When you lay me down to die . . . just remember this: when you lay me down to die,
you lay me down to live.—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”As I mentioned in my previous post, Sara and the girls and I went up to hear Andrew Peterson last night, which was a very great lift to our spirits. Before kicking into the songs from his new album, he opened with this one to set the theme. It reminded me of a time a couple years ago where I seemed to be surrounded by death. That was the time when Louie Heckert, one of the patriarchs of our little congregation and also one of the sweetest spirits I’ve ever met in a human being, was attacked and killed by a rogue bull moose; if you didn’t hear that story at the time, click the links—and even if you did, click on his name anyway, because if you didn’t know Louie, that was your loss. Around the same time, one of our long-time part-time folks died out in Missouri, as did two other long-time residents of Grand County for whom our church had been praying.To top it all off, my grandpa died at the same time, and his funeral ended up being the same time as Louie’s. As I was conducting Louie’s funeral, an old family friend was leading Grampa’s; and I could not break down, for Grampa or for Louie or for anyone else, because there were things that needed to be done. That, I think, is the hardest thing about doing a funeral, and the better you knew and loved the person who died, the harder it is: in order to honor Louie properly, in order to create the necessary space for everyone else to deal with their feelings of grief and loss, I had to keep strict control on my own. That’s just how it works. It doesn’t mean that the grief goes away, just that you don’t get to do anything with it.Nobody tells you when you get born here how much you’ll come to love it and how you’ll never belong here.—Rich Mullins, “Land of My Sojourn”As hard a time as that was, the good thing was that it all happened just before Easter, meaning that we were able to respond to all these deaths with the celebration of the Resurrection, because that is God’s answer to death; as one hymn we sang that Easter morning declares, “Christ is risen, we are risen!” because in his resurrection, “Death at last has met defeat.” That is the anchor of our faith, and it’s an anchor we particularly need when the death of someone we love dearly rocks our world. It’s not just because we want the assurance that we will see them again or because we want to believe that they are in a better place, either, though both those things are part of the equation. At a deeper level, encounters with death remind us that no matter how hard we try, we really can’t make our home in this world, because we can never fully belong here; we are temporary, and the world goes on.God is at home. We are in the far country.—Meister EckhardtWhat we tend to forget, though, is that the world’s perspective on death is something of an optical illusion; in truth, it’s this world which is temporary. It wasn’t meant to be that way—it’s the result of human sin—but we live in a world which is going to be replaced. The reason we cannot be fully at home here is because this is not the home for which we were made; we were made to live with God, and we live in a world that has rejected him. Our sin, our insistence on our own way, has opened a chasm between us and God—and the tragedy is that as a result, we have created a world for ourselves that we can’t live in, a world which can never be our home. As the German mystic Meister Eckhardt understood, we have made ourselves exiles in the far country, for no matter how hard we try, our only true home is still with God.I believe in the holy shores of uncreated light; I believe there’s power in the blood.
And all the death that ever was, if you set it next to life, I believe it would barely fill a cup.—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”Another of the small graces of that difficult month was the release of Peterson’s album The Far Country, from which this song comes. The album’s title was of course taken from the Meister Eckhardt quotation above, and the album is primarily a meditation on death and Heaven. As I listened to the album, and in particular to the song “Lay Me Down,” I was blessed by the strong affirmation of our resurrection hope from a non-standard perspective. The problem, really, isn’t that we die; the problem is that we aren’t at home, we’re exiles in the far country. In this far country, we die, and those we love die, and it brings us great pain; but God is still at home, and he is here as well in this far country with us, and he sent his son Jesus to make a way, to be the way, for us to get across the gap, to go home to be with him. That’s why we affirm that death has been defeated, that it has lost its sting, because by his death and resurrection Jesus has transformed it; it’s no longer the final curtain in this far country, but the door that opens onto the road back home.I’ll open up my eyes on the skies I’ve never known, in the place where I belong,
and I’ll realize his love is just another word for Home.—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.—Philippians 1:21

