Following Jesus in Suffering

Any form of entertainment – watching a movie, reading a book, turning on the ballgame – usually needs some twists and turns along the way to keep our attention. If the plot happens just how we expected, if the game goes just the way we thought, we probably won’t find it all that interesting. What usually entertains us are the things that keep us guessing.

Plot twists in real life though are very different. Unexpected occurrences and surprising events are often not entertaining, but instead traumatic and even disorienting. For example, many of us this weekend have been thinking back to the 9/11 attacks, and to where we were twenty years ago when we heard about them. The great loss of life was devastating, but perhaps just as traumatic was the shock of it – of being attacked here on our own soil. That was a painful plot twist that perhaps we could not have imagined before the attacks twenty years ago.

In the Gospel today, Peter also experiences a painful shock. Having just confessed his faith in Jesus as not just a wise man or holy preacher, but as God’s chosen, anointed Messiah, Peter finds out that Christ is going to Jerusalem to suffer and die, and to do so knowingly and willingly. The idea of God’s own Son dying at the hands of sinners was surely not a plot twist that Peter anticipated. But as Jesus himself says, any suggestion to the contrary – to think that such couldn’t happen or shouldn’t – is to think “not as God does, but as human beings do.”

Jesus then takes this plot twist one step further. Turning to his disciples, and the crowd at large, he says that his followers must also deny themselves and take up their cross. It’s a pretty clear rebuke of the mindset that Peter had: that suffering was somehow incompatible with what God wills. That attitude is still around today, and it presents an ever-present temptation to us who say we are followers of Jesus. Sometimes, we can fall into the trap of thinking, “Jesus suffered so that I don’t have to.” There is an element of truth there, but it needs a little expanding: Jesus suffered death so that I won’t suffer eternal death – eternal separation from God in hell. That is the deepest and most joyous truth of our faith. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t have to suffer at all. In fact, as we hear today, we should instead say, “Jesus suffered, therefore I will have to suffer also.” To follow him, we must follow the path he took – not by avoiding the Cross, or finding some way around it, but by passing through it.

Titian, Christ Carrying the Cross (c. 1565)

Suffering, of course, is never pleasant. However, it can have meaning when we approach it as Jesus approached his Cross. Jesus went to the Cross out of love and a sense of purpose: he knew it would be the manner by which God would remake the world, opening the doors of salvation for all of humanity. That work of redemption that began with Jesus continues in our lives and helps remake us in the image of the Son, especially when we intentionally unite our sufferings to those of Christ. For the Christian, life’s unexpected turns are never just cruel twists of fate: losing a job, being diagnosed with an illness, or a family member passing away suddenly. These are not just random traumas, but opportunities to embrace the Cross, to share more deeply in the redemptive love of Christ. Or when we consider the more routine but nonetheless painful experiences of the day to day: stress at work, challenges in our marriage or in raising children, betrayal from those who should be our friends, discouragement or emptiness in our spiritual life. These sufferings don’t mean that God is absent or doesn’t hear our prayers; rather they are invitations to learn how to be remade into Christ’s image, and to bear well the Cross in order to share what comes after.

It’s essential not to forget there is an after. On Tuesday of this week, we will celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross – a chance to remember that the Cross was the instrument by which Christ defeated sin and death. Jesus’s victory came not by avoiding the Cross, or trying to go around it, but by passing through it into what followed after: the Resurrection. That’s the best plot twist in history, of course, and Jesus assures us that if we join him in his Cross, we will share in his victory: “whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it.” If we try to save our life by avoiding suffering, going around the Cross, then we will end up losing everything. But if instead, we enter into our sufferings knowingly, and willingly, and lovingly, then the difficulties and sorrows of the present moment will be more than made up for in our sharing of Jesus’s victory, the Resurrection.

Friends, Jesus assures us today that the mystery of suffering is not meaningless, as if God delighted in keeping us guessing. Rather, it’s through suffering that the Lord redeems the world, and he invites us to look deeply into our hearts today, to see whether we believe that. Maybe, like Peter, we face the temptation to reject the idea of suffering. If that’s the case, let’s ask the Lord for his encouragement, maybe even for a little of his rebuke, as he gave to Peter, to learn to think beyond our human way, but to think as God does – as Jesus did. Let’s ask the Lord to help us to see his presence in the crosses we face, and to find in them an opportunity to love him more deeply, to be remade in his image – so that following him now in our sufferings, we may hope to be exalted one day in his victory.