by K. J. Ramsey
Christ’s faithfulness included anger. In Mark 10 people were bringing their children to be blessed by Jesus, and he was indignant at the disciples for keeping the children from him. Warfield called his anger here annoyance or irritation.37 Jesus got irritated. Anyone who has ongoing pain knows irritation is sometimes unavoidable when you are hurting, and to hear even Jesus felt irritation is a surprising relief. Faithfulness in suffering can and must include anger.
Jesus’ anger not only validates ours but also shows anger can be an energy that manifests God’s glory. When Jesus heard his friend Lazarus was sick, he said, “This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”38 He waited to go visit his sick friend, even though waiting meant Lazarus would die before his arrival. We’re told Jesus was deeply moved in his spirit when he stood before his friend’s grave.39 The Greek word translated as “deeply moved” can also be translated as “anger” or even “rage.”40 Kapic writes, “As he faced the sights, sounds, and smells of grief and death—the culmination of physical suffering—he was angry at the destruction caused in the world by the entrance of evil. Jesus’ tears grow out of this rage, and he weeps.”41 He raised Lazarus from the dead, but first he wept. His glory is shown through tears rising from anger. Jesus gave a foretaste of his coming resurrection, and the flavor included the stench of death and the salt of tears. Jesus said Lazarus’ sickness was for the glory of God, and that glory came through rage-filled tears. Love sounds like Jesus weeping.
Holiness can look only like Jesus. It will sound like crying, like groaning. It will speak with force, with fury. It will include peace and gentleness, but it will never be stoic. Wholeness is God filled and moved by feeling. The Light of the World shines in a malleable, tender heart. Suffering arouses difficult emotions. We need not judge them as diametrical to the heart of our Savior.
Jesus knows pain.
Jesus, through whom each galaxy was formed, every ocean filled, and each petal of every flower imagined, creates new life through his obedient suffering. His experience of genuine physical, relational, and mental pain re-creates our own.
We become whole, we become truly human, because Jesus lived a whole, human life including pain. Jesus knew the pain of betrayal and the sting of denial. Throughout his entire life he felt the loneliness of being misunderstood by those closest to him. His own family called him crazy.42 Even his brothers did not believe in him.43 He felt the grief of being judged by his religious community, who saw him as an imposter, a rebel, and a threat to kill. And when Jesus shared with his disciples about his coming suffering and death, Peter rebuked him, chiding Jesus, totally missing the truth of what he had shared.44 How frustrated Christ must have felt to hold his coming agony in his heart alone. God, who in himself is community, chose to feel and know the ache of loneliness.
As Jesus walked toward the cross to give himself entirely for us, he wrestled with the turmoil of accepting suffering in a human body made for life. Preparing for death, he withdrew with some of his closest disciples to pray. Jesus pleaded with his Father to take the cup of suffering from him: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”45
Jesus, the maker of the night sky, pleaded under the stars for suffering to be taken from him. Jesus—fully human and fully God—asked not once but three times for his suffering to pass. Even Jesus wanted relief. Even Jesus felt the inner battle of living in a body made for love in a world where faithfulness requires bearing pain.46 He felt anguish so profoundly, his sweat was like drops of blood.47 The German systematic theologian Jürgen Moltmann writes that this chapter in the Luther Bible is headed “The Struggle in Gethsemane,” and he says it was Jesus’ struggle with God.48 Jesus’ pain included struggling with God. Because of Jesus, faithfulness includes struggling with God.
Just a stone’s throw away, his closest friends in the world couldn’t even stay awake to pray with him in his hour of greatest need. Jesus knew the utter isolation of suffering, the harrowing place it takes us where others cannot or will not go. His pain included struggling alone when he felt his deepest anguish.
In the quiet of the garden, with the disciples asleep while he was in agony and the light of the moon his only earthly company, Jesus sweat over suffering, spoke his struggle to his Father, and in being heard felt the Father’s love. Of his prayer of anguish, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “He knows that the cup will pass by his accepting the suffering. Only by bearing the suffering will he overcome and conquer it.”49
In the first garden of history, the first human beings rejected what they were given in favor of what they wanted. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus accepted what we couldn’t to create the willingness we need. Our will is awakened by his willingness to die.
A garden held our original sin, and a garden held the faithful human response to God that spreads the seeds of Christ’s life into our bodies, broken by the curse and flailing to be free. Jesus’ agony and trust in the garden cultivates our lives into a garden that will never stop producing fruit.50
What I didn’t know in my earliest days of suffering, what I forget even now in despair, is that Jesus knows my pain more intimately than I do. The Light of the World is the Man of Sorrows. God, the Creator of everything, was despised. God, who has always been and always will be, felt rejection. He knows what it is to be sick and to suffer. He knows the shame of being considered worthless. He didn’t merely identify himself with those who suffer. He became one who suffers. His pain was genuine, and it included the suffering of the entire world. For “he himself bore our sicknesses, and he carried our pains.”51 He bore my disease, and he carried my pain. He bore your greatest grief and largest loss, carrying them to a place we wouldn’t and couldn’t.
