timeimmortal

It’s been a hectic, hectic week for me as I’ve rushed to finish projects at work before Grace and I depart for Vancouver for the next couple of weeks to celebrate Easter with her family. Normally, I’d have found time to write a lengthy reflection on Good Friday and the meaning of the suffering of Christ.

However, in haste, I can do no better than to re-iterate a point that I mentioned last year, a point that constantly returns to mind every time Good Friday comes around:

Suffering is a complex experience that can have many different facets and meanings. There are times when it comes of ill origin, and a case can be made that there are times when it is better that suffering be mitigated or avoided outright. But not all times are like this, and there are times when it is necessary — a wholly shocking concept to the post-Christian West — to suffer. Suffering, as often as not, is one of the ways in which God shapes us and perfects us for the call He has given us, or is about to give us.

In the case of His son, it was in Christ’s suffering that God and humanity truly became re-unified, as even in the face of what must have been the most drastic suffering, and in the face of what must have been the most drastic temptation to flee and escape the unending pain, Christ remained completely faithful to God. And in doing so, Christ not only united humanity and God, but re-shaped the meaning and nature of human suffering so that it might be a channel by which we are able to constantly be reconnected to God.

I think there is a case to be made that in the past, suffering was indeed something undesireable. But in Christ’s suffering and death, even the pains and evils of the world are transformed to become avenues that we might follow to become yet closer to God.

There is a somber bleakness to Good Friday as we recall the death of Christ. But beneath that solemnity is an unbridled joy as Christ works His most profound transformative miracle upon the world, turning even its sufferings into something holy.

I’ve laughed, in the past, at atheists and agnostics who attempt to dismiss faith — especially Christianity — as so much superstition with arguments predicated on the existence of suffering being contrary to the concept of a benign and all-powerful God. The official name for such things is theodicy, and I do not regard theodicy as a legitimate objection to Religion for the simple fact that Jesus Himself gave us an example of the role that suffering plays in the human experience, and in God’s creation.

On days such as this, I pity such people as those who regard suffering as a sufficient counter-example against faith. Theirs is a very post-Christian blindness, which I mention above, which sees suffering as something necessarily to be avoided, as something which is necessarily bad. In Christ, even suffering is transformed and given new meaning, and such people as cannot see the joy (not in a masochistic sense) and fruitfulness in times of trial and pain are, I think, the most pitiable of men and women.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

~ by Kenneth on March 21, 2008.