At last years Servants Orientation, Paul Mather lead a session on ‘discipleship’. During the course of our discussion, he hit us with the following quote…
To live you must choose
To love you must encounter
To grow you must suffer
(Viktor Frankl).
There was a moment of silence as each of us absorbed these words, and as the depths of our souls acknowledged their truth.
Yes, all of us knew that life filled only with pleasure – and no sacrifice – ends up profoundly self centred and shallow.
Suffering: the promise nobody claims
When I first became a Christian, many of the Pentecostal and Evangelical preachers I heard speak would urge me to ‘claim the promises of God’, to take the promises contained in the Bible and ask God to fulfil them for me personally.
But strangely, I never once heard any of them claiming the Biblical promise of suffering! (for example Acts 14:22 “We must pass through many sufferings in order to enter the Kingdom of God”).
In a world obsessed with the frenetic pursuit of wealth, comfort, entertainment and celebrity status, it seems that the church has simply absorbed the same cultural values.
In the last few decades we have seen the emergence of the Prosperity Gospel, in which believers are encouraged to pursue the same glittering baubles of wealth and success that ‘the pagans chase after’ (Matthew 5:32).
However, a second and more subtle twist has also arisen – and often among more thoughtful Christians. We could call this the Therapy Gospel. Just as our society has given itself over to the pursuit of self fulfilment, and the self help sections of bookshops swell larger and larger each year, so too popular Christian theology has mirrored this. God, it now seems, has become the Great Celestial Therapist, existing for no other reason than to help me become completely emotionally and physically fulfilled.
The Prosperity Gospel and the Therapy Gospel are really two sides of the same coin: the belief that God exists chiefly to aid us in our pursuit of personal happiness.
But Jesus never spoke of our personal self-fulfillment being his goal for us – in fact, he said quite the opposite: “Anyone who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his own life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:38-39).
Wow. Does that mean that those medieval images of God as an Inquisitor delighting in suffering were right after all? Does Opus Dei have it right, and we should all be self flagellating ourselves in order to achieve spiritual purity?
No. And here is the strange paradox of Scripture (and of life). Deep, abiding happiness is never attained by directly pursuing it. Instead, it is a by-product of pursuing other values deeper and higher: the Kingdom of God (Matthew 6:33).
Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychotherapist, wrote that the person who has an inspiring WHY for their life gains an ability to endure pain and overcome obstacles that would otherwise destroy them. If we are living for a purpose greater than our self, we are able to endure all manner of suffering. But those who live only for self, Frankl observed, will crumble before the fact of human suffering. Frankl, by the way, made these observations while imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp, having already witnessed the Nazi’s execution of his family.
A few weeks ago we had a Kiwi visitor at our house here in Phnom Penh, and while she was with us one of our young Khmer friends also dropped by. Afterwards Charlotte commented on Phanna’s obvious joy – his huge smile and shining eyes, his ready laugh, his obvious hunger to suck all he could out of life. Yet Phanna’s back ground is one of deep poverty and constant struggle. He had watched both his parents die of AIDS before he was 12 years old.
But Phanna relentlessly believed that God was present in his struggles, and somehow had a purpose for him to fulfil. Presently Phanna works as a youth leader for a small struggling local church. He is involved in ministry to drug addicts and teaches slum kids. He lives on about $50 NZ dollars a month. But Phanna possesses a joy deeper than most affluent Westerners (or Asians for that matter) will ever find.
I believe that one of the reasons a deep malaise has settled over Western society and the Western church is due to its headlong pursuit of physical and emotional comfort, or self fulfilment, and its desperate attempts to avoid suffering at all costs. And this surely is because we no longer have any great purpose, any heroic or inspiring dream that we are prepared to live and die for.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said that “if a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live”.
We need to get our heads around the fact that the New Testament promises us both joy (a far deeper quality than happiness or pleasure), and suffering – all at the same time. Check out Luke 6:22-23, James 1:2-4 or Romans 5:1-3 for example.
Suffering and pain are not something we should ever seek for their own sake (and to do so is a sign of psychological illness). But…if we genuinely embrace life and seek to follow after Jesus, and if we are really pursuing justice and righteousness and the Kingdom of God, we will encounter suffering. It is to be expected. It’s normal, it’s life. Moreover, in following Jesus we will find ourselves deliberately entering into other peoples suffering, sharing it, and seeking ways together to walk through it. And as we do, our own ‘unhappiness’ will seem to grow smaller. We will gain perspective. And as we willingly embrace and live through suffering, we will also encounter something deeper: joy. This is the way of Christ.
Once upon a time the Christian church could say that “suffering is redemptive”. Not self inflicted suffering (the self flagellation of the Monks), but encountered suffering embraced and endured in order to bring about good for others. Self sacrifice. Courage. Endurance. Longsuffering. But we don’t say that any more. These are words that have been lost from our Christian vocabulary. How desperately we need them back.
There is no joy without suffering, and no suffering without joy. There is no redemption without sacrifice. If we could grow beyond our trivial, self preoccupied pursuit of happiness and self fulfilment, we might just discover that Jesus was right about this.
[Kristin Jack is the Asia Coordinator of Servants and has lived amongst the urban poor in Cambodia with his family for the past 12 years.]
