( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 )

IV Jesus Christ Suffering Conquered By Love

§14. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”27 These words, spoken by Christ in His conversation with Nicodemus, introduce us into the very heart of God’s salvific work. They also express the very essence of Christian soteriology, that is, of the theology of salvation. Salvation means liberation from evil, and for this reason it is closely bound up with the problem of suffering. According to the words spoken to Nicodemus, God gives His Son to “the world” to free men from evil, which bears within itself the definitive and absolute perspective on suffering. At the same time, the very word “gives” (”gave”) indicates that this liberation must be achieved by the only begotten Son through His own suffering. And in this, love is manifested, the infinite love both of that only-begotten Son and of the Father who for this reason “gives” His Son. This is love for man, love for the “world”: it is salvific love.

We here find ourselves and we must clearly realize this in our shared reflection on this problem faced with a completely new dimension of our theme. It is a different dimension from the one which was determined and, in a certain sense, concluded the search for the meaning of suffering within the limits of justice. This is the dimension of Redemption, to which in the Old Testament, at least in the Vulgate text, the words of the just man Job already seem to refer: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last…I shall see God….”28 Whereas our consideration has so far concentrated primarily, and in a certain sense exclusively, on suffering in its multiple temporal dimension (as also the sufferings of the just man Job), the words quoted above from Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus refer to suffering in its fundamental and definitive meaning. God gives His only-begotten Son so that man “should not perish” and the meaning of these words “should not perish” is precisely specified by the words that follow: “but have eternal life.”

Man “perishes” when he loses “eternal life.” The opposite of salvation is not, therefore, only temporal suffering, any kind of suffering, but the definitive suffering: the loss of eternal life, being rejected by God—damnation. The only-begotten Son was given to humanity primarily to protect man against this definitive evil and against definitive suffering. In His salvific mission, the Son must therefore strike evil right at its transcendental roots from which it develops in human history. These transcendental roots of evil are grounded in sin and death: for they are at the basis of the loss of eternal life. The mission of the only begotten Son consists in conquering sin and death. He conquers sin by His obedience unto death, and He overcomes death by His resurrection.

§15. When one says that Christ by His mission strikes at evil at its very roots, we have in mind not only evil and definitive, eschatological suffering (so that man “should not perish, but have eternal life”), but also—at least indirectly—evil and suffering in their temporal and historical dimension. For evil remains bound to sin and death. And even if we must use great caution in judging man’s suffering as a consequence of concrete sins (this is shown precisely by the example of the just man Job), nevertheless, suffering cannot be divorced from the sin of the beginnings, from what St. John calls “the sin of the world,”29 from the sinful background of the personal actions and social processes in human history. Though it is not limit to apply here the narrow criterion of direct dependence (as Job’s three friends did), it is equally true that one cannot reject the criterion that, at the basis of human suffering, there is a complex involvement with sin.

It is the same when we deal with death. It is often awaited even as a liberation from the suffering of this life. At the same time, it is not possible to ignore the fact that it constitutes as it were a definitive summing-up of the destructive work both in the bodily organism and in the psyche. But death primarily involves the dissolution of the entire psychophysical personality of man. The soul survives and subsists separated from the body, while the body is subjected to gradual decomposition according to the words of the Lord God, pronounced after the sin committed by man at the beginning of his earthly history: “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”30 Therefore, even if death is not a form of suffering in the temporal sense of the word, even if in a certain way it is beyond all forms of suffering, at the same time the evil which the human being experiences in death has a definitive and total character. By His salvific work, the only-begotten Son liberates man from sin and death. First of all He blots out from human history the dominion of sin, which took root under the influence of the evil spirit beginning with original sin, and then He gives man the possibility of living in sanctifying grace. In the wake of His victory over sin, He also takes away the dominion of death, by His resurrection beginning the process of the future resurrection of the body. Both are essential conditions of “eternal life,” that is, of man’s definitive happiness in union with God; this means, for the saved, that in the eschatological perspective suffering is totally blotted out.

As a result of Christ’s salvific work, man exists on earth with the hope of eternal life and holiness. And even though the victory over sin and death achieved by Christ in His cross and resurrection does not abolish temporal suffering from human life, nor free from suffering the whole historical dimension of human existence, it nevertheless throws a new light upon this dimension and upon every suffering; the light of salvation. This is the light of the Gospel, that is, of the Good News. At the heart of this light is the truth expounded in the conversation with Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.”31 This truth radically changes the picture of man’s history and his earthly situation: in spite of the sin that took root in this history both as an original inheritance and as the “sin of the world” and as the sum of personal sins, God the Father has loved the only-begotten Son, that is, He loves Him in a lasting way; and then in time, precisely through this all-surpassing love, He “gives” this Son, that He may strike at the very roots of human evil and thus draw close in a salvific way to the whole world of suffering in which man shares.

