Christ, Suffering

How are we to understand Jesus’ cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” along with his desperate prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading with God “if possible, let this cup pass from me?

Here’s the (question): Many mere mortals have managed to face death with more (composure) than Jesus did—Stephen, for example, just months later. Jesus knew he would rise from the dead, so why all the anguish?

In his ordeal on the cross … Christ mind-reads the mental states found in all the evil human acts human beings have ever committed. Every vile, shocking, disgusting, revulsive psychic state accompanying every human evil act will miraculously, be at once, in the human psyche of Christ … without yielding an evil configuration in either Christ’s intellect or will.

Such psychic agony “would greatly eclipse all other human psychological su­ffering … Flooded with such horror, Christ might well lose entirely his ability to find the mind of God the Father.” This drives home the suffering of Christ, a suffering so comprehensively horrible that it surpasses even the physical abuse of crucifixion.

In China, the extremely wealthy can avoid prison terms by hiring body doubles. Incredibly, this is true! Slate.com originally broke the story of how the super-rich in China get away with pretty much everything, including murder.

According to Slate, a wealthy 20-year-old named Hu was drag racing his friends, when he struck and killed a pedestrian. Although Hu received a three-year prison sentence, allegations arose that the man appearing in court and serving the three-year sentence wasn’t Hu at all, but a hired body double!

In another case, the owner of a demolition company that illegally demolished a home hired a destitute man and promised him $31 for each day the “body double” spent in jail. In China, the practice is so common that there is even a term for it: “substitute criminal.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

This may seem scandalous, but 2000 years ago Someone became our substitute and took the punishment we deserve. He took the penalty of all our sins in his own body on the Cross. Justice is not met by the wealthy getting off scot-free. However, the death of Christ was “The just for the unjust – so that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18).

In her book Ten Fingers for God, Dorothy Clarke Wilson writes about Dr. Paul Brand who worked with leprosy patients in India.

Sometimes they would all gather together in fellowship. One evening, Paul joined them, and they asked him to speak.

Dr. Brand had nothing prepared, yet he willingly stood up, paused for a moment and looked at their hands, some with no fingers, and some with only a few stumps. Then he spoke: "I am a hand surgeon, so when I meet people, I can't help looking at their hands. I would like to have examined Christ's hands. With the nails driven through, they must have appeared twisted and crippled. Remember, Jesus, at the end, was crippled too."

The patients, on hearing this, suddenly lifted their poor hands towards heaven. Hearing of God's response to suffering had made their suffering easier.

A Franciscan University in Ohio recently posted a series of ads on Facebook to promote some of its online theology programs. But Facebook rejected one of them because it included a representation of the crucifixion. The monitors at Facebook said the reason for their rejection was that they found the depiction of the cross "shocking, sensational, and excessively violent."

The Franciscan University of Steubenville responded with a blog post that no doubt surprised Facebook: they agreed with Facebook's assessment! The Franciscan university posted:

Indeed, the crucifixion of Christ was all of those things. It was the most sensational action in history: man executed his God. It was shocking, yes: God deigned to take on flesh and was 'obedient unto death, even death on a cross' (Philippians 2 v 8). And it was certainly excessively violent: a man scourged to within an inch of his life, nailed naked to a cross and left to die, all the hate of all the sin in the world poured out its wrath upon his humanity.

They went on to say that it wasn't the nails that kept Jesus on the Cross but his love for mankind:

He was God, he could have descended from the cross at any moment. 'No, it was love that kept him there. Love for you and for me, that we might not be eternally condemned for our sins but might have life eternal with him and his Father in heaven.’