Is it just me, or has this been a rough decade? We’ve seen serious hurricane seasons return with a vengeance, giving us the likes of Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike; we’ve seen the representatives of a virulent, malignant strain of Islam take terrorism to a whole new level, beginning with the 9/11 attack on America; along with that, we’ve seen the government of Iran actually get worse, which would have seemed hard to believe before we were introduced to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the return of expansionist Russia; and now we’re seeing a storm of a different kind tear through our financial institutions, leaving us holding our collective breath to see which will stand and which will fall.And though it’s now receded into memory, we also saw the worst natural disaster in human history, the Asian tsunami of December 26th, 2004, which killed some 273,000 people. It seems strange to think that such a gargantuan event should be out of sight, out of mind, given the instantaneous response it provoked at the time; from children setting up tsunami-relief lemonade stands to Jay Leno selling a white Harley covered with celebrity signatures on eBay—a Houston company bought it for $810,000 to sit in the atrium of their headquarters—to offers of foreign aid from the U.S. government to large grants from Presbyterian Disaster Assistance and agencies of other denominations, people all across America snapped into action to offer assistance, and in that we only mimicked what the rest of the world was already doing. To be sure, there were also many who took advantage of the situation to line their own pockets, but on the whole, the collective response was one of which the human race could be proud.Of course, there was another response as well, from professional opinion-givers—pundits, authors, writers, Ph.D.s, preachers, and others of that sort—seeking to turn the situation to their rhetorical advantage; and in the West, at least, most such commentary revolved around religion. As Presbyterian pastor and writer Jim Berkley, who happens to be a friend of mine, noted with some exasperation, it seemed that the secular press had all of a sudden discovered the problem of evil—and assumed that the discovery was equally sudden for the church. The novelist and critic James Wood, writing in the Manchester Guardian that following January, wrote, “If there is a God with whom we can communicate, who (sometimes) hears our prayers, why does He not hear our suffering? Or why does He hear our suffering and do nothing about it? Theology has no answer, and never has had.” A few days before, Guardian columnist Martin Kettle had written a column titled “God and the Tsunami” which was, essentially, an 860-word elaboration of that same assumption, concluding with the question, “Are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things?”It’s worth pointing out that there’s one important difference between Wood’s column and Kettle’s: Kettle seemed to think that atheist science provides a perfectly acceptable answer for the tsunami, while Wood understood that it doesn’t. As he noted, such an approach “can tell us how the world works, but cannot answer the eternal metaphysical wail: why do we suffer so?” Both, however, assumed that the tsunami justified them in their atheism, for surely Christianity can offer no worthwhile explanation.Unfortunately, as little as I like to admit it, the views on the tsunami offered by many Christians in the weeks after this disaster didn’t do much to challenge Kettle and Wood in their assumption. Why is it that every time something big and nasty happens, someone will inevitably jump up and pronounce it to be God’s judgment on the victims? It’s utterly beyond me. In Scripture, every time God is going to judge someone, he sends prophets before it happens, both to give them a chance to repent and to ensure that they recognize his judgment when it comes. I don’t recall there being any prophets predicting judgment on Asia, nor do I understand why some people are so quick to anoint themselves prophets of judgment after the fact; and if God hasn’t given you the gift of prophecy, that’s really not something you should be pronouncing on.Of course, that sort of “God is judging Asia” talk was far from the only reaction out there. Others, for example, seized on the relief efforts of Christian churches and organizations, and on the opportunity tsunami relief seemed to provide for missionaries and the indigenous church in countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and India, to proclaim that God allowed the tsunami in order to create these opportunities, as if the chance for people to give money justified even one death, let alone 273,000; and even if this does boost evangelistic efforts in Asia, couldn’t that have been accomplished without the loss of life? There is no doubt truth here, that God will bring good out of this calamity, but when it’s offered as an explanation, as a justification, for such pain and suffering . . . well, that strikes me as blasphemous and obscene.The issue here is one that the great journalist and wit H. L. Mencken identified when he wrote, “For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, easy to understand, and wrong”; and unfortunately, those are the sort of solutions, the sort of answers, to which we tend to gravitate. For Christians, it seems to boil down to, “God is good, therefore this must really be good in some way.” Obviously, atheists don’t have that particular issue, but even the Guardian’s tag team that I mentioned earlier show signs of this. For Martin Kettle, an atheist of a scientific bent, the tsunami allowed the easy dismissal of Christian claims and a relatively easy affirmation of an atheist scientific view, for science can explain it and religion can’t. James Wood, being a literary type, was able to see that the explanation science offers isn’t adequate to our needs, so he said, “This sort of event proves that we need literature to express our feelings”—as if that was any more adequate.The