CHRIST is risen; yet we die, and suffering stays. With the resurrection, God’s great recreation has begun; yet the cycles of life and death proceed. What are we to make of suffering and death after the resurrection? Say too little, and we short-change the resurrection and its greatness. Say an excessive amount of — or speak too easily — and we risk a glib response to suffering.
When theologians have tried to know how the events of Easter transform our experience of suffering, and even of death, two approaches stand out: God’s sharing in our human life; and our sharing in God’s human life. With the primary, the emphasis is on God in Christ, sharing our suffering. The other looks at how our experience can then offer a level of sharing in Christ’s story.
The first approach has been set out poetically, when it comes to wayfaring. Going before us in his death and rising, Christ has mapped and secured the territory. The human journey retains its troubles, nevertheless it has been charted, its route made protected. As Augustine of Hippo (354-420) put it, “By his humility, Christ has been made a road for us in time, that by his divinity he is likely to be for us a mansion in eternity.”
In St John’s Gospel, Christ says not only that he goes ahead to organize a dwelling place, but in addition that he himself is the strategy to get there (14.2, 6). The remarkable image, in Psalm 23, of God as our shepherd, says something similar: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I’ll fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me.”
In the arresting version by St Gregory of Nyssa (c.335-c.394), Christ figures out the “labyrinth” that lies ahead of us: ”Although people wander away wandering in a labyrinth, they will escape its intricate and deceptive turns by meeting someone with experience, and get out by following the footsteps of their leader. So, too, the labyrinth of this life is without exit for human nature, unless someone should take the identical way by which he who was in it got outside its confine (the ‘labyrinth’ here being the exitless prison of death).”
ST IRENAEUS (c.130-c.202) wrote in an identical way: “Thus he [Christ] got here even to death, that he is likely to be ‘the first-born from the dead, having pre-eminence amongst all’, the writer of life, who goes before all and shows the best way.” Christ passed through every stage of life, becoming like us in each, in order that we imitate him in whichever stage, including suffering and death, we discover ourselves.
With that, Irenaeus offers a pivot between the 2 approaches introduced above: one emphasising that Christ shared our lot, the opposite that we will share Christ’s. Irenaeus first teaches that God united himself to suffering and death, sharing in our experience. That also means, nonetheless, that we will now, in turn, imitate Christ in his suffering and death.
Several theologians of the Early Church, Irenaeus amongst them, wrote that “God became what we’re in order that we will turn into what God is.” The extraordinary twist is that the God we imitate shared our suffering, in its fullest extremity, within the human nature of Christ. What now happens to us can subsequently turn into an imitation of Christ. As Louis Bouyer (1913-2004) put it, “Our Lord doesn’t must continue to exist earth again and to die again — this has been done once and for all. But the Church, his body, must progressively, in all her members, go through all the things he did.”
HAVING written a superb deal about themes of participation in theology, I now recognise that few of us who give attention to that topic have made enough of participation in Christ’s death, given how much New Testament writers dwell upon it (Matthew 16.24; Romans 6.5-11; 7.1-7; 8.17; 2 Corinthians 1.4-7, 3.8-12; Philippians 3.10-11; Colossians. 1.24; 1 Peter. 2.21, 4.13-14. . .). Nor, we may think, is the theme preached about often enough — although the Book of Common Prayer holds it before us on Easter Day, no less. The epistle for the day incorporates the arresting announcement that “you will have died,” framed as a part of the Good News, because it belongs to the reality that our life is “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3.3).
The principal way through which we share in Christ’s death — “mortification”, because it is typically called — is baptism. After baptism, nonetheless, this participation also unfolds within the struggles and sufferings of life, as St John Chrysostom (c.347-407) noted: “One is completed by Christ in baptism, and the opposite it’s our duty to effect by earnestness afterwards. For that our former sins were buried, got here of his gift. But the remaining dead to sin after baptism have to be the work of our own earnestness, nonetheless much we discover God here also giving us large help.”
I’m unsure that Chrysostom insists quite enough, here — along with his talk of the “work of our own earnestness” — on our total reliance on God; but his evaluation is otherwise good. The first great sharing within the paschal mystery is available in baptism. In it, we share Christ’s death in addition to his resurrection. There follows a constructive, lifelong sharing in his suffering and death, by which the remaining hold of sin upon us is weakened.
Although this account could also be unfamiliar today, it echoes down the centuries, in Protestant in addition to Roman Catholic and Orthodox writers. St Paul, so keen to explore our union with Christ in baptism, also wrote magnificently about this subsequent, ongoing technique of sharing in Christ’s suffering and death — resulting in resurrection — in Philippians 3.
HISTORICALLY, Christians — especially poor and suffering Christians — have seen such sharing in Christ’s agonies as a strategy to understand and “use” deprivation and illness which has seemed productive and meaningful. Suffering brings them closer to the Christ, the “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”. Their suffering can turn into a self-offering to God, stuffed with hope for resurrection.
There could be problems with that: theological problems, if death and suffering are allowed to eclipse life and resurrection as Christianity’s last word; political or ethical problems, if this outlook stifles protest against an unjust situation (“just offer it up”). Problems, yes; but contemporary theologians should think twice before claiming to know higher than those in painful circumstances methods to understand their suffering in relation to Christ’s death and rising.
I even have offered two angles on the experience of suffering and death after Christ’s resurrection: one, based on God’s making our suffering and death his own; the opposite, on our fellowship with God in imitation of Christ’s suffering. The foundation is in God’s act, in Christ’s experience, and that’s what allows it to be excellent news. The Easter proclamation is that God’s wayfaring with us in Christ didn’t get stuck within the grave. If we share in Christ’s suffering, that’s in order that we may also share in his victory.
The Revd Andrew Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity within the University of Oxford and a Canon Residentiary of Christ Church Cathedral.
Word of the month:
Christology — the branch of Christian theology coping with Jesus Christ, especially his person and the relation of humanity and divinity; from Greek Christos (“Christ”) and logos (here, “speech about”).
