Christ's Example in Suffering

I don’t always derive the comfort from the Advent readings I might. Sometimes I feel like Martha just before Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead: "Yes I know you are the Resurrection, on the Last Day." She felt little enthusiasm knowing her brother would rise only in the future, not now. Do we feel that we will only come alive in the future? Yet Christ is present now, not just on the last day!

Part of it too may be the cringing that accompanies an undeserved compliment. One recent reading goes: ‘Console my people, console them’ says your God. / ‘Speak to the heart of Jerusalem and call to her, that her time of service is ended, that her sin is atoned for, that she has received from the hand of the Lord double punishment for all her crimes.’”

I know I've not received single punishment for my crimes, let alone double. In the Psalm “where justice and mercy kiss” I imagined them kissing in the person of Christ, who was fully just but also showed mercy and love in his dying for us. We say that he died for our sins, and he did, but he didn’t die instead of us. We still have to die. We still have our crosses.

The way the world works is that the coin of the realm is relief of suffering: if someone does something that prevents me from suffering, even as minor as letting me in their lane of traffic, I am grateful. I feel the love. But if relief of suffering is the only thing I see as of value, then how can I truly celebrate Christ's love, He who relieves our sins and not our sufferings? Until I truly see sin, and not suffering, as the supreme evil, I can't truly be grateful to Christ.

The Father is to Christ what Christ is to us and there was no diminution of Jesus's love for the Father knowing that he had to die on the cross. What the Father asked of Jesus didn’t affect His love for the Father. He didn’t say: “if the Father loved me, He wouldn’t give me this cross.” The fact of his suffering, including the suffering of the Incarnation and being made human when He was God, was completely irrelevant as far as Christ's love for the Father. It was as a non-sequitor!