A Post-Easter Meditation
Only the Suffering of Christ Was a Gift
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
—James 1:2-4, ESV
Your suffering is not a gift.
No, it is suffering and it is wicked. Even if you can wring out the story of Job in a way that finds the Lord willed Job’s suffering, in no way does that mysterious text describe the suffering of the righteous as some sort of gift that we should be thankful for. Job’s suffering was brutal. It was not good.
We can find some suffering that is good, like the soreness that comes after a good workout or the pain of childbirth, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the sort of suffering we see coming out of Gaza, the suffering at the hands of terrorists which caused the war in Gaza, the pain of losing loved ones, the pain of disease, the injustice of racist slavery, the suffering of church abuse victims, and so on. We are not children—we understand what real suffering is. Some things are inconveniences; I mean here the weighty things that grind life to a halt.
Some teachers want to reposition suffering as a gift, that enduring deep pain or tragedy can be good because it drives us to intimately rely on our creator, but I want to reject that notion entirely. No suffering is light. It is suffering, and it should be grieved.
When James encourages us to count our sufferings as joy, he’s not saying suffering is good; he’s saying we might take good from them, that suffering is part and parcel to being alive. Paul took it a step further by saying that our good Father turns all things to our good. But they were not saying suffering was good. If suffering is goodness, then goodness isn’t good at all. Goodness would be unknowable.
Only the suffering of Christ was a gift.
We can’t undo our suffering by pretending it was good. We can only begin to undo suffering by looking at the suffering of Christ himself, who willingly took on our frailty in order to endure our sufferings with us. He suffered for and with us, but then renewed our hope with a quiet resurrection on a Sunday morning, a promise that suffering would be ended once and for all, as it was in the beginning and ever shall be—a world without end.
And so, for the joy that is set before us, we endure our crosses, counting as joy the various trials that beset our way.
Thanks be to God.