In this is last study in the series we've followed, "Afflicted in our Afflictions", there are two things I'd like to do; one is to give some thought to the time factor in our Lord's sufferings, the other is to draw attention to the astonishing degree to which Christ, in such suffering as makes others totally self-absorbed, continued to care for others.
Under the first heading, let me address three considerations:
and ask what Christ's sufferings of a few short hours amount to in the face of all that.
But there is a curious fallacy in that complaint. When you think about it, it is simply silly.
The 'unimaginable sum of human suffering' is a pure fiction. Nobody suffers it. Let me ask you to think carefully with me for a minute.
Imagine a person suffering the most extreme degree of suffering it is possible for a human being to endure. Are you with me? Nobody in the world is capable of suffering more than this person is suffering. Now put a second person alongside him who is suffering exactly the same degree of pain. You have doubled the pain? No you haven't! … because nobody is actually experiencing that doubled intensity of pain.
When you have set the limit of pain that one human being can endure, that is all the pain that is actually experienced by anybody.
I can only know my own pain. I can't know yours. I may experience the same sort of pain you do, but it is still my pain, and when I've reached my limit, that's it. My empathy with you in your suffering may be a real part of mine, but when my pain, compounded of both yours and mine, is at its limit, that's all the pain I can take. That's all the pain anybody can take. Nobody suffers any more.
Nobody can suffer any more … except - maybe - God.
The 'unimaginable sum of human suffering' is something that can't conceivably be experienced by anyone, unless it be God. If He does in fact experience it He is the only one who does. To hurl it in His face that he allows this 'unimaginable sum of human suffering' therefore is something of which you should be deeply ashamed. I hope none of you will ever say it again. For if you do, you will be guilty of the most dreadful and unreasoning offence against God who does suffer it, and is the only One Who can.
In moments of extreme bitterness, some folk, challenged with Christ's suffering the way we have been challenged over these last few weeks, will say, excusing themselves, "That's all very well, but His sufferings only lasted for a few hours. Mine have gone on for years."
When they think again they usually apologise for saying it. On reflection they understand, as every spiritually sensitive person does understand, that the Cross of Christ is not a bargaining counter at which quantities of sin and suffering are bartered, but a qualitative experience of personal identification by a personal God with His lost creatures.
It is worth while, however, to ponder the rather puzzling relationship of sufferings to time.
"Time is a great healer," people say, and sometimes it's true. But sometimes it's not. There are people for whom emotional hurts persist undiminished for years and years.
What makes the difference?
I don't pretend to have a complete answer to that. But I think I see a partial answer at least. It has to do with the curious (and merciful!) capacity God has built into our psyches whereby experiences that are too painful to be borne in full consciousness are "split off" from conscious memory and buried away in our deep mind somewhere under a sort of concrete bunker of forgetfulness. You are all familiar, I'm sure, with cases where a child, shall we say, has witnessed some horrifying spectacle - a grisly murder perhaps - but afterwards has no recollection of it at all … and cannot recall the memory, no matter how hard they try.
Time heals suffering if and when it is borne in full consciousness. If we can consciously endure the suffering when we're going through it, then as time passes the memory diminishes in intensity until only the knowledge of having suffered remains.
But where suffering is so severe as to take us past our threshold of tolerance to pain, so that in defence against it the experience is 'split off' from consciousness - deeply repressed so as apparently to be abolished - this is not so. It may seem to have been forgotten, but it has not. It lives on in the deep mind like some sleeping Rip van Winkle for years and years.
The repression may subsequently be lifted by abreactive techniques with which professional psychiatrists are familiar, or some later experience may re-awaken it; then you discover that the experience is as alive and painful forty years after it happened as it was four minutes after it was repressed. The suffering goes on below the surface, somehow, for the rest of life.
It is one of the invariable characteristics of suffering which exceeds our margin of tolerance to mental pain that it undergoes this kind of involuntary splitting off and repression. One has to say that God made us that way - equipped us all with this built-in safety factor; for by definition, if the pain is greater than you can bear, you can't live with it. Something has to be done with it or you'll go mad or die. But because it has been repressed, not healed, it is not really forgotten; endured at all, it is endured for ever, for the deep mind is a world where time does not exist. To be able to recover from that experience, the hidden suffering has to be brought back into consciousness, into the realm of time where alone it can be forgotten - and that requires a degree of inner strength far beyond our reach without help. Even a sympathetic therapist may not be able to give the patient enough support to permit the return of so much pain to consciousness.
Says Dr. Frank Lake (my mentor in the area of pastoral counselling through his Clinical Theology course in which I qualified, and to whom I owe a huge personal debt), "In our experience it has not been possible, though we have often genuinely attempted this, to enable patients in the deeper reaches of mental pain to permit the re-emergence of this experience without specific appeal to the saving companionship of Christ."
Since it can't be tolerated in consciousness, all the normal ways of caring which ought, reasonably speaking, to bring comfort, don't affect it at all. Nothing you say or do seems to do any good.
