A priest once heard a woman sobbing in the stillness of a
church. He wondered, “What could be the problem?” Did someone die? Were they
ill? Had they lost their job? He went up to console her and asked, “What’s the
trouble?”
Her
answer stunned him. “Father, I call myself a Christian. But my life is going
well. I have no suffering, no sorrows, and no problems worth talking about. I
am worried that perhaps I have fallen from Christ.”
How strange her remark sounds…but how right-on it is! The
Christian life is marked by suffering. The
Christian life is marked by the cross, and where there is no cross, there there
is no Christ. St. Paul told the Hebrews, “If you are left without
discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children
and not sons.”
Now sometimes the
cross comes to us unsought. The person whose marriage falls apart despite
their best efforts…the one who hears that horrid word ‘cancer’ from the
doctor…the one who becomes isolated at school because he bears the name of
Christ…nobody wants these things, no
one desires them, but they come
nonetheless.
Joachim and Anna bore the cross of childlessness. When we read their story, and hear how uprightly
they lived, and how cruelly they were taunted, it makes us weep. But it was
through their suffering, and through their prayers, that God made them ready to
become parents of the Theotokos. How else can we explain how willing they were
to give her up to life in the Temple at just three years of age? Their
suffering bore rich fruit.
But what about us? What if we have no suffering in our
life, to speak of? Well, in such times
we can take up the cross of self-discipline. Prayer, fasting and alms are
all means by which we say “no” to ourselves and “yes” to God and to others.
There are those who like to say they follow “the theology
of the cross,” and surely the cross is a wonderful theology to follow. But for
St. Paul and for all the saints from then till now, the cross is not merely a
clever phrase, or way of speaking. For all the saints, the cross is a daily experience of being united to
Christ in his sufferings. St. Paul says, “God forbid that I should glory except
in the cross of Christ, whereby I was crucified to the world, and the world was
crucified to me.” And again, he tells us, “I bear on my body the marks of
Jesus.” Where there is no cross, there
there is no Christ.
But why? Why is the cross so necessary for the Christian
life? If we are the children of God, then why must we suffer…why must we
discipline ourselves?
In the first
place, the suffering of Christ was the means by which he gave his life for us; and if we are to receive that
life, suffering is the means by which it enters us. In today’s gospel Jesus
tells Nicodemus, “As Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so must the Son
of man be lifted up, so that all who believe in him should have eternal life.”
Think of a blood transfusion. The one who donates the
blood, gives it through a wound opened in his body with a needle. But the one
who receives it, must receive it through a wound opened in his body likewise with a needle. When we embrace suffering, not
with complaining but with repentance and faith, we are joined to the one who
joined himself to us completely on the cross.
And suffering accomplishes its work in another way. Soren
Kierkegaard tells the story of a swan who flew high above a barnyard. He worked
hard to get his food; but the ducks in the barnyard were fed by the farmer. One
day his curiosity got the best of him. He landed in the barnyard. To his
surprise, the farmer didn’t try to catch him. Instead, he fed the swan.
Day after day, the swan began to land in the barnyard for
his food. He grew fatter and slower. Finally one day the farmer went to grab
him…and he had become so fat he was unable to escape.
Kierkegaard asks us, “What if someone had scared off the
swan…had made his time in the barnyard unpleasant.? The swan would never have
been caught by the farmer. That’s what the cross does in our life. It reminds
us that this life, where so many glory in the wrong things, is fundamentally
upside down. All the glory, all the pleasure, all the power of this world ends
at the grave.
But those who have been joined to Christ in his
sufferings have something different to look forward to. “The Spirit himself
bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children,
then heirs-- heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with
him in order that we may also be glorified with him. For I consider that the
sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is
to be revealed to us.”
So let us learn to embrace the suffering that comes our
way in this life. Let us embrace the disciplines of prayer, and alms, and
fasting. Wherever we see Christ suffer, there let us join him, whether it is
the poor, the hungry, the sick—wherever he hides himself. For our cross,
embraced in repentance and faith, joins us to Christ’s cross, the source of our
life. And by the cross the Lord will teach us to look past these present passing
pleasures, to the eternal joy at his right hand, of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit.
