Suffering and Love
Ordinary Sunday 28, 14th October, 2001
Fr Neville Connell
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Some of you may have watched "Australia Talks Back" from the Barossa Valley
the other night. It was rather like blood-sport, in which a somewhat hostile
audience poured out its wrath on the Minister for Foreign Affairs. People kept
returning to the subject of asylum seekers or irregular entrants (whichever
description one uses) to our country. Obviously this difficult matter is
causing considerable division and pain in Australia.
The destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York City has caused much
pain and suffering; then again, people in the Middle East, particularly the
Palestinians, can say that they have suffered much for fifty years and more.
Not all those suffering are Christian, but even if not, there is a different
form of suffering which comes from observance of others' suffering. The
suffering of guilt sometimes, or of helplessness, ineffectualness, impotence
in the face of pain.
The Church herself has never been free from suffering, especially in its
first 300 years, when it was an illegal organisation, and suffered much persecution. But in so suffering, the Church, as the Body of Christ (as St
Paul has taught us), is simply following in the footsteps of the Head of the
Church, Jesus the Christ. Jesus, the Son of God, died for the sins of all
people, and that is the vocation to which all Christians are called: to enter
into the mystery of suffering, but, for the Gospel's sake. That is, to learn
how to suffer as Jesus did.
It has been said, "it is not what we suffer, but how we suffer that
matters". Think of the two men executed on either side of Jesus; how one
railed against Jesus, "Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us as well.",
while the other said "Have you no fear of God at all? You got the same sentence
as he did, but in our case we deserved it: we are paying for what we did. But
this man has done nothing wrong. Jesus, remember me when you come into your
kingdom." The writer of our Second Reading for today (2 Tim 2:8-13) is
reflecting on just that. "Remember the Good News that I carry, Jesus Christ
risen from the dead, sprung from the race of David; it is on account of this
that I have my own hardships to bear, even to being chained like a criminal."
The problem of suffering has probably been the greatest obstacle to
Christian faith of all. How can a God who is good allow such dreadful events
as that on 11th September, or the bombing of Afghanistan, or the horror of
Rwanda, of starvation and so on? Any suffering? In the first place we
need to distinguish between what God wills and what he permits. God has
created us with free-will. He wills that we should love each other and all
of creation. Such is his love for us that he permits, gives us the freedom,
to deny him, and not only him but the rest of creation, by acts of hate and
violence.
And in the light of our abuse of our freedom – the original and
continuing sin which we all commit – God's response is to go on loving
us, by entering into our earthly existence through his Son Jesus – no
stranger to suffering from his birth. God in Jesus his Son did not explain
evil and suffering, which we can attribute to human pride. Jesus came to show
us how to transform suffering from being something which is wasteful, negative
and senseless, as in New York City, into something which can be used
creatively, for good.
The key is love. Sin put Jesus on the Cross and killed him. Love, perfect
love, raised Jesus to new liberating, eternal life. So, if God can bring about
good from such evil as the Cross, then evil can be transformed in any
circumstance. But only through love, the love of God. Fr Lionel Thornton CR
has written, "if there can be suffering without love, there cannot be love without suffering." Here we have the heart of Christian life. We do not
seek to court, avoid, or escape suffering, but when we bear it we seek to
transform it.
Simone Weil, a remarkable French woman, very sympathetic to Christianity,
but who always hovered on the edge of the Church, wrote "The extreme greatness
of Christianity lies in the the fact that it does not seek a supernatural
remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it." Not a way out, but a
way through it. Let this be our guiding light as we struggle with the
challenges which face us today. How do we transform this suffering? how do
we bring good out of it?.
We believe that it will be in union with, and in the power of, the Passion,
Death and Rising to New Life of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
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