Suffering was never meant to be easy
by Tom Brennen
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But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy (1 Peter 4:13).
Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber writes, ‘whenever I am in a real mess of pain and some well-meaning Christian says, “Well, when God closes a door, he opens a window”, I immediately look around for that open window so I can push them out of it. Which is to say, I don’t find ignoring the difficulty of life in favour of blindly cheerful optimism to be hopeful … I find it to be delusional’.
Being a Christian does not guarantee that life will always go your way or that suffering can be avoided. I really wish it were otherwise, but it is not. Time and time again, suffering is mentioned as part of the Christian life. Think of the suffering of the Israelites, the dangerous lives lived by prophets and apostles or the deaths of Christian martyrs. Our reading today tells us that we will be ‘reviled’ for identifying ourselves with Christ. Globally we know that our Christian sisters and brothers are being killed on account of the gospel. Our faith and speech must be deeper than simple platitudes.
Sometimes we want to offer people simple explanations and platitudes when they are suffering. In our desire to encourage them and make them feel better, we can seem to dismiss the difficulty and pain of the situation they are facing. Sometimes we try to give them false hope that everything is ‘okay’ when we both know deep down that everything is not okay. Yes, our role is to encourage those hurting, but we must be truthful in this comfort and hope we offer. In this, we need to point our sisters and brothers to the hope we have in Christ over anything else.
The father of our church, Martin Luther, reminds us, ‘when [non-Christians] run into affliction and suffering, they have nothing to comfort them, for they do not have the mighty promises and the confidence in God which Christians have. Therefore they cannot comfort themselves with the assurance that God will help them to bear the affliction, much less can they count on it that he will turn their affliction and suffering to good’.
Let us remind each other of the hope we have in Christ in the midst of suffering and that our Lord suffers along with us. Also, let us be brave enough to sit with our friends, share in their suffering, embrace it as part of the human experience, and move through it honestly, together as broken humans who still place their hope in Christ.
It is indeed the greatest of good news that suffering will have an end in the resurrection. But let us fulfil our pastoral duty and honestly deal with suffering, offering the hope of God, not the hope of human platitudes.
Lord, your suffering bought our salvation. May our suffering teach us to be more like you, and let its humanity draw us together as your beloved people. Amen.
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