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.
The question inflates quickly beyond the deliberate cruelty of religious and political persecution
and killing that makes the Cross happen. It expands to include the randomness of suffering and
violence in general.
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 mystery 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 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. And at the end of the Gospel
they are told to go back to Galilee where the whole story started to meet Jesus again for the first
time.
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? In our failure over and over again to get it right we meet God.