Thursday after Ash Wednesday
In our Gospel reading for today, we don’t get much in the way of good news. If I’m a disciple receiving this message from Jesus, I’m gonna have second thoughts. So, here’s the rundown:
- This Messiah I am following is going to be reviled, especially by the higher-ups.
- He’s then going to be executed and die.
- And if you follow him, you can expect your own version of suffering.
- You’ll have to take up your own cross—and you have to do it daily.
- If you can pull it off, your life will have meaning.
You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to get the point. Ours is a suffering savior. And He asks us to prepare ourselves to suffer also, in order to be true to Him.
But what sort of suffering is he talking about? We know he is not talking about enduring suffering for the sake of it or putting up with abusive behavior that, among other things, dehumanizes us.
He is not saying that he thinks suffering of any sort is a good thing. He didn’t heal the sick because he wanted us all to suffer more.
He’s being quite specific, actually. He says that for suffering to be meaningful it has to be on behalf of Him. It has to be a kind of suffering that witnesses to the Kingdom of God on Earth.
Years ago now, Bill volunteered to be in relationship with a man on death row. He was a decorated Vietnam vet who came back to the US with a very bad case of PTSD. Long story short, he became an addict and in a drug induced panic shot and killed a police officer. Over the next number of years, as legal appeals made their way through various courts, Bill and Sam became good friends. They talked sports mostly. But Sam also talked about his regrets, especially for the grief he had caused the family of the officer he shot.
The appeals failed. He would be executed. And he wanted Bill to be there. And Bill was.
As I read this challenging, to say the least, passage from Luke I hear Jesus talking about the kind of suffering Bill endured at his friend’s execution. It’s the kind of suffering that comes with loving “the least of these.” Or, to borrow from Father Satish’s homily on Sunday, it’s the kind of suffering that comes with loving lepers—and, importantly, that includes all of us.
These days there is so much verbiage in the broadcast media and social media and elsewhere that what we need to do is stand up against our enemies—be they immigrants or LGBTQIA+ or whatever. Our job as followers of Jesus is to figure out who our enemies are and fight like hell.
But I’m wondering if, in these days of “culture war,” suffering for Jesus means loving our enemies. Maybe that means endeavoring to hear the plight of the poor or the immigrant or the prisoner. Maybe it means resisting the demand to live in a constant state of fear and culture war. Maybe it means getting to know someone on death row. Maybe it just means reading a book that makes it possible for us to face someone we don’t understand—someone from another culture or another experience or another way of seeing the world.
Maybe to suffer for Jesus is, simply, to love.
-Sue Trollinger