Our hope rises in Christ’s willingness to carry what we hate and did not choose. Our darkness becomes light when we see his sacrifice included holding our suffering in his body, a mystery beyond our comprehension, an incomprehensibility that makes his love tangible. It was weight he chose and felt. It was as real as the weight of this book in your hands. Jesus carried my suffering, and he carried yours, all the way to the place we could never take it.
Jesus cosmically carried all our suffering in his body to the cross. His faithful human suffering reversed the curse of Eve’s grasping for a wisdom bigger than her body could hold. He accepted what was given. He wanted the wisdom revealed in the tree, the resolution of good and evil that only his body could hold.
“Because no other could do it,” Simone Weil writes, “he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this incomparable agony, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion.”52 When we are united to Christ, our suffering can be music that reverberates with the sound of his love. His love crosses the universe, echoing into the darkest, deepest silence of our suffering, enfolding our pain into his song of infinity-crossing love.53
In Jesus, “God stands in solidarity with the world and takes responsibility for the evil and suffering in the world,” writes disability theologian John Swinton.54 Before God brings life from death, he stands in solidarity with our suffering in the human Jesus Christ. In experiencing pain, by feeling the force of brokenness in his body and soul, Jesus became the greatest comforter we can ever know. “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.”55 Advice or consolation from someone whose life has been easy isn’t that comforting or welcome. Jesus has earned the right to be heard. Christ’s love can resound in our hearts because he has known the pain we carry. He has known the pain of the whole world.
The incarnation of Jesus Christ is God’s radical declaration that human bodies matter. The life, suffering, and death of Jesus is God’s patient insistence that suffering and ordinary, embodied life are places of grace. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s
affirmation that all matter matters.56 God called his creation good, called our bodies very good, and he insists on enfolding what he made into a life that will last.
This is grace: God joined us on the floor of this earth in the person of Jesus and forever changed the abyss into a portal. In the faithful life of Jesus and in the Spirit’s raising him from the grave, we can anticipate and even taste our liberation.57 His life changes how we can live our entire, embodied lives. Suffering can become the point at which we find ourselves nailed to the center of God’s heart and rising with his breath to walk in the world reborn.58
NOTES
1 A version of this story first appeared in Fathom. K. J. Ramsey, “The Education I Never Signed Up For,” Fathom (September 11, 2018), www.fathommag.com/stories/the-education-i-never-signed-up-for.
2 1 John 4:10.
3 Mark 1:15; Luke 4:43.
4 Luke 19:10.
5 I first heard this concept of “saved from” versus “saved to” in an undergraduate doctrine course at Covenant College with Dr. Kelly Kapic.
6 As citizens of the kingdom of God, we experience two conflicting realities. As theologian and pastoral counselor Eric Johnson writes, “Humanity is unknowingly under the degrading and enslaving influence of Satan (1 John 5:19), along with the ‘powers and principalities’ (Eph. 6:12), and the earth is now the site of a spiritual battle going on between Satan and his forces and God and his, ultimately limited by God’s power and plan.” If we fail to remember this, the bitterness of death will unnecessarily overpower the flavor of life Christ continuously offers us. Eric L. Johnson, God and Soul Care: The Therapeutic Resources of the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 132.
7 1 John 5:19 ESV.
8 Col. 1:13.
9 Gordon D. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 50–51, emphasis added.
10 Matt. 24:36; Mark 13:32.
11 N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 111.
12 John 1:14.
13 Wright, Surprised by Hope, 112.
14 In the incarnation, we have what James Torrance describes as a “double movement of grace.” This movement is both God-humanward and man-godward through the person of Jesus by the Holy Spirit. James B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 32.
15 Kelly M. Kapic, Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 89.
16 Saint John Chrysostom, “The Mystery,” in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008), 232.
17 Julie Canlis, A Theology of the Ordinary (Wenatchee, WA: Godspeed, 2017), 30.
18 Oliver Crisp, “By His Birth We Are Healed: Our Redemption, It Turns Out, Began Long before Calvary,” Christianity Today 56, no. 3 (March 1, 2012): 31.
19 Luke 2:40.
20 Luke 2:52.
21 Kapic, Embodied Hope, 89.
22 Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering (New York: Penguin, 2013), 284.
23 Timothy R. Jennings, The God-Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), 27.
24 And, phew, being loved by God does not look like what we want or think we need, but, hallelujah, it is good.
25 James B. Torrance, “The Vicarious Humanity of Christ,” in The Incarnation, ed. T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: Handsel, 1981), 144.
26 Phil. 2:7.
27 John 5:17.
28 John 5:19.
29 John 15:19–20, emphasis added.
30 John 8:29.
31 Remember, in chapter 4 we discussed how our emotions reflect God’s.
32 B. B. Warfield, “On the Emotional Life of Our Lord,” in The Person and Work of Christ (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1950), 93.
