Going to Hell Sans Handbasket

It has been my experience that life has a way of throwing crazy curve balls at inopportune times. Starting a new life some few hundred miles away from home presented problems and challenges that I did not anticipate and indeed found nearly insurmountable. My grandmother is terminally ill, and I feel that I am neglecting my obligations to my family by being so far away. Given the current economic climate, finding a job has been a far greater hassle than it ever should have been. I anticipated the challenge of meeting new people and forming close relationships, but the added stress from the other two significant issues made my social life more tense and distracted than it would have been otherwise.

It struck me as ironic when our first topic engaged the idea of financial stability, given my struggles with said topic. I feel that I have learned something fundamental to the Christian experience: the motif of suffering as a core component of following Christ. I will treat the motif in three parts: my personal experiences in coming to accept the motif, the expression of the motif as running through the Biblical meta-narrative with special attention to John's writings, and the purpose of suffering in both the original culture and the surprisingly similar purpose of suffering in contemporary society.

I will admit that I came here with unrealistic expectations. I expected the world to hand me everything I wanted on a silver platter. It goes without saying that my expectations were shattered. Despite my consistent and vehement railings against the prosperity gospel, my theology essentially mirrored theirs. While I certainly gave lip service to the motif of suffering, I did not really put much stock in it. Everything went so well during my undergraduate program that somehow I came to expect that my current experience was indicative of how life is supposed to go. Perhaps life is supposed to be wonderful for everyone who ever lives life, but given the disease, famine, poverty, and death that the world endures daily, one can hardly claim that life is wonderful.

I became angry with God and wondered what was wrong with me that I should be going through this. It is funny how easily I embraced a retributive justice theory, even though I do not really believe that God punishes everyone. Somehow all my thoughts and certainties about how God works were up for grabs again. I have fluctuated between excessive rage and excessive depression for about the past three months. The real crisis was that I found that I felt entitled to a job, to my anger and sadness, and to a life of certainty and comfort.

I finally began to write some of my thoughts down in a journal and realized just how petty and foolish I had been. I have been given the gift of existence. Even though life is not easy, it is still superior to the alternative. Indeed, any sense of entitlement that I felt evaporates rather quickly when one recalls the suffering of Christ on our behalf. It was then that I remembered a passage from John's Gospel:

"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: 'Servants are not greater than their master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also." 15:18-20 TNIV

I had not been abandoned by Christ; indeed, I met him through a church that is worth its salt and through my suffering. My job situation is no better. My grandmother is still dying. Life is still Hell. But I am not alone, and that difference makes all the difference. I shall return to this thought soon.

Yet I must fulfill my second promise, namely an overview of the motif's usage in the text. In the interest of brevity, I will give a very slim overview. God in creation originates the motif in creation with the act of creating another being by sharing the status of existence with other things. He lessens his uniqueness for the sake of others. He then proceeds to use and deliver a specific people out of their slavery in order to be a beacon of hope for all people. When that plan failed, God subjects himself to human status and to a personal Hell on Golgotha. He then suffers along with his church at the hands of Roman imperialism until the time of Constantine.

The suffering of Christ and his church becomes the modus operandi for redemption. In Acts 16, Paul allows himself to be whipped and imprisoned specifically for the purpose of slapping pax Romana in the face. Rome promised power, peace, and prosperity, a euangelion (gospel) that sounds remarkably like the pipe dream I had. Paul, a Roman citizen, could not be legally whipped or imprisoned without a trial. By subjecting himself to such treatment, a prison guard and his family believed in Christ, and Paul displayed pax Christi as superior to pax Romana.

When Rome began to hammer Christians hard in response to the Council of Jamnia, John wrote perhaps his most powerful work, the book of Revelation. Therein, John viciously assails Rome, calling it by the name of every evil empire within the Jewish collective memory. Upon running out of empires, John turns to the prophets Daniel and Ezekiel for more imagery of incarnate evil. In each story where Rome is compared with an evil empire/ image, the people of God suffer at its hands. In each story, God delivers his people. In each story, the clear testimony is the redemptive power of God via the medium of suffering. Ultimately, God suspends suffering and declares pax Christi eternally.

The power of suffering is that it exposes pax (insert empire name here) for what it truly is, an empty promise. Certainly the packaging looks good, but the wrapping paper is irrelevant to the kid on Christmas morning. What matters is what is on the inside, and though we might have to sell all we have to afford this pearl of great price, we rejoice to have it. Suffering is Christian dissent from this world and confession of God's eternal kingdom. It declares the inadequacy of this world to ever provide what we truly want out of it while looking forward to a world in which we have all we need. Bonhoeffer's Ethics places strong emphasis on this dual confession as such, and I feel that Bonhoeffer's argument holds.

Which brings me at length to a conclusion. Suffering is only necessary insofar as 1) culture proclaims its own agendas as superior to the agenda of loving God and loving others as one's self 2) death and evil (both human and natural) wreak havoc on the human experience. Until Christ's redemption brings in the Kingdom of God in fullness, however, suffering remains a necessary and empowering element of following Christ. I do not mean that Christians should always be scraping to get by, living in a consistent state of trouble. Nor do I mean that Christians who are secure financially should toss aside such security in favor of suffering. What I am saying is that if in the course of following Christ one should find themselves in my position with regard to financial security, embrace it as a golden opportunity. The real merit in Christian faith is not in escaping Hell, but in the presence of Christ even while one is there.