Month: March 2016

The depth of Christ’s humiliation is astonishing. His life was marked by radical marginalization and poverty; he was born a political refugee, grew up a subsistence-level worker, and died homeless and possessionless.

If we believe Christ suffered because he wants us to emulate his example, our lives will be known for their striving and either frustration (for failing) or pride (for succeeding on our own power). Fortunately the New Testament paints a different picture.

Viktor Frankl observed, “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.” No stranger to suffering, Dr. Frankl was a psychotherapist who willingly stayed in Austria and endured the holocaust. Of his time in the concentration camp, he wrote, “There was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”

This way of understanding suffering demonstrates why Christians have, for centuries, referred to Christ’s suffering as his passion. In modern culture passion is defined as powerful feelings or interest. The historic word comes from the Latin, pati: to suffer.

Following a true passion is a journey of suffering defined not by the intensity of positive emotion, but the willingness to endure for a greater reality. Most people do not miss out on their passions because they have been held back from expressing emotion or desire, but because they were unwilling to courageously place their faith outside of themselves.

It is only through dying to ourselves and placing our passion in Christ that we truly live. It is Christ’s love born in us that gives us hope and a future—never more than in suffering. “Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire,” reflected Dr. Frankl. Reflecting on his time in the concentration camp, he concludes:

The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’

Today’s Reading
Job 33 (Listen – 3:00)
2 Corinthians 3 (Listen – 2:25)

“Christ was subject to great humiliation in his private life at Nazareth,” writes Jonathan Edwards. While many of us can appreciate a great high priest who can “sympathize with our weaknesses,” the grittiness of this reality can escape us.

Edwards, the great theologian, writes of the daily toil of Christ’s vocation in Nazareth:

He there led a servile, obscure life, in a mean, laborious occupation; for he is called not only the carpenter’s son, but the carpenter. By hard labor he earned his bread before he ate it, and so suffered that curse which God pronounced on Adam; “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.”

Let us consider how great a degree of humiliation the glorious Son of God, the Creator of heaven and earth, was subject to in this—that for about thirty years he should live a private obscure life among laboring men, and all this while be overlooked, not taken notice of in the world, more than other common laborers.

Christ’s humiliation in some respects was greater in private life than in the time of his public ministry. The first thirty years of his life he spent among ordinary men, as it were in silence. There was not any thing to make him to be taken notice of more than any ordinary mechanic.

In fasting we forego a luxury in order to better understand our desires and better experience the only one who can truly satisfy. The sacrifice of fasting is our way of entering into the footsteps of Christ who, “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor.” Edwards reflects on the fulfillment of Christ’s love, even as he was subjected to the pangs of earthly brokenness:

He suffered great poverty, so that he had no where to lay his head. So that what was spoken of Christ, “My head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night,” was literally fulfilled. And through his poverty he was doubtless when tried with hunger, thirst, and cold.

Christ had no land of his own, though he was possessor of heaven and earth; and therefore was buried by Joseph of Arimathea’s charity, and in his tomb, which Joseph had prepared for himself.

Christ being thus brought under the power of death, continued under it till the morning of next day but one. Then was finished that great work, the purchase of our redemption, for which such great preparation had been made from the beginning of the world.

Today's Reading
Job 32 (Listen – 2:12)  
2 Corinthians 2 (Listen – 2:13)

Today’s Reading
Job 31 (Listen – 4:16)
2 Corinthians 1 (Listen – 3:52)