difficulty we have finding a satisfactory explanation for such an event as the tsunami, or the abuse of a child, or 9/11, or any of the other myriad ways in which human and natural evil devastate lives, should lead us to ask whether an explanation is really what we want. After all, let’s suppose that someone came along and offered an explanation of evil which really was sufficient, which really did explain everything in a satisfactory way, with no holes in it. What would be the cost of such an explanation? What would that mean? It would mean that evil is explainable, that it’s understandable; and for that to be the case, it would have to be part of the natural order, part of the necessary structure of the world as God made it. Put another way, for us to be able to offer an answer for why evil happens, evil would have to make sense, which would mean it would have to be in some way necessary to the proper order of things; which would mean that this world was flawed from the beginning, and that God deliberately created it flawed. It would mean that we would never be able to get away from evil, that evil cannot be defeated; it would mean that the people who say that good cannot exist without evil would be right, and thus that evil, too, is eternal. That, it seems to me, would be far too high a price to pay for any mere explanation.When once we see this, we realize that we could either have a world in which we can find a rational answer to the problem of evil, or we could have a world in which the final defeat and total destruction of evil is a possibility; and it is the consistent testimony of Scripture that the latter is the world we have. Scripture doesn’t offer any sort of philosophical explanation for evil, because it offers no compromise with evil at all, only unrelenting denunciation of evil in all its forms. Those who seek to explain why God would allow the tsunami should remember the words of Jesus in Luke 13 about another natural disaster, the collapse of a tower in Jerusalem, which killed 18 people; not only did he re­fuse to offer an explanation, he challenged the popular idea that their deaths were God’s judgment on them. Trying to make sense of evil is our project, not God’s, and thus it’s ultimately futile. Evil doesn’t make sense, it can’t be rationally explained, because it doesn’t belong to the world God made; it’s fundamentally alien to the way things are supposed to be, and so it’s fundamentally inexplicable.Does this mean that our faith has no answer to offer us for the problem of evil? Does this mean that God has no answer? No! Indeed, he offers us the only real answer possible: he offers us himself. Thus it is that when Habakkuk offers his complaint at the evil God allows, what is God’s response? “There is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and it does not lie. If it seems slow in coming, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. . . . The righteous live by their faith.” The apostle Paul then picks this up in Romans 1, applying it to the gospel of Jesus Christ: it is through Jesus, by faith in Jesus, that the righteous live by faith. It is through faith in a God who doesn’t try to fob us off with explanations, as if such thin soup would really make our lives any easier or any better, but instead comes down to endure evil with us, and ultimately to defeat it by his death and resurrection.Thus, when James Wood asks, “Why does [God] not hear our suffering? Or why does He hear our suffering and do nothing about it?” he’s wrong in his question, and completely wrong to say, “Theology has no answer, and never has had,” because that’s exactly what Easter is about. God has heard our suffering—he has heard every cry of anguish, felt every blow and every betrayal, and caught every tear in the palm of his hand—and in Jesus Christ, he has done everything about it. In Jesus, he came down to share our suffering with us, drinking that cup to the very dregs. He took the weight of all our sin on his shoulders—the entirety of human evil and human suffering, of all the brokenness and wrongness of the world—and he carried it to the cross, its cruel thorns digging into his forehead, its sharp splinters shredding his back; and there, for the guilt of all the crimes he never committed, he died.This is God’s answer to evil. He doesn’t explain it, for to explain it would be to dignify it, to give a reason for it, and ultimately to excuse it, when evil is utterly inexcusable; instead, he says, “I have overcome it.” In the resurrection of Jesus, life has defeated death, and love has broken the power of sin, once and for all. Yes, there are still times when the pain of this world drives us to cry out with the Psalmist, “How long, O Lord?”; there are times when we wonder why God is waiting so long to raise the curtain. But we know that at the cross, he turned evil against itself, and on that first Easter, he broke it; and when the time is right, he will complete the victory he won that day. Evil will be banished, and all things will be made new; God will live among us, and he will wipe away every tear from our eyes, for death itself shall die, and grief and sorrow and pain will be no more. This is the promise, and the one who makes it is the beginning and the end, and all that he says is trustworthy and true.

I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?
My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved;he who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade on your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,nor the moon by night.
The LORD will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.
