A personal look at private and collective Suffering

A personal look at private and collective Suffering

There must be numerous articles, journals, and speaker’s engagements that discuss, view, and analyze the existence of suffering everywhere on the planet.  Questions as to why God allows us to suffer and no substantial answer that any of us can discern with accuracy continues to become the number one type of discussion around the world.

The one question that many Christians may ask is why God sent his Son to die for all of us since no one had the fortitude enabling them to suffer legitimately for their own sins let alone everyone else as well.  We are told that one drop of his precious blood would have been enough to redeem us.  Can you even imagine being asked to shed a little bit of our own blood to forgive us?  

Christ’s whole life is a mystery of redemption.  Redemption comes to us above all through the blood of his cross, but this mystery is at work throughout Christ’s entire life.  (CCC 517).

The baptism of Jesus is on his part the acceptance and inauguration of his mission as God’s suffering Servant.  (see Isaiah’s Suffering Servant songs) He allows himself to be numbered among sinners; he is already “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”  Already he is anticipating the “baptism” of his bloody death.  Already he is coming to “fulfill all righteousness,” that  is, he is submitting himself entirely to his Father’s will: out of love he consents to this baptism of death for the remission of our sins.  The Father’s voice responds to the Son’s acceptance, proclaiming his entire delight in his Son.  The Spirit whom Jesus possessed in fulness from his conception comes to rest on him.  Jesus will be the source of the Spirit for all mankind.  At his baptism “the heavens were opened” - the heavens that Adam’s sin had closed - and the waters were sanctified by the descent of Jesus and the Spirit, a prelude to the new creation.  (CCC 536).

Here the suffering of one man; Jesus Christ, is personal; yet we all are sharing that same baptism of suffering as a collective body; the Body of Christ which is all of us.  

What about the very suffering we must go through to arrive at the Cross; which without we will never enter into heaven!  Why must we suffer?  The answer lies in the truth that without this special reason for water baptism and the Spirit of God, that is the only path to the cross that is our way to eternal bliss with Christ.

Pray the passion of Christ in all that we do, achieve, give as sacrifice, and become the very suffering of Christ in our journey to our own cross which will open the door to paradise for us  one day. 

Ralph B. Hathaway