Weeping with Those Who Weep

Yes, but why?

Image by Karen Nadine from Pixabay

For reasons inexplicable, the other night I dreamt that someone asked, “Why are we supposed to “weep with those who weep?” (Rom. 12:15) This question rolled around in my mind for many dreamy minutes as I slowly woke myself from sleep. The reason that most compels me is this:

We weep with those who weep because redemption only comes through suffering. And our common redemption--that is, the redemption we will enjoy together (and there is no redemption if it is not enjoyed together, with others) only comes through our common suffering, as we suffer with one another. And thus the fellowship of suffering can paradoxically become a fellowship of joy.

The goal of our therapeutic culture is to eliminate suffering, or at least to keep it at bay. We are understandably anxious to solve people's problems, to cheer up the downcast, to do what we can to make them feel better, to see the brighter side of life. When it comes to transitory or small suffering, this often works. But there is some suffering that is immune to superficial remedies.

Some suffering goes deep and lasts long. The loss of a job you loved. Unjust treatment at school. Betrayal by friends. The death of one’s child. The failure to achieve a life dream. And looking outward: Mass shootings. Famine. Oppression. War. For suffering that goes deep and that lasts, the Christian is called not to cover it with thin Band-ids but to enter into it, to experience its darkness, to let grief and pain shape the soul. 

In one form of the liturgy of the Mass, as the elements are about to be consecrated, the priest says, “After Jesus was betrayed and willingly entered into his suffering ....”  Jesus is the model of how to approach suffering—entering into it willingly.

Jesus is not only the model but also the one in whose image we are being created.  “We must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph. 4:15, italics added). This includes the “sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death” (Phil. 3:10). 

Our culture has a warped idea of what constitutes the good life, in large part because it has a mistaken view of God. God is said to be characterized by glory, peace, power, and joy. So far so good. But the Bible never tires of reminding us that God’s identity also includes suffering: God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. How? By suffering and dying on a cross.  On the cross, Christ suffered and suffered unimaginably, suffered to the horrible point of feeling deserted by the God of glory and power. All that was left for Jesus was the Father who, setting aside glory and power, suffers in silence. 

The church father Origen put it like this: 

But the Father himself, the God of the universe, he who is full of long-suffering, mercy, and pity, does he not suffer in some way? Or do you not know that, when he concerns himself with human affairs, he suffers a human passion? “For the Lord your God has taken on himself your ways, like someone who takes upon himself his child.” God thus takes upon himself our ways, as the Son of God takes upon himself our passions. The Father himself is not impassible. If one prays to him, he takes pity and is compassionate. He suffers a passion of love [passio caritatis].

Our suffering is grounded in our passion for the good, the true, and the beautiful. We suffer when we see in our lives or in our world that the good, the true, and the beautiful have been thwarted, when injustice has won the day, when evil has temporarily triumphed. There would be something wrong with us if we didn’t suffer at such times. It’s one of the ways we reflect the image of God—we suffer in ways similar to his suffering. That’s not to deny that much of our suffering is wrapped up with self-pity and arrogance—Lord, have mercy. But at it’s core, suffering is a divine gift, the gift of suffering love.

Naturally, we sometimes angrily reject this gift, this call to enter willingly into suffering.  We curse God.  We rail at him.  We say God is not like that, or if he is, we want nothing to do with him or his religion.  This doesn't relieve our suffering, of course, but only turns it into bitterness.  And let's admit that bitterness tastes good for a time. We're asserting ourselves against our fate, against almighty God, in fact.  We feel alive with anger as we smash our false idol, the one we’ve created, the one shaped in the image of who we believe God is supposed to be. In our rage, we savor sweet bitterness.

This is where our post-Christian world has landed. Our culture’s intellectual elite have, for some decades now, marginalized the real God, the one who came to us in Christ.  On the one hand, he is identified as a good, gentle, peaceful God, the grandfather God, the harmless God, the one who is easy to blithely ignore.  Or he is disparaged as the God who should have known better, the one we self-righteously chastise, albeit indirectly: “How could a good and powerful God allow this to happen!?”

On a popular level, we are taught to move on from suffering, ASAP. We go from one more news story of unimaginable, horrible suffering to binge watching the latest TV serial, not to mention indulging in the cacophony of music and movies and personality gossip that fuels social media and our 55-inch screens. Morning news shows, which act like morning devotionals for our culture, are a perfect example, jumping from a story about yet another murder in South Side Chicago to a feature about a new way to cook potatoes--with but a blink between the horrific news and the new recipe, leaving hardly a second, a literal second, to ponder (let alone grieve) the terrible thing that happened to yet another teen. 

In short, our culture catechizes us either to move on from suffering as soon as possible or to delight in theological bitterness.

But as most of us soon discover, if we let bitterness take root, if we let it grow in us like a cancer, we die. Die spiritually. Die to love.

There is, however, another kind of death we're called to. The death to self, to self-assertion. To our rights. To what we deserve. To what is fair. We die to all of that when we are finally able to say, “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” When we enter willingly into suffering--the grief, the loneliness, the seeming hopelessness of it (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). When we die to our self-righteous demand that God behave as we want him to behave. If we learn to entering into this dying, we not only imitate Christ, we welcome Christ into us more deeply, becoming transformed into his very image.

This does not mean to trod along with a hanged head, making sure everyone knows our sorrow and pain. This doesn’t mean we can excuse ourselves from the duties God has given us. It doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy a joyous meal with friends or an inspiring walk in the woods. But it does mean to refuse prematurely relieve that steady grief that accompanies us, to simply learn to live with it, to even welcome it as a means of abiding with Christ, knowing in God’s timing will be healed. 

There is always, of course, resurrection hope. Paul not only longs to share in Christ’s suffering and death, but in the hope that he “may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:11).  As we allow the very Spirit of Christ to grow in us, we know that the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead will make us alive as well (Rom. 8). This is a sure and certain hope.

Yet I fear that in a culture that catechizes us to move on--to move on “for there is a brighter day tomorrow;” to move on “for this is the first day of the rest of your life;” to move on even in our churches, “for this is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it”—we are tempted to use the future resurrection to avoid entering into our present suffering. And avoiding our suffering allows us to avoid being transformed into Christ’s image. As we well know, human nature cannot handle too much of this sort of thing, and we know God will not ask us to enter into more suffering than we can handle. But that which I can handle, with his caring hands holding me up, is something I want to enter into willingly. That, at least, is my prayer.

Mark