Posted by Cathy Taggart
on January 8, 2008, 1:43 pm
Firstly, Kevin, I’m sorry I haven’t contributed to your Forum for a while, but in the latter half of last year I was sick a lot – nothing serious, just one of those “bugs” that leave you feeling tired and run down most of the time. But I’ve just been reading your new reflection, “The Journey through Suffering and Death to Life”, and it has inspired me to put pen to paper, or rather my fingers to the keyboard!
My first reaction, I must say, was one of concern for you personally. Are you yourself actually suffering from some serious illness? But more generally, this article resonated with me because, like many people, I have long been troubled about how you can reconcile suffering with our belief in a loving, beneficent God.
Your reflection on this mystery – on the need to embrace rather than deny or avoid suffering – certainly provides a useful and inspiring perspective, but it still left me feeling that the issue is more complex than this. Trying to embrace your suffering can not only be very difficult, as you acknowledge, it can also be dangerous! To become too preoccupied with death and suffering can be a genuine threat to your mental health, and your ability to cope with life. It can also be a small step from here to the view that suffering in itself is good, that if you are experiencing suffering you are in a sort of spiritually superior state, and more able to feel near to God, than if you are happy and healthy. But I suppose my main problem with the approach to suffering in your article is that it doesn’t seem to fit in with the Gospels. Jesus didn’t go round helping people to come to terms with their suffering, he went round healing them!
In fact, the impression the Gospels give is that Jesus’ healings (including his exorcisms) had a core significance that we seem to have lost sight of (at least in most of the mainstream Christian traditions). For one thing, Jesus’ healing ministry seems to be very closely associated with his “core business” of announcing the coming of God’s kingdom (e. g., Mt. 4:23, 11:2-5). It also seems to be intrinsically tied up with what it means to be a person of faith: Jesus would often say to the healed person something like, “Your faith has made you well”. What's more, you could even say that it was his healing work, more than anything, which led to his death. His criticisms of the religious leaders and their traditions, even his fraternising with sinners and outcasts – all this could have been dismissed as the behaviour of a rebel and a trouble-maker, or even a madman. Yet it was his healing ministry which provided the most incontrovertible evidence to friend and foe alike that he was from God, and hence which made him most threatening to God’s official representatives of the time (e.g. Luke 5:21-26, 11:15-20; John 9:16-34).
I’m not suggesting we get too naïve and simplistic about this. However, I certainly believe that miraculous healings (or, perhaps more accurately, faith healings) can and do happen, and I think this belief should not be dismissed as yet another way of avoiding or denying suffering. But I think what we most need to take on board is the fact that Jesus’ healing ministry enabled people to recognize him as being from God. It is pointless trying to convince some-one that God loves them, and that life is a precious gift from God, if they experience their life as a painful burden. People need to experience God’s love, not just be told about it, and they need to experience it in a way that makes sense in human terms. The fact that God’s ways are not our ways doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with our natural human aversion to suffering. In fact, in the Biblical context, God having mysterious ways often means that he bestows good things on those who are most suffering under the worldly order!
So while I found your reflection very inspiring and meaningful, Kevin, I think it describes a rather advanced form of spirituality. Unless we already have a strong and genuine sense that God loves us, that God can bring good out of even the worst suffering, trying to embrace our suffering may just lead to another cross, not to resurrection!
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