The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.—Psalm 121 (ESV)Joyce over at tallgrassworship got me thinking about this psalm with her recent post; it’s one I’ve been particularly fond of ever since I was inspired by Eugene Peterson’s book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society to preach through the Songs of Ascents (of which this is the second). It’s a psalm for travelers, and thus for all who are betwixt and between; and so I think Joyce is right that it’s one that’s particularly valuable for us to hear in this rather parlous period.The road is a perilous place. It has ever been thus; that’s why we pray for our snowbirds as they fly north for the summer and back south for the winter. Dangers both dramatic—such as the threat of terrorist attack—and mundane—perhaps an overly worn bolt gone unnoticed by an overworked, overtired mechanic—shadow us as we fly; driving, we bear the risks of mechanical failure, tire damage, and fellow drivers whose weariness, illness, chemical intake, poor reflexes, or simple incompetence make them unsafe behind the wheel. Wherever we go, by land, air, or sea, the weather is always a potential threat. Even in our age, travel has risks.Even in our age, yes; but it was far more so in the ancient world. To take but one example, ships crossing the Mediterranean bearing cargo typically would not sail around the southern coast of Greece. Instead, they would put in at the port of Corinth, or at Piraeus, the port of Athens, offload all their cargo, carry it across the Isthmus of Corinth, and load it on another ship on the other side to take it the rest of the way. This trade from ships unwilling to sail around Cape Malea and Cape Matapan, the southernmost points of Greece, was the reason Corinth was founded, and the reason for its wealth and power. Now, this was a pretty involved and labor-intensive evolution, but sailors of the time didn’t begrudge it, for their assessment of the treachery of the southern Greek coast was blunt: “Who sails around Malea best make out his will.” For what it’s worth, the captains and crew of today’s big ships apparently feel much the same way: if you go to Corinth now, you will find a canal cut through the isthmus—I’ve stood and looked down into it—full of ships and boats that don’t want to take the southern route.The hazards at sea, in that time of peace, were mostly those of wind and wave; on land, not only could bad weather be a problem, so could good weather—in the Mediterranean climate, sunstroke and heatstroke are very real dangers. The roads, aside from those built by the Romans, weren’t paved, so there was always the possibility of turning one’s ankle on a loose stone (or having one’s horse or donkey suffer similar injury); and for those on long journeys, the fatigue and anxiety of travel took their toll emotionally and could bring on a breakdown—what ancient writers called moonstroke, because they understood it to come from the effects of exposure to the moon. (That ancient idea is also at the root of our words “lunacy” and “lunatic.”) Finally, there was the greatest threat of all, from robbers who lurked along the road to ambush the unwary traveler.Now, this psalm may originally have been written simply to reassure the ordinary traveler; but its placement as the second of the Songs of Ascents, the psalms which were sung by pilgrims as they made their way up the road to Jerusalem to worship God at the temple, gives it a particular depth of meaning. As one of the Songs of Ascents, this psalm is talking about a very particular road: the road to the city of God; and that road, the way of pilgrimage, the path of discipleship, is often a perilous and difficult one indeed. It’s difficult because it requires us to leave the ways of the world behind, which we often don’t want to do, and because it calls us to stretch ourselves, to do and be more than we think ourselves capable of doing and being; it’s also difficult because the world doesn’t tend to treat people well who challenge its comfortable assumptions and ways of doing business. On this road, too, fatigue is a very real concern, as is the threat of attack from others; we need help if we’re going to make it through.The psalmist knows this, and so he lifts up his eyes to the hills, which is a deeply ambiguous act. On the one hand, it was from the hills that danger came, as robbers came down out of their hiding places to ambush travelers on the road. The hills were a source of danger, and a refuge for enemies. At the same time, if the hills the psalmist has in view are those which rise around Jerusalem (as seems likely), then these are not only hills among which robbers live—they are also the hills among which God lives; perhaps, then, we have the psalmist looking at the hills and straining not only to see if there are robbers ahead, but to see if perhaps he can catch his first glimpse of Jerusalem, the holy city, which is his goal. If this is so, then that movement of lifting up the eyes expresses both concern and trust: concern that the hills are the home of the enemy, but trust that God is also there.Thus to the question, “From where will my help come?” the answer comes quick and sure: “My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” I look to the hills and I see danger, I see that I need help and protection, but I also see that my God, who made these hills and everything else, is there to give me the help and protection I need. This is the point the psalmist wants to make, and it’s one he makes in several different ways in this psalm, in the repetition of two key words. First is the repetition of “LORD,” which represents the personal name of God. (It’s translated this way because no Jew would ever pronounce the name