§16. In His messianic activity in the midst of Israel, Christ drew increasingly closer to the world of human suffering. “He went about doing good,”32and His actions concerned primarily those who were suffering and seeking help. He healed the sick; consoled the afflicted; fed the hungry; freed people from deafness, from blindness, from leprosy, from the devil and from various physical disabilities; three times He restored the dead to life. He was sensitive to every human suffering, whether of the body or of the soul. And at the same time He taught, and at the heart of His teaching there are the eight beatitudes, which are addressed to people tried by various sufferings in their temporal life. These are “the poor in spirit” and “the afflicted” and “those who hunger and thirst for justice” and those who are “persecuted for justice’ sake,” when they insult them, persecute them and speak falsely every kind of evil against them for the sake of Christ….33 Thus according to Matthew; Luke mentions explicitly those “who hunger now.”34

At any rate, Christ drew close above all to the world of human suffering through the fact of having taken this suffering upon His very self. During His public activity, He experienced not only fatigue, homelessness, misunderstanding even on the part of those closest to Him, but, more than anything, He became progressively more and more isolated and encircled by hostility and the preparations for putting Him to death. Christ is aware of this, and often speaks to His disciples of the sufferings and death that await Him: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him to the Gentiles; and they will mock him, and spit upon him, and scourge him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise.”35 Christ goes towards His passion and death with full awareness of the mission that He has to fulfill precisely in this way. Precisely by means of this suffering He must bring it about “that man should not perish, but have eternal life.” Precisely by means of His cross He must strike at the roots of evil, planted in the history of man and in human souls. Precisely by means of His cross He must accomplish the work of salvation. This work, in the plan of eternal Love, has a redemptive character.

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And therefore Christ severely reproves Peter when the latter wants to make Him abandon the thoughts of suffering and of death on the cross.36 And when, during His arrest in Gethsemane, the same Peter tries to defend Him with the sword, Christ says, “Put your sword back into its place…. But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?”37 And He also says, “Shall I not drink the cup which the Father has given me?38 This response like others that reappear in different points of the Gospel, shows how profoundly Christ was imbued by the thought that He had already expressed in the conversation with Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”39 Christ goes toward His own suffering, aware of its saving power; He goes forward in obedience to the Father, but primarily He is united to the Father in this love with which He has loved the world and man in the world. And for this reason St. Paul will write of Christ: “He loved me and gave himself for me.”40

§17. The Scriptures had to be fulfilled. There were many messianic texts in the Old Testament which foreshadowed the sufferings of the future Anointed One of God. Among all these, particularly touching is the one which is commonly called the Fourth song of the Suffering servant, in the Book of Isaiah. The prophet, who has rightly been called, “the Fifth Evangelist,” presents in this Song an image of the sufferings of the Servant with a realism as acute as if he were seeing them with ho own eyes: the eyes of the body and of the spirit. In the light of the verses of Isaiah, the passion of Christ becomes almost more expressive and touching than in the descriptions of the evangelists themselves. Behold, the true Man of Sorrows presents Himself before us:

”He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned every one to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.41

The Song of the Suffering Servant contains a description in which it is possible, in a certain sense, to identify the stages of Christ’s passion in their various details: the arrest, the humiliation, the blows, the spitting, the contempt for the prisoner, the unjust sentence, and then the scourging, the crowning with thorns and the mocking, the carrying of the cross. the crucifixion and the agony.

Even more than this description of the passion, what strikes us in the words of the prophet is the depth of Christ’s sacrifice. Behold, He, though innocent, takes upon Himself the sufferings of all people, because He takes upon Himself the sins of all. “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”: all human sin in its breadth and depth becomes the true cause of the Redeemer’s suffering. If the suffering “is measured” by the evil suffered, then the words of the prophet enable us to understand the extent of this evil and suffering with which Christ burdened Himself. It can be said that this is “substitutive” suffering; but above all it is “redemptive.” The Man of Sorrows of that prophecy is truly that “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”42 In His suffering, sins are canceled out precisely because He alone as the only-begotten Son could take them upon Himself, accept them with that love for the Father which overcomes the evil of every sin; in a certain sense He annihilates this evil in the spiritual space of the relationship between God and humanity, and fills this space with good.