Parents are often puzzled when a child who seems to have been happy and reasonably well adjusted begins, during adolescence or early adult life, to accuse them of attitudes of rejection and harshness which are certainly not justified by their care of them over the years, and you can't argue them out of it. They are in fact experiences in the foundation year of life, repressed then, but, with the glandular imbalances of puberty (which weaken the repressive barrier), re-emerging.
Those who undergo such experiences have many ways of defending against the re-entry into consciousness of their particular 'descent' into hell, ways we don't have time to spell out now. But those defences may break down in adolescence or middle life; they commonly take from forty to sixty years before they break down. When they do, we meet the hurting person in the same state of pain in which they first suffered. And we see, in retrospect, that the distorted personality pattern which has made this man or woman so difficult to live with over the years has all along been a defence against a deep, inner wounding. Their 'being in hell' may have lasted only for a few hours; but splitting off, repression and fixation have guaranteed that the pain lives on.
What you have to understand therefore is (and this is the point to which we have been working) that the lifelong effects of mental pain are a function not of their actual duration, but of their intensity.
The work of our Lord Jesus Christ upon His Cross is fully adequate therefore to meet the needs of such sufferers by His identification with them.
The question whether He suffered as long as they did is not really to the point; the one point of real significance is: "Did He suffer as intensely as they?" He bore all our afflictions, as in this series we have tried to see, in full consciousness, at full intensity. He entered into all the interminable 'hells' in this world and the next in order to lighten their darkness by His Presence.
Moreover, Christ, more able to empathise with the sufferings of His fellow creatures than anyone the world has known, knew, throughout His manhood, the nature of the suffering that was prepared for Him. He who had cast out so many devils of mental pain and spiritual evil knew from the beginning the task that was set for Him. His Spirit, now, with groanings which cannot be uttered, makes real His Presence right alongside those who suffer in these ways.
Says Dr. Lake, "In our experience" (as a therapist) "it is the indwelling presence of this groaning Spirit of the groaning Saviour, conjoined, as always, with the mighty, joyful and loving Spirit of the risen Saviour, which enables them to bring their own private hells back into the open. If this work is truly done, as we have often known it done, with the emergence of the dreadful experience from the timelessness of repression into time, it soon becomes a memory of having suffered, its 'ever present' intensity becoming finally a 'thing of the past'." The memory is healed.
As the writer to the Hebrews tells us, "We see the man Jesus - made inferior to the angels for a little while and subject to pain and death so that He should, by God's will, taste death for every man - crowned now with glory and honour. It was right and proper that in bringing many sons to glory, God should make the leader who delivers them a perfect leader through His sufferings ... For since the children have a shared physical nature as human beings, He also shared our human nature with us, so that by going through death as a man, He might break the power of him who had death at his command, that is, the devil; and so set free those, who, through fear of death, had been subject to lifelong bondage.
"For since He Himself has passed through the test of suffering, He is able to help those who are exposed to it now."
And that brings us to the third consideration: that …
Here I owe a debt I gladly acknowledge to a little book of Lenten studies by Professor T. E. Jessop. ("The Enduring Passion" Epworth Press 1961) He raises a thought-provoking question.
Was the last price for man's redemption paid on Calvary?
In the historical sense that Jesus will not - and indeed cannot - come again to minister among us and be slain by us, yes.
Yes also in the theological sense that He died 'once for all': that that "one, full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice once offered for the sins of the whole world" secured for ever the reconciliation to God of all who wholeheartedly put their trust in it. It was the last price paid on the human scene.
But within God's own being the price is still, surely, being paid; for He is still being ignored or resisted, and is still bearing the sin of His creatures therefore. Said the risen Christ from the Throne of His glory at the Father's right hand to Saul the Pharisee on the Damascus road, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" Present tense, you notice. Risen, ascended and glorified, He was suffering still. The spiritual pain of Calvary throbs on. A world with people like us in it and a God like the One revealed by Jesus over it, is bound to have as its consequence an abiding grief in the heavenly places, a continuing spiritual crucifixion. So long as there is gross sin, perfect love must be in pain. Sin casts its shadow into heaven itself.
Only in Christianity is there this doctrine of a suffering God, a long-suffering God - of an infinite forbearance which only infinite love can explain. Only such a God could have put up with us as long as He has, instead of wiping out our race in anger.
The picture of God that Jesus presents us with as He moves to the Cross is of One Who advances toward us with arms outstretched in loving and defenceless appeal all the time that we keep shooting arrows into Him. He absorbs the wounding till He falls at our feet, still pleading with us. He bears our sins … and is willing still to forgive us them when we confess them and repent of them.
And repentance there must be … a repentance motivated in us by those wounded hands and outstretched arms of Christ.
Repentance is the only decent attitude we may show toward our sin.
For what is my sin?
It is self-soilure.
That, surely, is to be repented of.
Sometimes others are directly my victims, sometimes indirectly. Every sin, even a sin that is immediately against myself, has social consequences, at least by spoiling the social tone and so provoking others' sins.
For that too we should obviously repent.