of God for fear of violating the commandment against taking his name in vain. Thus, in reading the Scriptures, they would substitute the word Adonai, “Lord,” and our translations do the same thing.) In repeating the name of God—five times in these eight verses—the psalmist evokes, again and again, the work of God, both in creation (he is the one “who made heaven and earth”) and in taking care of Israel. We appeal, the psalmist tells us, to one whose power to help and bless his people is unlimited by anything at all, and whose will to do so has been proven over and over and over again.This is reinforced in the repetition of “keep” and “keeper,” which together occur six times. “The LORD,” the creator of the universe, the one who made everything just by speaking the word and who upholds everything that is, “is your keeper,” declares the psalmist; the LORD, who is so great and powerful that he holds all creation in the palm of his hand, is concerned about you, and watches over you. Whatever dangers may come, however great they may be, the LORD is there watching over you to guard and protect you. He will keep your foot from slipping; he will be your shade to protect you from the sun; he will guard you from the effects of the moon. “The LORD is your keeper.”Now, is this a promise that those who follow God will never suffer any affliction? Are we guaranteed never to stumble on the road, never to wear down under the demands of life, never to break down under the anxiety and fatigue we sometimes have to bear? Are we guaranteed never to be attacked, never to be robbed? No, clearly not; we know from our own lives and the lives of others that those who follow God are not exempt from the pain of the world, much though we might wish it were otherwise. The point isn’t that nothing will ever go wrong for us, or that we will never suffer—indeed, the New Testament is clear that those who walk with Jesus are sometimes called to suffer with him—but that whatever may come, we will never be defeated; evil may hurt us, but it will never have power over us or victory in our lives. Jesus didn’t tell the Pharisees that no one would ever harm his sheep, but he did say, “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.” Similarly, Paul never told the Romans they would avoid “hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril”—but he did declare that “in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us,” because nothing can or will ever separate us from his love.This is why the psalmist promises us, “The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.” In every aspect of life, in all the things you do when you leave home in the morning, in every part of the home to which you return, the Lord is with you to guard and protect you; and though you may walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you need fear no evil, for he who has overcome the world is with you, and in him you too will overcome, for he will take care of you. This is what we know as the doctrine of providence, that in every circumstance, however difficult, God is at work to bring about our good. I love the way the Heidelberg Catechism puts this: “I trust [God] so much that I do not doubt he will provide whatever I need for body and soul, and he will turn to my good whatever adversity he sends me in this sad world. He is able to do this because he is almighty God; he desires to do this because he is a faithful Father.” This is the kind of trust we can have in God as our keeper.Still, trusting God isn’t always easy. Maybe you’ve never felt this way, but there have been times when I was praying and praying, and he just didn’t seem to be paying attention; it’s enough to make you wonder, sometimes, if God’s just on another frequency for a while, maybe listening to the ballgame or something. Against this, the psalmist says, no, “he who keeps you will not slumber. He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” God’s mind never wanders; he never drops off for a nap, nor does he ever get so busy taking care of the rest of the world that he forgets about you. Yes, there are times when troubles come, and yes, we often wonder why God lets them hang around so long, but even then, he is with us, watching over us and taking care of us; he doesn’t keep us out of the dark times, but he promises to bring us through them. I think the great Catholic mystic Julian of Norwich captured it best when she wrote, “God did not say, ‘You will not be troubled, you will not be belabored, you will not be disquieted’; but God said, ‘You will not be overcome.’”This is the promise of Scripture, which we see in this psalm, in Jesus’ words in John 10, and in many other places: “You will not be overcome.” The way of discipleship isn’t easy, because it calls us to turn our backs on a world which is opposed to God and set our face toward his holy city, to live our lives as a pilgrimage toward God. There will be times when our feet slip and we slide off the path into sin, leaving us wondering if we can even get back on our feet; there will be times when we grow weary on the way, and fatigue seems to be too much for us; there will be times when we’re just getting hammered emotionally. But in these times, and in all the greater and lesser difficulties we face as we seek to follow Christ in this life, the psalmist assures us, “The Lord is your keeper; . . . The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.” Through the hard times and the easy times, in big problems and little ones, in all the daily trials and tribulations of life, however important or unimportant they might seem, he is our keeper; and he keeps us not just from up ahead or up above, but from right beside us, where he walks to protect us, and to lead us on.

