So my friend and former student Tim, never missing an opportunity to point out the ways that a healthy dose of Catholicism might set me straight, commented on yesterday's post about suffering:
"I think modern Christianity seems to think the two are antithetical--if you're suffering then you aren't joyful. The traditional/catholic perspective--and the one indicated by Scripture--seems to me to be that unless we share in Christ's suffering, then we will not share in his joy either."
I think Tim, as he often is, is right on. In much of American Protestant/evangelical Christianity, suffering is something to be avoided or managed...or worse is a sign that God's angry with you.
This taps into something I've been mulling over. Scripture has in some ways informed the general Western view of suffering as bad or something to be managed or avoided as opposed to the Eastern view of suffering which understands suffering as something to be embraced as a part of normal life.
Much of what has captured the West's imagination post the Reformation (and informed the Protestant work ethic) is the concept of end-times and our possible participation in bringing about God's kingdom on earth.
Some of this has been shaped (at least in the U.S.) by a century or so of a very questionable end-times theology fueled by dispensationalism which has (thankfully) mostly gone out of favor, but is still behind much pop-evangelicalism. The "Left Behind" series is yet another (but hopefully among the last) unfortunate product of what I believe to be a mistaken view of what the end will look like.
One of the views of end-times thinking was that as God's people worked to bring about his kingdom things would inevitably get better and better until it reached a point of nearly-fully-redeemed-ness. Then Jesus would come back and we would all live happily ever after.
And so, for the love of everything good and holy, Christians got to work. They believed that in Jesus' power all (or nearly all) things could and would be fixed before he came. This notion of "fixing" things has marked much of the West's cultural influence and has born good fruit (vaccinations, for example) and bad fruit (colonialism and genocide, just to name a couple).
But the natural outworking of this is to see suffering in a specific light. That is, suffering is a problem to be eradicated so that Jesus would return.
And even as dispensationalism (and that specific end-times theory) falls out of favor and even as Christianity as a whole recedes a bit from the western consciousness, this core value of "fixing things" continues to live on as one of our favorite self-identifying characteristics.
This, of course, robs us of a true Biblical understanding of Christianity. As my friend Tim has proposed, the point is not that suffering is to be avoided or even managed but it is to be embraced as a part of our participation with Christ.
This can get squirrelly. Suffering in and of itself is evil and will one day be done away with once and for all. We do not celebrate suffering. We celebrate Jesus who is Lord over suffering and who invites us to share in his suffering that we along with him might know fullness of joy and victory.
When we are doing that, we can walk in the goodness of participating in the redemption of a broken world while at the same time walk in suffering as a participant in Christ, with Christ, for the joy set before us.
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