Resurrection Now – Suffering and Service

Greetings,

We are in the midst of the Easter season, and celebrating the grace of God toward us in the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  Consider these thoughts on the suffering Messiah and the Body of Christ.

I wish to know Christ and the power flowing form his resurrection; likewise to know how to share in his sufferings by being formed into the pattern of his death.

                                                                                                                        Philippians 3:30

Jesus’ words and his life reflect the same spirit which we believe we see in Job, in Jeremiah, in the Servant of the Lord: that there is no answer to the problem of evil, and no way to meet evil in the concrete, except suffering and death.  We have seen people in all the ages try to shake off the burden by the most varied and ingenious devices, and they have all failed.  Jesus alone came and said: Take up your cross.  If you wish to live, die.  If you wish to find joy, suffer.  He did not explain it; he simply lived that way.  If there were a better answer to the problem, if there were a better way to meet it, it is hard to think that the incarnate God would not have chose it.  He did not make evil easy to understand or easy to bear; he showed only that it is possible to live with it, and to live well, to live heroically, without doing anything about evil except to suffer it.  This is the mystery of the Servant, the mystery of the life and death of Jesus, that it is in yielding to evil, in becoming its victim, in being consumed by it, that you have your only hope of overcoming it; and, by the solidarity which links Jesus with all and all with each other, this victory over evil can be communicated to others who are ignorant of what happens on their behalf.

                                                                                                                  John L. McKenzie

McKenzie wrote about the suffering of Jesus, and those who would follow him, in 1956 in The Two-Edged Sword: An Interpretation of the Old Testament.  Some two hundred years earlier Charles Wesley wrote:

Didst thou not make us one,

That we might one remain,

Together travel on,

And bear each other’s pain;

Till all thy utmost goodness prove,

And rise renewed in perfect love?

Then let us ever bear

The blessed end in view,

And join, with mutual care,

To fight our passage through;

And kindly help each other on,

Till all receive the starry crown.

And my old favorite, Dorothy Sayers, comes through with:

It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills

a sparrow can hear that story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not                 experience any shock at all.

Yours & His,

DED