Suffer

Scripture: The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 23), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Christianity is the only religion that has as its focus the suffering of God. The symbol of our faith is the Cross, often with a naked corpse nailed to it. To the uninitiated this emblem of agony still has the power to deeply shock, deeply disturb. No one else pictures God in this way, worships God in this way. Most religions would be scandalized by the very notion that the One True God would even be capable of suffering. He’s supposed to be beyond that, to transcend that. Yet here is our God, dying down here, in the mud and the blood.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus has attracted quite a crowd of followers, which should come as no surprise. If even half the stories we read in the Gospel are true, then Jesus could not help but become a sensation: public healings, public exorcisms, raising the dead from their graves. And the preaching! Why, people would throng from all the cities and the surrounding countryside, people would go hungry in the wilderness, just to hear the word of truth proclaimed from Jesus’ lips.

And they knew He was the Messiah. Or at least, they hoped so. The ancient prophecies had come to pass; the centuries of waiting drew now to a close. From days of old, God had promised to send His Anointed One, His King of Kings, to liberate His people from oppression and to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. In a world hungry for liberation, electric with anticipation, Jesus seemed to fit the bill. He could do things no one else could do, speak as no one else could speak. Surely He would lead the long awaited uprising against Rome and bring glory to His people Israel! This was the hope of the crowd. This was their ardent desire.

But Jesus is having none of it. “Whoever comes to Me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be My disciple,” He proclaims. “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow Me cannot be My disciple. None of you can become My disciple if you do not give up all your possessions, all that you have!” Talk about a buzz kill. This is not what the people want to hear. This is no way to whip up a popular rebellion, let alone grow a church.

See, the crowds have made the same mistake that Jesus’ own Apostles make. They are able to recognize that He is—or at least they hope that He is—God’s promised Messiah. But they expect the Messiah to be some sort of conquering general, or fiery angel, bringing glory and honor and might to His supporters while crushing His enemies with a rod of iron. Who wouldn’t want to get behind that? Yet Jesus offers them precisely the opposite. To His followers He brings humiliation, alienation, agony, division, and death—while upon His enemies He pours out forgiveness and healing, offering His back to the lash, His hands to the nails, His head to the thorns, and His side to the spear.

“Don’t sign up for this thinking that discipleship is going to be easy,” He tells the crowds. “I’m not leading you to glory and prosperity. I’m leading you to Jerusalem, to the Cross, to the grave. If you follow Me, you’re going to lose everything. Not just your possessions, but your very life! Are you willing to leave behind grieving parents, grieving children, grieving brothers and sisters? Is that what you want for them? If so, by all means, pick up the cross and follow Me. Because make no mistake: I am going to Jerusalem to suffer and to die.”

Jesus is not telling the crowd that they’re unworthy to follow Him. Jesus is warning the crowd that they can’t follow Him. They don’t know what they’re getting into. He has not come to lead yet another futile spasm of violence against the might of Rome. He has come to offer up His life for the salvation of the world—to pour out His own Spirit and Body and Blood that it might fill up the chasm of death torn through Creation by our sin.

This is the great truth, the great mystery, at the heart of Christianity. To love someone is to suffer—to give of yourself for the good of the other. The God of all loves all, pours Himself out for all, and so suffers, suffers in deepest love for all. Agony and bliss, sin and forgiveness, death and eternal life: this is what we see in the Cross. This is how we know the depthless love of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

Someone asked me recently what is the point of prayer. If God already knows what we need better than we do, and if God answers in His own way and in His own time, then what is the point of asking Him for anything? I think we all wrestle with this question at some point along the journey of faith. We read of miracles and wish we could experience one. We hear of healings and wonder why not us, why not our ailments. We experience tragedy and suffering and loss, and we want to know why God allows such things to occur. “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

And we can talk about how no one is righteous in the eyes of God. We could pontificate about how trials build character, or how God doesn’t give us any more than we can handle, or how the Creator in His mysterious providence doesn’t owe us any sort of explanation at all. It’s all there in the book of Job. But at the end of the day there are sufferings that we do not deserve, that do not build character, that make no sort of reasonable sense at all. There are senseless, horrible, ghastly tragedies that occur every day for no good reason. And God lets them happen. Why?

We get upset because we think that God isn’t doing anything, that He’s above it all, that He’s transcendent, blind to our sufferings and agonies and prayers. We want Him make it right. We want Him to snap His almighty fingers and fix it, force the world to be good. After all, that’s what we would do, if we were God. Right?

But love doesn’t work that way. Love doesn’t force. Love seduces, entices, begs, pleads, and entreats. Love heals and forgives and never gives up. Love suffers. Love has to have a willing partner; it cannot tyrannize; it must have free consent. And that’s not easy. Love is not easy. That’s why it takes so bloody long. But love is the only way to heal the world. We get angry at God, frustrated at God, because we think He’s not doing anything, that He just sits aloft and aloof upon His golden throne in Heaven. But we’re wrong. We’re as wrong about Him and what He does as the crowds that follow Jesus.

God is doing absolutely everything He can to heal our world, to call us sinners home. He has come down as one of us, lived alongside us, laughed and cried and loved and lost and suffered and died with us, rose from the grave to rescue our souls, ascended to Heaven to gather us home. He loved us so much that it killed Him. We killed Him. Yet even from the Cross He proclaimed our forgiveness. Even from the grave He conquered our foes. You think He doesn’t know our sufferings? He is in our sufferings.

The point of prayer is not that God will grant us wishes, as though He were a genie in a bottle. He is far too wild for that. No, the point of prayer is to conform us to Christ, to make us one with the God who is Love itself, and who therefore suffers until every one of His wayward children is called home in Him. We live now in the between time, between the Resurrection of Jesus, who is the firstfruits of the dead, and the end of the age, when the harvest will come in full. One day there will be no more suffering, no more darkness, no more terrors or lies or death. One day all evils will be set right and each child lost will be raised. One day Christ will wipe every tear from our eye and God will be all in all.

Until that day, brothers and sisters, it is our job to be Jesus Christ in the world. He has chosen us as His Body, chosen our hands as His own, our tongues for His truth. We are called to be the face of Jesus alive in the world today. We are called to love our neighbor, to forgive our enemy, and to suffer—yes, suffer—for the salvation of the world. God has poured out His life that we might rise from death. Now we must pour out our lives in love for the world.

This is the cost of discipleship. This is what eternal life is. To love is to suffer. To die to ourselves is to live for others. This is how God is saving the world. Let us pick up the Cross and follow Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.