We do not always get a simple, satisfying answer to all of our questions about suffering. In a 2014 testimony about his experience with a debilitating disease, former Wheaton College Provost Stan Jones provided a helpful perspective on all the questions about our suffering that we find it difficult or even impossible to answer. He said:

Long ago, I read a book about suffering, and the author made a point that I have had to return to time and time again. He said most of our why questions about suffering are ultimately unanswerable. God does not seem to be in the business of answering the why questions, and most of our philosophical responses to the question of suffering amount to various forms of taking God off the hook for the problem of suffering. But this author pointed out that God doesn't seem to be interested in getting off the hook. In fact, the answer of God in Jesus Christ to the problem of suffering is not to get off the hook at all, but rather to impale himself on the hook of human suffering with us in the very midst of our suffering.

When trouble comes and places a giant question mark over our existence, we should remember Jesus and the empathy of the Cross.

On the scenic foothills of the Alatoo Range in northern Kyrgyzstan there is a spot that looks up to the peaks of the towering Celestial Mountains, and down across the valley to the city of Bishkek. They have built there a great monument complex in honor of the Kyrgyz people. It's name is Ata-Beyit.

But there is something different about this place. Most monuments of such a grand scale are built to commemorate national victories and grand achievements. This place, however, was built specifically as a monument to magnificent defeat. Specifically, there are three heartbreaking defeats that the Kyrgyz people remember together on that scenic hill.

There is a soaring monument to the defeat of 1916 when the Tsar Nicholas II decreed that all Kyrgyz men be conscripted into the Russian army to fight in the First World War. On that mountaintop some 100,000 died, either massacred by soldiers or lost in the brutal winter. The second monument on that hill remembers 1938 when at the personal instruction of Joseph Stalin, 137 leading citizens—writers, teachers, artists, and politicians—were rounded up and led up those hills to be murdered. The third monument remembers 2010, when eighty-four young people were lost in a single day, murdered for protesting against yet another brutal regime, standing in the way of freedom.

Nothing but tears on that mountain … but the Kyrgyz people believe these must forever be remembered for they are magnificent defeats. Despite the oppression of their worst enemies, and the tears of these most painful tragedies, the Kyrgyz people have not only persevered, but they are today a proud and thriving people.

Sometimes there are defeats so magnificent that they simply must be memorialized—and every Christian understands this. On the foothills, just outside of another great city, there is another site remembered with many tears and a monument to unthinkable injustice. And while it would be impossible to remember that place without being moved by its terrible tragedy, we remember it because of something so magnificent in that tragedy. On that terrible hill—by his wounds, we were healed. On that terrible hill—through his cross, we are saved. On that terrible hill—death may have won the day, but life-everlasting secured an unbreakable victory.

Some people might ask why go to such trouble to memorialize a mount of such great painful sorrow. We would say that some defeats are worth remembering, precisely because they contrast the magnificence of the final victory that overcame the evil of that place.

The Kyrgyz people have a mountain, and its name is Ata-Beyit. The people of God have such a mountain. Its name is Calvary.

When the Bible scholar N.T. (Tom) Wright was asked what he would tell his children on his deathbed he said, "Look at Jesus." Tom Wright explained why:

The [Person] who walks out of [the pages of the Gospels] to meet us is just central and irreplaceable. He is always a surprise. We never have Jesus in our pockets. He is always coming at us from different angles … If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what it means to be human, look at Jesus. If you want to know what love is, look at Jesus. And go on looking until you're not just a spectator, but part of the drama that has him as the central character.

Lt. Jack Cambria has spent more than a decade talking people down from the ledge. Until his retirement in 2015, he was the commanding officer of the NYPD's hostage negotiation team for over 33 years. During his career he became an expert at saving fellow cops from gun-wielding maniacs or dissuading people to not jump off New York City's skyscrapers or bridges.

What's the secret to success as a hostage negotiator? Cambria says, "The very good negotiators, I think, are the ones with the life stories"—particularly, he would add, life stories of pain that have produced compassion for others. Cambria claims, "[Good negotiators must] experience the emotion of love at one point in their life, to know what it means to have been hurt in love at one point in their life, to know success and perhaps, most important, to know what it means to know failure."