Here we touch upon the duality of nature of a single personal subject of redemptive suffering. He who by His passion and death on the cross brings about the Redemption is the only-begotten Son whom God “gave.” And at the same time this Son who is consubstantial with the Father suffers as a man. His suffering has human dimensions; it also has unique in the history of humanity a depth and intensity which, while being human, can also be an incomparable depth and intensity of suffering, insofar as the man who suffers is in person the only-begotten Son Himself: “God from God.” Therefore, only He—the only begotten Son—is capable of embracing the measure of evil contained in the sin of man: in every sin and in “total” sin, according to the dimensions of the historical existence of humanity on earth.

§18. It can be said that the above considerations now bring us directly to Gethsemane and Golgotha, where the Song of the Suffering Servant, contained in the Book of Isaiah, was fulfilled. But before going there, let us read the next verses of the Son, which give a prophetic anticipation of the passion at Gethsemane and Golgotha. The Suffering Servant and this in its turn is essential for an analysis of Christ’s passion takes on Himself those sufferings which were spoken of, in a totally voluntary way:

”He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb,
so he opened not his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
and as for his generation,
who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people?
And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.”43

Christ suffers voluntarily and suffers innocently. With His suffering He accepts that question which posed by people many times has been expressed, in a certain sense, in a radical way by the Book of Job. Christ, however, not only carries with Himself the same question (and this in an even more radical way, for He is not only a man like Job but the only-begotten Son of God), but He also carries the greatest possible answer to this question. One can say that this answer emerges from the very matter of which the question is made up. Christ gives the answer to the question about suffering and the meaning of suffering not only by His teaching, that is, by the Good News, but most of all by His own suffering, which is integrated with this teaching of the Good News in an organic and indissoluble way. And this is the final, definitive word of this teaching: “the word of the cross,” as St. Paul one day will say.44

This “word of the cross” completes with a definitive reality the image of the ancient prophecy. Many episodes, many discourses during Christ’s public teaching bear witness to the way in which from the beginning He accepts this suffering which is the will of the Father for the salvation of the world. However, the prayer in Gethsemane becomes a definitive point here. The words: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will,”45 and later: “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done,”46 have a manifold eloquence. They prove the truth of that love which the only-begotten Son gives to the Father in His obedience. At the same time, they attest to the truth of His suffering. The words of that prayer of Christ in Gethsemane prove the truth of love through the truth of suffering. Christ’s words confirm with all simplicity this human truth of suffering to its very depths: suffering is the undergoing of evil before which man shudders. He says: “Let it pass from me,” just as Christ says in Gethsemane.

His words also attest to this unique and incomparable depth and intensity of suffering which only the man who is the only-begotten Son could experience; they attest to that depth and intensity which the prophetic words quoted above in their own way help us to understand. Not of course completely (for this we would have to penetrate the divine-human mystery of the subject), but at least they help us to understand that difference (and at the same time the similarity) which exists between every possible form of human suffering and the suffering of the God-man. Gethsemane is the place where precisely this suffering, in all the truth expressed by the prophet concerning the evil experienced in it, is revealed as it were definitively before the eyes of Christ’s soul.

After the words in Gethsemane come the words uttered on Golgotha, words which bear witness to this depth unique in the history of the world—of the evil of the suffering experienced. When Christ says: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”, His words are not only an expression of that abandonment which many times found expression in the Old Testament, especially in the psalms and in particular in that Psalm 22(21) from which come the words quoted.47 One can say that these words on abandonment are born at the level of that inseparable union of the Son with the Father, and are born because the Father “laid on him the iniquity of us all.”48 They also foreshadow the words of St. Paul: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin.”49 Together with this horrible weight, encompassing the “entire” evil of the turning away from God which is contained in sin, Christ, through the divine depth of His filial union with the Father, perceives in a humanly inexpressible way this suffering which us the separation, the rejection by the Father, the estrangement from God. But precisely through this suffering He accomplishes the Redemption, and can say as He breathes His last: “It is finished.”50

One can also say that the Scripture has been fulfilled, that these words of the Song of the Suffering Servant have been definitively accomplished: “It was the will of the Lord to bruise him.”51 Human suffering has reached its culmination in the passion of Christ. And at the same time it has entered into a completely new dimension and a new order: it has been linked to love, to that love of which Christ spoke to Nicodemus, to that love which creates good, drawing it out by means of suffering, just as the supreme good of the Redemption of the world was drawn from the cross of Christ, and from that cross constantly takes its beginning. The cross of Christ has become a source from which flow rivers of living water.52 In it we must also pose anew the question about the meaning of suffering, and read in it, to its very depths, the answer to this question.

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