This year I have heard more people talk about Jesus’ death than I can ever remember, even people I previously couldn’t imagine giving much thought to Jesus at all. This familiar story of his trial and death still touches people so deeply, because more than any other part of Jesus’ life, we know the world works just this way. Random events, political jockeying, all seemingly preventable, all unreasonable, but no one can stop it. What happened to Jesus could happen to anyone.
So many words to explain why this story moves us. And yet I heard one set of words that seemed wrong to me. I read in a local paper someone who said that now that she had fully imagined what Jesus’s suffering had been she had never before realized how insignificant her own sufferings were.
If we take anything away from today’s passion reading, it really should be something very like the opposite: today is the day when we find out that our suffering means infinitely more than we usually think it does.
Each of us goes through years where we don’t pay much attention to death, but in other years it’s with us every day. Maybe you are here today in one of those years like that, when you realize that no matter how much we ignore it or work around it, death hurts us, deeply, day after day, in ways that we find it hard to think about. After a while, we think our lives individually must not be all that valuable. So many lives seem to end so quickly, without any point, so much of our world seems to accept suffering and violence as simply the way things are, or a way we get things done.
We don’t ultimately know why God has us in a world where so many people face so much needless sadness and loss. If it’s to prove a point, we’re tempted to say, let’s hear what it is. We don’t know why death is here as our enemy. But we do know that we do not have a God who is indifferent to this, who says, just endure it, it’s not that bad, who says, it’ll all work out in the long run, trust me on this one. Those answers aren’t good enough for us, we want to know that God sees our suffering and understands it and suffers with us and is with us.
Today, God proves it. God is not a changeless, anonymous being out there somewhere, God felt and lived the life that we do, every part of it, even the pain and the death and the anger and the pointlessness.
Today we find out that our bodies are not worthless, in fact, they are the place where we work out our salvation. We find out that our lives here are not worthless, because we are chosen to be heroes as Jesus was. Today we find out that the things we suffer unite us with all our brothers and sisters and with Jesus in a way that we feel in our hearts even when we can’t explain why it should be that way. Does it help our pain all go away? No. But it unites with a God who suffers with us.
Sometimes it’s said that we are a narcissistic society that all we do is look at ourselves and indulge ourselves. At times it does seem like that. But at other times it seems that the one thing we don’t do is look at ourselves, look at ourselves in the mirror and see ourselves as someone who God not only loves but someone whose life was worth dying for. If we believed that about ourselves, that God is so attentive to us individually that even death wasn’t too much to prove it, it wouldn’t be narcissism. It would be a lot harder than that. It would be our first step towards believing that God has singled out our life as one that he loves enough to die for.
Whatever we say about today, let’s not go so far as to say that all suffering is holy. At least once in your life you’ve probably been annoyed by someone who implied that rejection and unhappiness was a sign that he or she was suffering like Jesus. Maybe some suffering does make us like him. But we do know that Jesus’s suffering and death makes God like us, once and for all. That makes everything we do, including our suffering, something so important, that even today, we need remember that every part of the gospel even this part, is for us nothing but good news.