He learned this lesson during his first day as a police officer. Cambria admitted that he had his "own baggage about the homeless, they were violent, they were dirty, they were mentally ill." Then one day, he had to confront a homeless fare beater and searched his satchel. Inside wasn't a weapon but a manuscript of a play titled "Crabs in a Basket," a metaphor for the man, of his struggle to crawl out of the hole he was in.

"In that two-minute space of time, he had transposed himself from a homeless guy—my baggage—to a playwright," he recalled. That compassion has led colleagues to refer to him as "Gentleman Jack," whose guiding principle is to just get the suspects talking.

This quote highlights how Jesus, in his suffering and death, stands in solidarity with any human being who suffers, especially the poor, the forgotten, and the powerless:

It's important to note that [according to the world's standards] Jesus' death was an obscure one … [In the world's eyes] Jesus dies like a migrant worker who suffocates in a freight container, like a garbage-picker caught in a slide, like a child with an infected finger, like a beggar the bus reverses over. Or, of course, like all the other slaves ever punished by crucifixion, a fate so low, said [the Roman philosopher] Cicero, that no well-bred person should ever even mention it. Some people ask nowadays what kind of a religion it is that chooses an instrument of torture for its symbol … The answer is: one that takes the existence of suffering seriously.

Editor's Note: Christ's death was completely planned and purposeful, not random or accidental. This quote merely highlights that at the Cross, Jesus completely identifies with the agony of the migrant worker, the garbage-picker, the unknown child, the beggar, the slave, and every other human being who has ever lived.

More people point to the problem of evil and suffering as their reason for not believing in God than any other—it is not merely a problem, it is the problem. A Barna poll asked, "If you could ask God only one question and you knew he would give you an answer, what would you ask?" The most common response was, "Why is there pain and suffering in the world?"

John Stott said, "The fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith, and has been in every generation. Its distribution and degree appear to be entirely random and therefore unfair. Sensitive spirits ask if it can possibly be reconciled with God's justice and love."

Richard Swinburne, writing in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, says the problem of evil is "the most powerful objection to traditional theism." Ronald Nash writes, "Objections to theism come and go. … But every philosopher I know believes that the most serious challenge to theism was, is, and will continue to be the problem of evil."

You will not get far in a conversation with someone who rejects the Christian faith before the problem of evil is raised. Pulled out like the ultimate trump card, it's supposed to silence believers and prove that the all-good and all-powerful God of the Bible doesn't exist.

In his book If I Were God I'd End All Pain, John Dickson recalls speaking on the theme "The wounds of God" at a university campus. After his speech, the chairperson asked the audience for questions. Without delay a man in his mid-30s, a Muslim leader at the university, stood up and proceeded to tell the audience how preposterous was the claim that the Creator of the universe would be subjected to the forces of his own creation—that he would have to eat, sleep, and go to the toilet, let alone die on a cross.

Dickson and the man went back and forth for about ten minutes during which the man insisted that the notion of God having wounds—whether physical or emotional—was not only illogical, since the "Creator of Causes" could not possibly be caused pain by a lesser entity, it was outright blasphemy, as stated in the Koran.

Dickson later wrote,

I had no knock-down argument, no witty comeback. The debate was probably too amicable for either approach anyway. In the end, I simply thanked him for demonstrating for the audience the radical contrast between the Islamic conception of God and that described in the Bible. What the Muslim denounces as blasphemy the Christian holds as precious: God has wounds.

Around his 50th birthday, Pastor Ed Dobson was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease. Over time, the disease attacks neurons that control voluntary muscles. As nerve cells degenerate, muscles atrophy. There's no known cure. Eventually, the body just gives out. Shortly after the diagnosis Dobson wrote, "I felt like I was sinking into the darkness … my life was over. I felt like I had been buried alive."

