Growing up as a Methodist, the church calendar oriented my childhood around twin poles of Christmas (and Advent) and Easter (and Lent). Advent was my favored season of the two: Waiting with a pile of presents in view is not so difficult. And I could grasp the significance of Easter—apart from chocolate—but Lent’s long demand of denial and suffering was much harder to embrace.
This 40-day season before Easter is when Christians prepare to celebrate Jesus’ death and resurrection. Lent began, as best we know, in the fourth century. It is a time of repentance, of introspection and reflection, and frequently of some kind of fasting, a decision to refrain from ordinary goods so we might more clearly see who God in Christ is inviting us to be.
Lent also invites us to recover the deeply Christian language of mortification—of putting to death aspects of our lives to make room for God to grow the image of Christ in us.
This is a difficult work for any Christian but perhaps particularly for Protestants, for we have a history of skepticism of this kind of self-denial. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the Reformer John Calvin famously wrote that Lenten practices are false imitations of Christ. The famous Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon likewise found it inconsistent to talk about fasting, even during Lent, because Christ has already been raised from the dead. “How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? They cannot, so long as they have him with them” (Mark 2:19).
As a child, I’d have been happy for this skepticism, as Lent mainly seemed like a time when desserts and candy were off the table. But as an adult, I’ve recognized the benefit of self-denial. Though I have been saved and am being saved by the work of Christ (1 Cor. 1:18), the things I desire and the ways I desire them too often run sideways to the life God means for me to have.
By the time I came around to Lent and mortification, however, I was no longer a Methodist. I had become a Baptist, and many Baptists do not regularly celebrate Lent, moving from Christmas to Easter without much fanfare.
I’m not suggesting Baptists actively choose to reject the practices of Lent: self-discipline, prayer, and fasting. But suffering is not an aspect of Christianity we tend to discuss, much less something we see as needing to be taken up on purpose. The suffering we do discuss tends to be extraordinary—persecution and martyrdoms—or else the subject of prayer for divine relief—from illness or some other hardship undeserved.
These are both good ways to talk about suffering, as the ordinary kind happens to all of us and the extraordinary kind may very well happen to someone in service to Christ. Perennial evangelical interest in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the recently Oscar-nominated documentary of the story of the 21 Coptic martyrs—all of this illuminates our minds and prepares us for courage, should it be needed. Suffering could happen to you or me or any of us, these stories say, so we must be ready.
For all that, I no longer think those discussions of suffering are sufficient, though I understand why it may feel that way: Because suffering is incredibly ordinary, there’s a sense in which we need not talk about it. Suffering appears hand in hand with the arrival of sin in the world in Genesis: It is there between the man and woman, between humans and the earth. It multiplies between brothers, between peoples, in our bodies. It is the aches that come with being middle-aged as much as the pains that come—necessarily yet somehow still unexpectedly—from being alive and in relationship with others. Perhaps we don’t talk more about suffering because we all know the subject so well.
Yet mortification strikes me as different, for—in both its ordinary and its extraordinary forms—most suffering happens to a person. But mortification is a suffering which we undertake willingly.
These acts of fasting, prayer, and conscious self-denial are not (or should not be) an attempt to work our way into God’s good graces. Mortification is rather a response to God’s grace (Rom. 8:13), a response to God’s invitation for us to be joined to Christ in every part of our lives, to be attentive to the ways in which our lives become immune and asleep to God. “Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Eph. 5:14).
This is why mortification is an appropriate preparation for Easter. We become able to watch and pray as Jesus asked in Gethsemane (Matt. 26:41) because we have taken on the habit of watching and praying, of denying our appetites in small ways that we might deny our appetites when it counts. The practices of mortification are meant to break us out of our ordinary rhythms and to remind us that suffering and death are themselves deeply ordinary—and deeply ordinary means God uses to heal our dullness of ear and heart that we may more fully receive and rejoice in the Good News we celebrate at Easter.
In recent years, there has been no shortage of Christian resources offering a therapeutic approach to suffering, proposing that suffering is not something we must bear but something we may escape. I am married to a talented therapist and believe that counseling is often appropriate and necessary and that the ways we cope with suffering often do unacknowledged harm to those around us. There are many whose ordinary sufferings are abundant, many who bleed for years in silence like the woman who touched Jesus’ garment, and therapy may help them heal. It may even be a way to better understand and experience God’s grace.
But the place for therapy is those spaces in which the ordinary means of living break down. The aim of therapy is to return people to their lives with new tools and approaches to living through ordinary life. It is not intended to—and cannot—help them escape future suffering.
When therapeutic concerns become the primary frame for approaching the Christian life, extraordinary suffering become difficult to countenance and taking on suffering willingly becomes nearly impossible to understand. Suffering will find us in its ordinary form, for we are creatures in a world in which sin operates. But sometimes, Paul writes, taking on suffering is how we better understand the love of God.
In Colossians 1:24–26, Paul commends us with these words:
Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and 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. I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness—the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people.
In this passage, Paul draws together his own sufferings, which continue in the way and mission of Jesus, with the vocation given him by God. The afflictions he undertakes, he notes, are not of his own choosing, but in imitation of Christ’s own suffering. Paul does not see himself as repeating Jesus’ suffering, but he makes sense of his own suffering in light of Christ’s. The disciple is to expect no easier time than the master.
Paul’s voluntary suffering and his mission from God are inseparable here. Yet by his own witness, Paul invites those of us who do not take up this extraordinary vocation to ask about our own callings, to wonder how we might also participate in the singular mission of God. The practices of Lent find their full orientation here, in our joining the work of God in Christ by the power of the Spirit.
When we accept the invitation to be Christ’s disciples, we also accept an invitation to live—and suffer—like him. That suffering may be extraordinary, like Paul’s, or it may be the smaller mortification we can choose during Lent, like sacrificing precious time to make room for intentional prayer, omitting a meal to meditate on Scripture, or denying ourselves other ordinary pleasures to better join in the larger work of God. Mortification attunes us—in our habits and appetites—to what God is doing.
Paul’s framing here also reminds us that practices of mortification are not taken up for our own sake alone, as if the goal of fasting, praying, or meditating on the Scriptures were personal spiritual excellence. In connecting his own suffering to Christ’s calling and the wider church, Paul teaches that any hardship chosen in imitation of Christ is undertaken as a member of the body. Practices of fasting, praying, and Scripture reading are best done in the company of others and, as Paul writes, “for the sake of his body, which is the church.”
In book 1, chapter 14, of On Christian Doctrine, Augustine of Hippo uses an analogy of the healing of an injury or illness. Sometimes, he writes, wounds are healed by things contrary to them, and sometimes they’re healed by things like them. Sometimes a bandage is applied to stop the bleeding, but sometimes mild versions of the things afflicting us—a kind of vaccination—are introduced to help the body learn to defeat them. Sometimes, the bleeding must be stopped, and yet one cannot wear a bandage forever. Eventually, Augustine concludes, the body must learn what to do when the difficulty is introduced again.
Mortification is like this. We take on small difficulties not only because suffering cannot be avoided, nor merely to continue the struggle against sin. We take them to be better able to join in the good work of Christ.
Myles Werntz is author of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together. He writes at Taking Off and Landing and teaches at Abilene Christian University.
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