth. With this, evil begins to lose its sting already. And one day things will be complete in a new heaven and a new earth where “there is no longer any pain or suffering or death or mourning.” For now, we are moving through the birth process – there are tears still, but there is purpose to the tears.
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Articles in Christianity series:
Religious pluralism and monotheism in the Bible: From Genesis to Jesus