Then, 13 years later, Dobson said he has a very different outlook on life and on what it means to follow Christ. Before the disease, he basically focused on the resurrected Jesus. Now he can also focus on the suffering Jesus. "Even when my body doesn't work," Dobson says, "I remember the Jesus who created the universe limited himself to the human body. I find encouragement in Good Friday. I want to get to Sunday, but I'm more focused on the suffering."

Editor's Note: You can stop the illustration right here, or you can add the following two paragraphs to emphasize how suffering helps us comfort others in their pain.

Through his pain, he's learning how to meet others in their pain. Shortly after the diagnosis, he visited a woman in the final stages of ALS. The patient's husband stood in the doorway and politely explained that his wife didn't want to see anybody. But feeling urgent, he walked past the man into the woman's bedroom. Dobson spoke to her, but she remained silent. He returned for more visits, but each time she would just roll over and face the wall, never saying a word.

He always prayed with her, even though she didn't give a rip about God. He wrote a prayer to Christ on a note card, and her husband taped it to the wall where she would always see it. The weekend she died, she asked her husband to carry her into the living room. She wanted to watch Dobson preach on TV. After she had listened, she told her husband to tell Dobson he prayed the prayer—that she was ready to die. And the next day she did.

Editor’s Notes: Pastor Ed Dobson’s suffering ended on December 26, 2015, when he entered heaven.

Christian minister John Dickson once spoke on the theme of the wounds of God on a university campus in Sydney, Australia. During the question time, a Muslim man rose to explain "how preposterous was the claim that the Creator of the universe should be subjected to the forces of his own creation—that he would have to eat, sleep, and go to the toilet, let alone die on a cross."

Dickson said his remarks were intelligent, clear, and civil. The man went on to argue that it was illogical that God, the "cause of all causes" could have pain inflicted on him by any lesser beings. Dickson thought for a minute but he couldn't come up with a knockdown argument or a witty comeback. So finally he simply thanked the man for making the uniqueness of the Christian claim so clear. Then Dickson concluded, "What the Muslim denounces as blasphemy the Christian holds precious: God has wounds."

In his book God in a Brothel, investigator Daniel Walker recounts his attempts to infiltrate brothels and gather evidence so he could release women and children from sex trafficking. He describes how he overcome his initial fears with a deep-seated confidence in God's sovereign rule—even in a despicable brothel:

I had not been conducting investigations into sex trafficking for very long, and being inside a brothel still left me feeling vulnerable and afraid. I was afraid of my sinful nature. I was afraid of perpetrators and corrupt officials who were profiting from organized crime. And I was afraid of going into what I perceived as enemy territory.

But as he closed his eyes and prayed, suddenly God completely changed his perspective:

A still, voice reminded me that "greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world" (1 John 4:4 KJV) …. The words of an old hymn came to mind: "This Is My Father's World." Again I saw for the first time that the brothel I was standing in was as much a part of God's creation as any beautiful mountain or crystal cathedral, and that God had in no way surrendered it to anyone.

I knew that God was in that brothel before I arrived, suffering with [victims of sexual trafficking], witnessing [their] defilement night after night and sharing in [their] tears, and that he would remain in the brothel long after I left. Any uncertainty I previously had about walking into such a dark and "evil' place vanished.

Though not in an audible sense, I nevertheless heard his command and his call to go boldly in his name to such places as these, to rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, and to plead for the widow.

Tim Keller writes:

There is no way to have a real relationship without becoming vulnerable to hurt. Christmas tells us that God became breakable and fragile. God became someone we could hurt. Why? To get us back … . No other religion—whether secularism, Greco-Roman paganism, Eastern religion, Judaism, or Islam—believes God became breakable or suffered or had a body."

In his book Unspeakable, Os Guinness tells the story about a well-known Christian leader whose son had been killed in a cycling accident. Although the leader was devastated, somehow he managed to suppress his grief, even preaching eloquently at his son's funeral. His display of hope in the midst of tragedy earned him the admiration of many.