Human life has two indispensable supports: justice and love. And sin shatters both. When I hurt my neighbour, I not only deny him his rights - his normal human rights - I also put love down. I wither my own, and I stamp on his … and if his be weak I may destroy it.
For that the very least we can do is to repent.
So much is obvious. You don't even have to be a Christian to see that much. But for the Christian you haven't understood life's plot until you've reckoned God in.
In every vicious motive and every evil deed I strike a blow at the Godhead.
On the view of God which we have learned through our Lord Jesus, this means that we are sending a pain through the heart of the universe. Put more bluntly, it means, not that we are being silly enough to offend the Supreme Power, but that we are being beastly enough to wound the Supreme Love.
That God is Love the way Jesus showed Him to be makes sin more base than we thought it to be before. Our little unnoticed sins - our 'shortcomings' as we sanctimoniously call them, deceiving ourselves - may affect our neighbours only very indirectly, but every sin, small or big, flies like an arrow straight to the heart of God.
The final Christian reason for repentance then, over and above the natural three, is the knowledge, not so much that God punishes our sins but that our sins punish God, that they wound Him. Precisely because His love is greater and purer than ours, He is more vulnerable … is more deeply hurt.
Of that we should repent, should we not?
On the positive side, one of the uses of such periods as Lent in which we are encouraged to ponder the Passion of our Lord as we are doing in this series, is to see our Christian task against that sombre background; we are reminded that whenever we behave like sons to God and like brothers to one another - and induce one soul more to do the same - we are lessening God's age-long grief, mitigating it.
The final consideration I want to bring before you - and I hope it will lead us into worship - is that Christ, in such suffering as makes others totally self-absorbed, continued to care for others.
Our sufferings can be so great that we just can't turn our attention away from ourselves to the sufferings of others. We are well aware of the obligation imposed on us by human suffering to be sympathetic; yet there are times when it is an obligation we simply cannot find the heart or the will to meet. We can become so self-absorbed in our own misery that no appeals for help from others ever reach us. That is a sad truth about unaided human nature.
And yet, sometimes a miracle happens. The Spirit of Christ can move in a supernatural fashion in a troubled Christian's heart so that, astonishingly, he finds that even in the midst of intense suffering of his own he is able to give full and compassionate attention to others. Empty and exhausted himself, he becomes a channel of vital friendship, courage and uplift to others as empty and exhausted as he is himself.
It never happens outside of the zone of Christ's influence, for He is the only source of it.
He demonstrated it at in His passion.
Piteously lamented by grieving women on the Via Dolorosa because His end had come and there was now no future for Him, He brushed aside their concern for Him, and out of His extreme weakness and humiliation He sought to prepare them for their future.
"Father forgive them," He cried, of those who nailed Him down."Son, behold your mother," He said to John, out of His massive pain; and "Woman, behold your son," to Mary. Consumed by anguish of His own, He provided for His mother's future.
To the appeal of the thief beside him, He responded, "Today you shall be with me in Paradise." Christ shared with him the same consuming torment, yet out of it He snatched the man from the final catastrophe of his accursed life, forgave his mockery, identified with his agony, and appointed him a place in the eternal habitations.
Human blindness and hardness of heart spat its evil venom at Him. And the overwhelming thing, the divinest thing, the new revelation, the shining mystery, is that nevertheless He loved them still. By the pouring in of love where there was only hate, He neutralised it, disinfected it.
And in that He perfectly displayed His and His Father's lasting attitude to all men. That is what it means that 'God is love' - a love beautiful in Jesus' birth, patiently forbearing in His ministry, sublime in His dying.
That 'God is love' is not to be taken abstractly as it tends to be in theology, or charmingly as it tends to be in popular piety, coaxing us into a sweetly sentimental mood.
It is bigger than that - real, huge and awesome. It covers over appalling things with a superlative magnanimity, which no-one with open eyes and open heart can contemplate but he falls at God's feet in wonder love and praise. It is love in that full sense that Christ reveals.
That love is the divinest reality there is - more divine in God, if we may put it so, than His omnipotence, omniscience and justice.
That love is not - as ignorant worldlings nowadays say - mere human love 'projected' on to God, so that in ascribing it to Him we are 'making God in our own image.' The love we see on the Cross is not love as it is ever seen in natural humanity; it is a quality of love we never felt or saw anywhere in the world until we saw it in this man, this God-man. Before Jesus came, this image of God - stooping, suffering in the ways He suffered in Jesus - had not even been imagined.
In Jesus it became actual, a newly evident reality.
It was love of the unloving, of the unlovable.
It persisted against indifference, scorn, and implacable hostility.
It anticipated the awful consequence of human sin that would be heaped upon it; and when that consequence came, it remained unextinguished - violated yet intact; and in that great, great sense it triumphed. F. W. Faber has taught us to sing the triumph:
O love of God! O
sin of man!
In this dread act your strength is tried;
And victory remains with love
For He, our Lord, is crucified.
This material is copyright; it may not be quoted, published or reproduced without the author's permission, nor preached without acknowledgment!
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