Chapter 1 - "... who (God) comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God ... for just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation, and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer ... We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, of the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves, but on God, the dead-raiser."
Chapter 4 - "But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that the all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard-pressed on every side but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed. Always the death of Jesus we carry around in our bodies so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our bodies. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you."
Our journey through lament reminded us that before God it is okay, in fact, it is GOOD to acknowledge the full weight of evil. That we are authorized to spell out in full and living color the evil, the injustice, and the hardship of our lives, and to do it before the face of a God who hears, knows, takes into account, and longs to respond with his justice and redemption.
What we come to see as remarkable, then, is the means by which God actually does bring that justice and redemption into the world. I note three things in particular that stand out in the above texts:
1) Suffering seems to allow a sort of emptying effect for the believer - it causes them to let go of everything but God, which brings them to a core of redemptive, missional energy
2) Suffering creates energized communities of grace, peace, comfort, and generosity - in short, justice
3) Suffering is crucial for the spread of the gospel, because the messengers need to reflect the message - God brings his salvation to the world through a crucified, weak, and powerless Messiah, and continues his salvation in the world through communities that act as living witnesses to world-transforming, powerful weakness
I have always been intrigued by (1) and (3), only recently has (2) come into focus for me as a crucial component of God's agenda for drawing the world into his salvation. Brokenness, in a weird way, creates opportunities for the people of God to put God's justice, his shalom, on display, and if the opportunity is seized, there begins a transference of life and grace that simply must be reckoned with.
What do you think?
What role has suffering played in your life?
Have you seen any of (1-3) played out in your life?
Stories of (1-3)?
2 comments:
I noticed an interesting theme that emerges in all three of your point, which somewhat troubles and intrigues me. In all three points you seem to come back to how suffering is a grace, particularly an "energizing" grace: "(1)missional energy, (2)energized communities,
(3)communities that act."
During this time in my life, I am internally suffering as I never have before in both duration of time and acuteness of angst. Subsequently, I have never felt more lifeless or lacking in energy. Furthermore, it also seems that this correlation between suffering and physical fatigue emerges in the Bible time and again (e.g. Jesus collapsing because of his suffering, the disciples sleeping because of their suffering in waiting waiting for Jesus' arrest, Elija collapsing because of his suffering with Jezebel, ect.) So, I was wondering if you could expound on how you see suffering as energizing. It would seem that you hint at a communal aspect of suffering that in some way is energizing only on a corporate level, but are you then also suggesting that it is necessary for an individual to suffer for the energizing of the rest? In other words, what might this type of theologizing mean for the "one" that now suffers?
-dan
Dan,
Great questions ... Methinks the critical thing is to keep in mind that all of this talk exists as possibility rather than certainty. Some suffer and yet never come to the state of emptied-ness into the person and will of God that creates energy ... They simply despair and give up hope. And some communities never rally around the sufferer, but instead blame and shame and exclude in order to maintain the coherence of their narrative world - we scapegoat the victim in order to avoid the difficulty of actually feeling any kind of responsibility towards them. In both cases and to both extents, there is no energy, no hope, no justice done. There is only despair in the first case, fear in the second.
And I suppose that is why Paul is emphatic about saying two things: 1) "this happened that we might not rely on ourselves, but on God", and 2) "Open wide your hearts to us, Corinthians." In the first case, he recognizes that his suffering led him and his companions to a more intense trust in the divine "other", and in the second case, he uses his theology of suffering to propel the Corinthian community to energized engagement with him and his situation. In both cases, however, it could have been otherwise.
Suffering, I suppose, is not an automatic pathway to 1-3.
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