THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

The cross and suffering

Much of the thinking I will share in this chapter and the next comes from Alan Lewis’s book, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday.[46] For serious students who wish to explore these themes in some depth, I am not aware of a better starting point. Suggestions I make here are mere pointers to thinking in an area where there is much mystery and yet where there are glimpses of truth that can be of great encouragement as we journey through life with its ups and downs, victories and defeats, joys and sorrows, and its beckoning challenges.

[46] William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Cambridge, U.K./Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001, ©.

First, it may be helpful to give a brief summary of one of the harmful influences that Greek philosophy has had on Christian thinking. In the third, fourth and fifth centuries, one of the issues that church leaders wrestled with, particularly as they sought to clarify their understanding of the nature of Jesus and God, was the principle of “divine impassibility”—the idea, inherited more from Greek philosophy than from the Bible, that God was not capable of passion, that he was incapable of pain or suffering, that he could not be affected with pain or uneasiness, that he was invulnerable. Lewis states:

Almost everyone involved on all sides of the long debates through which [Nicene and Chalcedonian] theology took shape held it as a common axiom that even in the incarnation, God as such—the divine nature—did not and could not suffer, still less die. It proved intellectually impossible for the church in this context to muster language, conceptually, or regulative statements which corresponded to Scripture’s own bold attestation that “they crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8).

Those who sought to be most faithful to Christ’s full humanity, including his weakness and suffering as it is presented in the New Testament, and yet were still influenced by this thought of God’s impassibility, tended, as a consequence, towards separation of Christ’s two natures. It was his human, not his divine nature, which suffered for us on the cross. But the New Testament in no way divides up Christ’s personality in this way—certainly not in those passages we have looked at in Hebrews which speak of his sharing our humanness in every respect.

For the influential Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, God’s perfection excluded all passibility. To quote Lewis again:

Suffering or change, emotion or need, would indicate defective power or deficiency of being. God loves “without passion” or desire; and in the incarnation it is strictly by reason of his human nature, not his divine, that Christ suffers and dies.

Even Calvin said that suffering is not properly ascribed to Christ’s divinity, and this thought was continued in the Reformed tradition that the eternal Word which united with Christ’s human nature remained simultaneously in heaven, not forfeiting its divine, eternal Lordship.

However, the sheer force of human suffering over the last one hundred years has helped to push theology towards new thinking about a suffering, crucified and buried God. After two world wars and numerous lesser conflicts, the holocaust and other major genocides, mass hunger and poverty, nuclear disasters, ecological disasters and destruction, the possibility of the death of the planet itself—and all conveyed to us constantly by the modern media—it seems as if the stench of death hangs over us today as in perhaps no previous generation.

It was Barth as much as anyone who finally broke the shackles of ancient philosophy. His insistence that theology must listen before it speaks—that we must begin with revelation, with what God himself has made known about himself in the Scriptures—that enabled him to radically reconceive the nature of God in the light of the cross and grave of Jesus Christ, and hence the possibility of God’s own suffering. Lewis says: “Barth overturns the Christolgical tradition as a whole by interpreting Christ’s weakness and humiliation as a divine event and his exaltation as a human happening.” It was God in Christ who suffered for us on the cross. It was Jesus with his resurrected human nature that was exalted to glory. Others since have taken up this theme. Lewis sums up Barth as follows:

On the cross, not only is the Son of God rejected by humanity’s violence, our blindness and ingratitude; but the Son of God sacrificed and delivered up by the Father endures the heavenly Judge’s own rejection of earthly enmity and folly. Yet who is thus the victim of God’s malediction but God’s own very self? It is the Lord, none other, who has become the humbled servant, the repudiated cornerstone. The Son of the Father gives himself to us, “to suffer in our place the divine rejection, the divine No, the divine judgement…to fulfil the divine Yes, the divine grace.” The blow of God’s No first of all strikes God’s own heart, who “tasted…damnation, death and hell” and did “bow before the claim and power of nothingness.”

Barth eloquently says:

He elected our suffering…as His own suffering…The sentence of Pilate He elects as a revelation of His judgement on the world. He elects the cross of Golgotha as His kingly throne. He elects the tomb in the garden as the scene of His being as the living God.

Again he says:

God does not merely give himself up to the risk and menace, but he exposes Himself to the actual onslaught and grasp of evil…He hazarded himself wholly and utterly.

