Tuesday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
Each of these readings are providing some good insight into who Jesus is. He is God, creator of the universe, with all things subject to him. Jesus is also a man. Every Christian knows these two facts. This is contradiction enough, but another prominent layer comes as well; that it was fitting for Jesus to suffer. None of us likes to suffer. For most of human history, however, it has been such a near and present companion that people accepted it as part of life. In the last hundred-plus years, we have made great strides at reducing human suffering. Praise the Lord! But for us, when it can at times seem possible to live a life without very much suffering at all, it is especially strange to read in sacred scripture that it is fitting that Jesus suffers. We know all about his passion and death, but we feel the injustice in it, since he was without sin. Why then, is it fitting that Jesus suffers?
There is a basic and unfortunate reality: while suffering is greatly reduced for many people in the modern world, it will find each of us. We will have terrible days and years and seasons of our lives. Because we are humans in a sinful world, suffering finds us. This is why, for a human-Jesus truly present in this world, suffering is fitting in spite of his divinity. He cannot be here as ‘God-with-us” and avoid the effects of sin and suffering.
Precisely because many of our lives have relatively little suffering in the historical sense, we may not be aware of how much we can spiritually profit from suffering. When we offer up and conform our suffering to the suffering of Christ, virtues of clarity, purification, charity, and humility (among many others) often increase. Suffering in itself is clearly evil and the result of sin. But our Lord can transform suffering into the stepping stones that lead us to new life. In suffering, the old passes away and the new is born. For the faithful Christian, suffering very often makes us better. The devil’s efforts to torture and undo us only make us stronger.
We often wish that our omnipotent God would wipe suffering away from the Earth and re-create us without it. Indeed this is our destiny. But for reasons which none of us really understand, that time is not here yet. Jesus didn’t come to be the type of Messiah that overwhelms and crushes all evil with an unstoppable good. Instead, he can to be with us. He came to suffer with us. He came to show us that, while we cannot understand why the world is the way that it is, we can understand that God’s love is not distant. Instead, Jesus is right beside us, our brother, suffering everything that we suffer, and leading us down the difficult path of transforming perfection.
-Chris Nieport