But a few weeks after the funeral, the man invited Guinness and a few friends to his home. According to Guinness, this man spoke and even screamed "not with the hope of a preacher but with the hurt of the father—pained and furious at God, dark and bilious in his blasphemy." In his agony, he blamed God for his son's death.

Rather than rebuke him, one of Guinness's friends gently reminded the enraged father of the story of Jesus at Lazarus' tomb. On three occasions in that story, Jesus expressed anger, and even furious indignation, in the presence of death. When Jesus came to earth, he became a human being just like us, feeling the abnormality of our suffering. In Jesus' humanity we see God's perspective of our pain: the beautiful world God created is now broken and in ruins. Jesus will heal this broken world and our broken lives, but first, he came to earth in order to identify with our anguish.

Guinness concludes that when we understand Jesus' humanity, it frees us to face the world's brokenness just as Jesus did. Like Jesus, we must never accuse God of wrongdoing or blaspheme God, but like Jesus, we are "free to feel what it is human to feel: sorrow at what is heartbreaking, shock at what is shattering, and outrage at what is flagrantly out of joint … . To pretend otherwise is to be too pious by half, and harder on ourselves than Jesus himself was."

Joe Cumming, a fellow of the Faith and Culture Center at Yale, has a special interest in respectful Christian witness to Muslims, among whom he lived for many years. Joe once had the opportunity to meet with the Lebanese Ayatollah, one of the most influential Muslim clerics in the Arab world. It was the day before the holiest day of the year for Shiite Muslims, so it was like asking for an audience with the Pope on Christmas Eve.

The sheik's secretary said Joe could only have five minutes—and at four minutes and fifty-five seconds, he should be standing to leave. As Joe prayed hard about what he could say, he saw a banner across the road that read in Arabic, "The victory of blood over the sword." This meant that when the enemies of Muhammad's grandson Hussein came to kill him, he could have called on God to kill them. Instead, he laid down his sword and was massacred, becoming a sign of forgiving the sins of others. So, when the Ayatollah asked Joe what he had to say, Joe said, "Doesn't that banner mean that Hussein won a greater victory by laying down his life?"

"Yes," said the sheikh, "that's what it means."

"That's what I believe about Jesus," said Joe Cumming. "He could have killed his enemies, but instead he laid down his life for them in love, and prayed for their forgiveness. I believe that is the key to break the cycle of violence and revenge in the world."

The Ayatollah turned to his followers and said, "I totally agree with every word this Christian man of God has just said."

Joe stood to leave. His five minutes were up. "Where are you going?" said the sheikh. "There's more I want to talk about."

He kept Joe for two hours.

At one point the Ayatollah brought up the death of two little boys on the West Bank, killed by a misfired missile as they played soccer. "What do you have to say about this as a Christian?" he asked.

Joe replied, "I look at the suffering of all innocent victims through the lens of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. I might wonder at times if God has abandoned the human race. But in the suffering of Jesus Christ, I see the sign of God's solidarity with all innocent victims of violence and suffering."

The sheikh turned again to his followers and said, "I agree with every word this Christian man of God has just said." What a powerful thing to be able to say, in light of the cross, "If Christ be for us, who can be against us?"

In her book Because He Loves: How Christ Transforms Our Daily Life, author Elyse Fitzpatrick writes:

Just in case you're unaware, identity theft occurs when someone steals your name and other personal information for fraudulent use. Most of us are dismayed by this new cyber-age crime, and we wouldn't assume that the theft of another person's identity is acceptable behavior. The surprising reality, however, is that Christian's are, by definition, people who have someone else's identity. They're called "Christians" because they've taken the identity of someone else: the Christ. Not only have you been given an identity that you weren't born with or that you didn't earn the right to use, but you're invited to empty the checking account and use all the benefits this identity brings! This is so much better than identity theft—it's an identity gift!