For Barth, it is not just the Son who suffers. There is a very real sense in which God suffers too, in the mode of the Father. The humiliation of the Son is grounded in a mysterious “fatherly fellow-suffering of God,” in solidarity with and substitution for human suffering, realised in the historical event of the cross.

It is true that Barth came short of attributing death as such to God in the light of Jesus’ perishing and burial. He rejects as anthropomorphic “the idea of a God who is dead.” However, I shall look at that question briefly again in the next chapter.

Jungel, another who wrote much on the subject, declared that God’s freedom to exist as a created being in the person of Jesus did include a willingness to be the creature’s victim, to surrender to that “opposition to God which characterises human existence. The consequence of this self-surrender of God is God’s suffering…a suffering even to death on a cross.”

As Dennis Ngien declared in Christianity Today:

The main point I am seeking to make is that our God is a God who has experienced suffering at its deepest level, and I believe this is thoroughly consistent with all the clues we are given in the New Testament. However, it is not only true that God suffered through his coming in the person of Jesus, but that he still suffers through his identification with us in our sorrow and misery. In Paul’s magnificent chapter, Romans 8, he speaks of the whole creation “groaning in the pains of childbirth” (v. 22). Then he says, “we ourselves…groan inwardly” (v. 23) as we await our final deliverance. But then he says that “the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans” (v. 26). Lewis declares of this passage:

Eternally [Christ] shares humanity’s infirmities as fellow sufferer, and as victim he endures re-crucifixion at their hands. He intercedes for their healing with the Father and pleads their case as advocate, and sends to comfort them the Spirit whose own beseeching, groaning, wordless prayer lifts their pain into the heart of the divine community when their own lips fall dumb in despair and numb bewilderment.

Again he eloquently says:

The God who suffers pain and grief, death and hell, in the separation of the Father and the Son between Good Friday and Easter Saturday, is still the same suffering, grieving God, who has tasted death on Easter Day. Taking death into the Godhead, as the only way to put death to death (Hebrews 2:14), God continues to be subject to the groaning of a captive creation and the mortality of perishing humanity. Only when through the Spirit, all pain and tears have passed away will God’s suffering come to an end, the ascendancy of life over death be uncontested, and what began between Easter’s Saturday and Sunday be concluded.

He adds, “This is the eschatological growth and enrichment of the Trinity through God’s pain and suffering in fellowship with us, and joy and delight at loving responses from us.”

In Philippians 2:7 Paul tells us that Jesus “made himself nothing”. The Greek verb keno means “to make empty” and can mean “to destroy; render void, of no effect”. Moltmann, in his books Trinity and the Kingdom, God and Creation, and The Crucified God, conceives of the cross as a distinct and new event for God, when the divine experience of suffering takes on a different dimension. Until Christ returns, God through the Spirit suffers at a level of infinite intensity that did not occur before the incarnation. He sees the coming of Christ into human history and the particular event of the cross as anchor points for a much more extensive reality, a cosmic kenosis—a self-emptying focused not so much on the Son as on the Spirit, the Spirit immanent through all of time, in all creation. Lewis sums up his emphasis as follows:

By the Spirit, God is the victim of everybody’s pain; takes in not just one death but universal death; absorbs not only the evil done to Jesus but wickedness wherever it occurs: the godforsakenness and godlessness of not just one Easter Saturday, but of every day. That ever-repeated “Easter Saturday” experience, at the heart of every generation’s suffering and grief, death and hopelessness, also belongs to the Trinitarian history of God begun at the cross.

Though we get into matters here that go further than what is spelt out in the New Testament, it does not seem to be unreasonable to me to think along such lines, taking into account terms that are used. It is a point also made by John Stott in The Cross of Christ:

There is good  biblical evidence that God not only suffered in Christ, but that God in Christ suffers with his people still…It is wonderful that we may share in Christ’s sufferings; it is more wonderful still that he shares in ours.

So far, what we have been indicating is that, whatever suffering we may personally experience, or whatever questions we may have about the suffering we see around us, the one thing we can take from the cross is that God is with us in our suffering. Flora Slosson Wuellner wrote in Weavings:

It is not enough for us...within the arena of the world's pain merely to know of a God who sympathises. It is not even enough to know of a God who heals. We need to know of and be connected with a God who experiences with us, for us, each grief, each wound. We need to be bonded with a God who has had nails in the hands and a spear in the heart!

