The Gospel Of Suffering

A Spiritual Reflection by Pope John Paul II(taken from the Anawim Way, Daily Liturgical Meditations, August 22 to October 9, 2010, p.82-85)In the light of the unmatchable example of Christ, reflected with singular clarity in the life of His mother, the Gospel of suffering, through the experience and words of the apostles, becomes an inexhaustible source for the ever new generations that succeed one another in the history of the Church. The Gospel of suffering signifies not only the presence of suffering in the Gospel, as one of the themes of the Good News, but also the revelation of the salvific power and salvific significance of suffering in Christ's messianic mission and, subsequently, in the mission and vocation of the Church.Christ did not conceal from His listeners the need for suffering. He said very clearly, "If any man would come after me, let him take up his cross daily", and before His disciples He placed demands of a moral nature that can only be fulfilled on condition that they should "deny themselves". The way that leads to the kingdom of heaven is "hard and narrow", and Christ contrasts it to the "wide and easy" way the "leads to destruction". On various occasions Christ also said that His disciples and confessors would meet with much persecution, something which - as we know - happened not only in the first centuries of the Church's life under the Roman Empire, but also came true in various historical period and in other parts of the world, and still does even in our own time.While the first great chapter of the Gospel of suffering is written down, as the generations pass, by those who suffer persecutions for Christ's sake, simultaneously another great chapter of this Gospel unfolds through the course of history. This chapter is written by all those who suffer together with Christ, uniting their human sufferings to His salvific suffering. In these people there is fulfilled what the first witnesses of the passion and resurrection said and wrote about sharing in the sufferings of Christ. Therefore, in those people there is fulfilled the Gospel of suffering, and at the same time, each of them continues in a certain sense to write it: they write it and proclaim it to the world, they announce it to the world in which they live and to the people of their time.Down through the centuries and generations it has been seen that in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace. To this grace many saints, such as St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius of Loyola and others, over their profound conversion. A result of such a conversion is not only that the individual discovers the salvific meaning of suffering, but above all that he becomes a completely new person. He discovers a new dimension, as it were, of his entire life and vocation. This discovery is a particular confirmation of the spiritual greatness which in man surpasses the body in a way that is completely beyond compare. When this body is gravely ill, totally incapacitated, and the person is almost incapable of living and acting, all the more do interior maturity and spiritual greatness become evident, constituting a touching lesson to those who are healthy and normal.This interior maturity and spiritual greatness in suffering are certainly the result of a particular conversion and cooperation with the grace of the crucified Redeemer. It is He Himself who acts at the heart of human sufferings through His Spirit of truth, through the consoling Spirit. It is He who transforms, in a certain sense, the very substance of the spiritual life, indicating for the person who suffers a place close to Himself. It is He - as the interior Master and Guide - who reveals to the suffering brother and sister this wonderful interchange, situated at the very heart of the mystery of the Redemption. Suffering is, in itself, an experience of evil. But Christ has made suffering the firmest basis of the definitive good, namely the good of eternal salvation. By His suffering on the cross, Christ reached the very roots of evil, of sin and death. He conquered the author of evil, Satan, and his permanent rebellion against the Creator. To the suffering brother or sister, Christ discloses and gradually reveals the horizons of the Kingdom of God: the horizons of a world converted to the Creator, of a world free from sin, a world being built on the saving power of love. And slowly but effectively, Christ leads into this world, into this kingdom of the Father, suffering man, in a certain sense through the very heart of His suffering. For suffering cannot be transformed and changed by the grace from outside, but from within. And Christ through His own salvific suffering is very much present in every human suffering, and can act from within that suffering by the powers of His Spirit of truth, His consoling Spirit.This is not all: the divine Redeemer wishes to penetrate the soul of every sufferer through the heart of His holy mother, the first and the most exalted of all the redeemed. As though by a continuation of the motherhood which by the power of the Holy Spirit had given Him life, the dying Christ conferred upon the ever Virgin Mary a new kind of motherhood - spiritual and universal - towards all human beings, so that every individual, during the pilgrimage of faith, might remain, together with her, closely united to Him unto the Cross, and so that every form of suffering, given fresh life by the power of His Cross, should become no longer the weakness of man but the power of God.However, this interior process does not always follow the same pattern. It often begins and is set in motion with great difficulty. Even the very point of departure differs, people react to suffering in different ways. But in general it can be said that almost always the individual enters suffering with a typically human protest and with the question "why". He asks the meaning of his suffering and seeks an answer to this question on the human level. Certainly he often puts this question to God, and to Christ. Furthermore, he cannot help noticing that the One to whom he puts the question is Himself suffering and wishes to answer him from the cross, from the heart of His own suffering. Nevertheless, it often takes time, even a long time, for this answer to begin to be interiorly perceived. For Christ does not answer directly and He does not answer in the abstract this human questioning about the meaning of suffering. Man hears Christ's saving answer as He himself gradually becomes a sharer in the sufferings of Christ.The answer which comes through this sharing, by way of the interior encounter with the Master, is in itself something more than the mere abstract answer to the question about the meaning of suffering. For it is above all a call. It is a vocation. Christ does not explain in the abstract the reasons for suffering, but before all else He says "Follow Me!" Come! Take part through your suffering in this work of saving the world, a salvation achieved through my suffering! Through my Cross! Gradually, as the individual takes up his cross, spiritually uniting himself to the Cross of Christ, the salvific meaning of suffering is revealed before him. He does not discover this meaning at his own human level, but at the level of the suffering of Christ. At the same time, however, from this level of Christ the salvific meaning of suffering descends to man's level and becomes, in a sense, the individual's personal response. It is then that man finds in his suffering interior peace and even spiritual joy.(On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering, Salvifici Doloris, Pope John Paul II, February 11, 1984, Nos 25-26. Used with permission of St. Paul Media, Boston MA)