How can God's suffering be redemptive?

Lent literally means to fast. Last Wednesday, we commenced the Lenten Season, which spans 40 days, excluding the five Sundays of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to the Easter Vigil on Black Saturday. The 40 days of fasting and abstinence allude to the Israelites’ 40 years of wandering onward to Canaan and Jesus’ 40 days in the desert.

Historical. Our 40-day Lenten observance traces its roots to the fourth century. Then, the two-day fast preceding Easter was extended to 40 days. Moreover, catechumens preparing for Baptism, often adults, fasted and performed sacrifices. So did Christians who had lapsed into sin after their baptism. In sum, the Lenten practices of self-denial were geared toward disposing catechumens to embrace the Christian Faith and inviting Christians to repent for past sins, and recommit to the Christian way of life.

Theological. Many Christians spiritualities, including Mel Gibson’s The Passion, tend to over-emphasize the physical suffering of Jesus on the cross, as though the more intense his agony, the more salvific his death. These theologies and spiritualities promote the notion that the more Jesus’ flesh was torn by the scourging at the pillar, the more the thorns bore into his skull, the more often he fell on his face as he carried the cross, the more he howled in pain as the nails were driven into his palms and feet, the more God’s salvific plans were brought to fruition.

The dangerous implications of a theology that construes physical suffering as redemptive are, on the one hand, the attendant conception of a God who wills and engineers Jesus’ suffering and death and our experience of suffering today, and on the other hand, our acquiescence and tendency to accept suffering as willed by God. Both are erroneous and incompatible with God’s self-revelation..

God does not will our suffering. God desires fullness of life for all. God did not ordain Jesus’ death on the cross. Human beings, particularly the Jewish religious leaders and representatives of the Roman Empire, connived to execute Jesus whose preaching and way of life threatened them. God did not manipulate Judas, the High Priest and Pilate to have Jesus crucified. They rejected God’s will, words and ways embodied in Jesus, in all that he did and stood for.

What then is salvific about the cross? Not the physical pain, but the love underlying the suffering. Love redeems, not pain. Love redeems, not shame. The unjust execution of an innocent man, Jesus, the Son of God, is the work of human sin, a travesty in the eyes of God, the rejection of the Father’s supreme gift to humanity. But the love of Jesus underlying his suffering and his fidelity to his Father and his mission despite the consequent persecution is redemptive.

Ultimately, the depth and purity of love, not the extent and intensity of physical pain, is salvific. Forced suffering is evil, but suffering freely embraced out of love heals and liberates. This brings us to our Lenten observances of prayer, fasting and almsgiving.

Pastoral. Again, our physical and corporeal sacrifices per se are not values in themselves. However, performing them with freedom and love imbues them with spiritual significance and incorporates them into the saving Paschal Mystery of Christ. It is not the intensity of hunger we experience during our fast, the number of churches we visit, the number of rosaries we recite, the amount of alms we give, or the depth of the wounds from self-inflicted flagellations that matter; but rather, the love that accompanies all these sacrifices. The love of God and of our neighbor ought to be the motive underlying the sacrifices we make during this Lenten Season.

If the Season of Lent is the period of renewing our baptismal promises, then to recommit ourselves to our Christian Faith involves, on the one hand, alleviating suffering caused by moral sin and denouncing immoral forces of suffering, such as, poverty, exploitation, oppression. On the other hand, recommitting ourselves to our Christian Faith entails embracing the suffering that comes with loving unconditionally, for instance, material deprivation for opting to live with the poor, calumniation for defending the unlovable in society, persecution for speaking the truth.

Fasting from meat and physical comfort is a laudable way of recommitting ourselves to our Christian Faith. But the physical fast must be conjoined to a spiritual fast—fasting from affirmation and fame and embracing calumny and shame due to love is a redemptive fast that participates in the total self-emptying of Jesus who loves unto death, death on a cross.

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