The Jewish author Elie Weisel relates a WW II incident that illustrates the nature of God’s participation in the world. The Gestapo sadistically killed a boy before the inmates of a concentration camp. One of the onlookers cried, “Where is God now?” Another answered, pointing to the figure of the dying boy, “He is there: he is hanging on the gallows.” The original speaker intended to say that God was impotent, extinguished, dead, but these words convey a profound truth for a Christian: they indicate that God was present in the situation, experiencing profoundly the horror of suffering. As Lewis puts it: “Our tears are but the slightest drop in the ocean of God’s own weeping over young lives brutally curtailed, and old extended beyond all meaning, in pain, indignity, and helplessness.” Corrie Ten Boom, who survived imprisonment in a concentration camp during World War II, wrote, “There is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still.”

Philip Yancey, in one of his thoughtful “Back Page” articles in Christianity Today,[47] tells of meeting with renowned theologian Jurgen Moltmann (whom he describes as one of his heroes) at his home in Virginia. Drafted into the war at 18, and seeing compatriots incinerated in the fire-bombings in Hamburg, the question “Why did I survive?” haunted him. He was to spend three years in prison camps in Belgium, Scotland and England. As he learned the truth about the Nazis, Moltmann felt an inconsolable grief about life, “weighed down by the sombre burden of a guilt which could never be paid off.” He had no Christian background and read Goethe’s poems and the works of Nietzsche, neither of which offered much hope. But an American Army chaplain gave him a copy of the New Testament and Psalms. He read, “If I make my bed in hell, behold [you are] there” (Psalm 139:8). As he read on, he found words that perfectly captured his feelings of desolation. He became convinced that God “was present beyond the barbed wire—no, most of all behind the barbed wire.”

[47] September 2005, ©.

On his release, Moltmann began to articulate his theology of hope. Through all his theological works run two themes: God’s presence with us in our suffering and God’s promise of a perfected future. As he explains in The Crucified God, in Jesus we have definitive proof that God suffers with us. (During the war in El Salvador, someone sent Moltmann a picture of one of six Jesuits murdered by a death squad, and next to his body lay a Spanish edition of this book.) But that is not the end of the story. The Gospels speak not only of the cross, but also of resurrection. Easter is the beginning of the “laughter of the redeemed…God’s protest against death.” Faith allows us to believe that God is not satisfied with things as they are either, and plans to make all things new. Moltmann notes that the phrase “Day of the Lord” in the Old Testament inspired fear, but in the New Testament it inspires hope, because those authors have come to know and trust the Lord whose Day it is.

It may be appropriate to mention, before leaving this subject, that there is a very real sense in which Christians are called to suffer. Peter has a good deal to say about this in his first letter (e.g. Paul, writing from prison, says to the Colossians, “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 (1:24[47a]). The one we serve chose suffering as his way of redeeming the world. It is obvious, however that it is not this kind of suffering that Paul is referring to as it would contradiction so much of what he says elsewhere. Only Jesus could pay the price of sin. But Jesus’ sufferings were not just “sufferings for sin”, but were also suffering that he endured simply as a result of his commitment to truth and goodness. The Greek word for suffering here (thipseon) is never used of his suffering on the cross, but it I used extensively throughout the Bible of various kinds of oppression, such as the imperial oppression of Egypt and Babylon on Israel, the oppression of the poor by the rich or the oppression Christians experience at the hands of the authorities. All such overtones are carried by this word.

[47a] See also 2 Corinthians 1:3-7; Philippians 3:8-11; Romans 8:17.

Note that it is suffering “for the sake of [Christ’s] body, which is the church”. Through the presence of his Spirit in believers, Jesus identifies himself wholly with his people. Paul’s use of the term “body” could not express this identification more clearly. When we suffer because of our faith in him, he suffers with us. In this sense his suffering is yet incomplete. Peter has a good deal to say about this kind of suffering (e.g. 1 Peter 2:20,21; 4:19). Though some of may be called more than others to this cost of our discipleship, the way we bear it may be the most powerful aspect of our witness to the truth of the gospel and the most powerful means of bringing others to faith.

God has the power to transform our present. He can heal the sick, spare us from injury, rescue us from desperate situations, and sometimes he does. Often, for his own purposes, he choses not do so, and allows us to experience this world’s woes. But, as we have been arguing, he is far from indifferent. He suffers with us, and with us longs for our final transformation. However, the message of the New Testament is that there is more to come, that final deliverance for his people is certain and that certainty can strengthen us and give us confidence and hope for the journey. Before we focus on that certainty, however, let’s look at the question “Why Easter Saturday?"

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