Jack Hardaway
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What do we do with suffering?
Explain it? Justify it? Turn away? Hide? Bury it deep inside? Push it away? Addiction? Distraction and numbing agents?
Seek it out? Inflict it? Despair? Lash out?
Offer comfort and company? Try to fix things even if it makes things worse? Try to feel useful by inflicting further harm? Good intentions? Play the hero?
Bake a casserole?
I am not an expert on suffering. My experience is blessedly limited, but I have observed and participated in all of these.
Why did Jesus have to suffer? Why must he be rejected? Why be killed?
All the answers seem to fall flat. They aren’t enough.
The question inflates very quickly.
Why the long history of God’s people suffering? Jesus seems to personify the entire history of the Hebrews suffering at the hands of others.
The randomness of suffering is harsh enough, let alone adding human cruelty and indifference to it.
No wonder Peter denied Jesus’ foreseeing his own rejection, suffering and death. What good is another dead Jew? History is littered with the bodies of Peter’s people. Please not again. No more.
Christianity doesn’t really have an answer to the persistent problem of suffering. The only answer that we have is the Cross itself. The answer to suffering is Jesus suffering.
Somehow God turns the pain and the shame into the beauty of the resurrection.
It defies logic.
What is our response to the miraculous illogic of Jesus?
Jesus passes a message forward to us, inviting and challenging us to respond by following him, to take up our own cross and to walk the way of self-denial with Jesus.
Then see what happens.
Mark’s Gospel is meant to be a manual that illustrates the life of following Jesus as a life of spectacular failure. The disciples mess it up every chance they get.
At the end of the Gospel they are told to go back to Galilee where the whole story started, to meet Jesus there again, and to start all over again, to try again.
We are the disciples in this story trying to discover the way of the cross, the way of self-denial, the way of Jesus, the way that is resurrection.
We are those who fail all along the way. We are those who at the end of the story are told to go back to Galilee and to walk with Jesus yet again, and then again, and again.
We are meant to read and live Mark’s vision of the Gospel of Jesus over and over. It is a sort of literary and holy erosion, we are worn and shaped into something new, never really arriving, never really getting it, but living deeply into the suffering of the world and the suffering of God and finding life and light and resurrection all along the way as we fail spectacularly.
What do we do with suffering? Like the disciples we fail over and over again to get it right -and that is where meet God.