33 See Warfield, “On the Emotional Life of Our Lord,” and Stephen Voorwinde, Jesus’ Emotions in the Fourth Gospel: Human or Divine? (London: T&T Clark, 2005) and Jesus’ Emotions in the Gospels (London: T&T Clark, 2011).
34 Kapic, Embodied Hope, 83.
35 Luke 4:18–19.
36 Mark 3:5.
37 Kapic cites Warfield in Embodied Hope, 83.
38 John 11:4.
39 John 11:33, 38.
40 Kapic, Embodied Hope, 84.
41 Ibid.
42 Mark 3:21.
43 John 7:5.
44 Matt. 16:21–23.
45 Matt. 26:39.
46 Eric L. Johnson, God and Soul Care: The Therapeutic Resources of the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 253.
47 Luke 22:44.
48 Jürgen Moltmann, “Prisoner of Hope,” in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2014), 148.
49 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2015), 55.
50 Rev. 22:1–2.
51 Isa. 53:4.
52 Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction,” in Simone Weil: Essential Writings, ed. Eric O. Springsted (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), 46.
53 Ibid., 53.
54 John Swinton, Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil (London: SCM, 2018), 87.
55 Heb. 4:15.
56 As Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “The resurrection of the dead is the radical insistence that matter matters to God.” Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 62.
57 Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 113.
58 Simone Weil writes, “The man whose soul remains oriented toward God while a nail is driven through it finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe; the true center, which is not in the middle, which is not in space and time, a totally other dimension, the nail has pierced through the whole of creation. . . . In this marvelous dimension, without leaving the time and place to which the body is bound, the soul can traverse the whole of space and time and come into the actual presence of God. It is at the point of intersection between creation and Creator. This point is the point of intersection of the two branches of the Cross.” Weil, “Love of God and Affliction,” 55.
CHAPTER 7
BEAUTIFUL UNION
Christ’s Life Becomes Our Own
Christ takes on the whole of our lives so that we may partake of the whole of his life.
—CHRISTIAN KETTLER, THE GOD WHO REJOICES
Deep, buried beneath all you feel
and all the lines of your story
that are twisted, tangled knots
is
a subterranean self—you,
hidden with Christ in God,
and
a subterranean story—you,
knit into the story where
all that is deep, buried,
twisted, and tangled
is
soil of a growing goodness
that will last.
Jesus came close to bring us close, to enfold us back into the love for which we were created. In him we participate in a new reality and a grand story. We hold a living hope. Yet if you are like me, sometimes you don’t know how to derive comfort from Christ’s story. With depression that isn’t lifting or pain that’s still present, God can feel more absent than near. Sometimes the sheer volume of suffering in our stories makes it hard to see how we could be participating in a story bigger and better than pain, a story that won’t end in defeat.
Our neural networks tend to reinforce the story that suffering is a barren desert, and we’ll continue to experience it as such unless we encounter another person standing there with us. We cannot make sense of our stories on our own. Attachment researchers measure the extent to which an adult has made sense of their life story, through a tool called the Adult Attachment Interview.1 Those who have a coherent grasp of thei
r life story have what is called secure attachment. Secure attachment is reflected and expressed in an integrated prefrontal cortex, a mind and life like a tree planted by streams of water.2 Later in this chapter, we’ll learn more about having an integrated prefrontal cortex and moving toward secure attachment, or as Paul describes, being “transformed by the renewing of your mind.”3
We didn’t become withered trees with eroded roots on our own. Our patterns of relating often become insecure through inadequate formative relationships with our caregivers early in life and through traumatic experiences even into adulthood (perhaps including the suffering that led you to pick up this book). This is why we might believe God is good but feel he is cruel. Without secure attachment, we will struggle to make sense of our stories, including our suffering, and our minds will continue to stay knotted, disintegrated, and discouraged.
We don’t become rooted, fruitful trees by thinking harder. As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has commented about trauma, this is not “something you figure out. This is about your body, your organism, having been reset to interpret the world as a terrifying place and yourself as being unsafe.”4 Many of us have come to experience our suffering as scorched earth, our bodies as betrayers, and God as negligent, even if our churchy goodness makes us afraid to admit it.
We can only develop the capacity to make sense of our stories and renew our minds to greater wholeness through encountering an outside relationship. The field of psychology describes this process as earned secure attachment.5 Theology describes it as union with Christ. God is inviting us into a paradox of great possibility. Becoming whole in and through suffering requires experiencing the presence, power, and story of the Person we most fear has abandoned and neglected us—God himself.
Our suffering only makes sense alongside the story of the risen, reigning Christ. Suffering roars with lies about who we are. Forgotten. Forsaken. Unloved. When suffering lingers, we’ll only hear the sound of love and the harmony of hope in the rhythm of Christ’s breath, which is nearer than you might expect.