Has it ever occurred to you how much of what they show on TV is about suffering? I don’t mean the programs, necessarily (though many of them are, too)—I mean the commercials. For one thing, many of them are so bad, they make you suffer . . . More than that, though, suffering is really what they’re about. First, you have all the drug commercials. “If you suffer from depression . . .” with these grey-lit shots of gloomy, exhausted people—then, after they tell you about the drug, the same people in the sunshine with smiles on their faces. “If you suffer from high blood pressure,” or “high cholesterol,” or whatever—they all boil down to the same thing: Got a problem? Take a pill. Sure, there are side effects, but they aren’t as bad as this, are they?Alongside those, though not as frequent, are the “pay an expert” ads. The ones that still come to my mind, though I haven’t seen them in ages, are ads for “the law offices of Buckland & Shumm” that used to run incessantly during Perry Mason on the Bellingham station. Different places have different lawyers, but the same basic message: has someone hurt you? Sue their pants off. We’ll be happy to take all their money for you, and we’ll even let you have some of it! Also in this category are ads for counseling services and the like, and these I have a lot more respect for; I’ve been through counseling a couple of times myself (I came out still odd, but happier about it), and I know just how much good a good counselor can do. What does concern me, though, is that there’s still the idea here that suffering is a problem which needs to be fixed, and that you need an expert to fix it for you. There are times when that’s true; there are also a good many counselors who are wise enough not to foster that idea when it isn’t; but there are too many more who aren’t.As well, we have the bread and butter of commercial advertising: Is there a need in your life? Buy our product. Dishwasher soap not getting your glasses clean? Not attractive enough to the opposite sex? Feeling flabby and out of shape? Driving an old, uninteresting car? Losing your hair? Losing your energy? Why suffer? Buy Our Product, and all will be well.Besides these, I can think of one other type of TV ad that’s all about suffering: political ads. (And no, I don’t primarily mean your suffering, real though that no doubt is.) When it comes to negative political ads, it seems to me there are two basic variants. One, of course, is the “my opponent is scum” ad, like this one from the current Senate race in Minnesota:

The more common form of negative advertising, however, is the “distort the record” ad, which makes all sorts of exaggerated statements about the opponent’s political positions and actions that really boil down to one premise: you’re suffering, and either my opponent is the reason why, or if they win this election, they’ll make it worse. These sorts of ads give us a third response to suffering: if you can’t take a pill or pay an expert to fix it, then find someone to blame. (Just imagine if we combined these with the lawyer ads . . . “Hi, I’m Joe Schmo, and I’m running for Congress. My opponent beats up old ladies and burns down their houses. Vote for me, and after I win, I’ll sue him for millions of dollars on your behalf.” The possibilities are endless.)All these ads run off the underlying assumption of our society that we shouldn’t suffer, that we shouldn’t have to, and that if we do, something’s wrong—something needs to be fixed, somebody’s going to pay, something has to change. In the most extreme cases, this gives us the euthanasia movement, which tells us that if we’re suffering and it can’t be fixed, we can’t change it, then we shouldn’t want to live anymore. In lesser cases, we’re urged to take a pill, see a specialist, call a lawyer, file a complaint. Behind it all is the idea that a life without serious suffering is the norm, or ought to be, and that we should expect no less; that creates a gap between expectations and reality, which creates stress, which only makes matters worse.By contrast, the apostle Paul had a very different view of suffering. I don’t imagine he enjoyed it any more than anyone else does, but he didn’t see it as something to be rejected, to be avoided or fixed or blamed on someone else. Look at Colossians 1:24-29:

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.

“I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake.” That doesn’t mean he wanted to suffer, but that in the midst of suffering, as bad as it was, he was able to find joy—not despite his suffering, but in it; he was able to find his suffering a cause for joy. Why? Because he saw a purpose in it, a reason for it, and a benefit to it. He isn’t suffering for no reason, and his suffering isn’t meaningless; he’s suffering for the sake of the Colossians, for the sake of the whole church, and for Christ.But what purpose, what reason, what benefit, could he have found in his suffering? The answer to that question begins with one key fact: Paul was a faithful servant of Jesus Christ, and there was no doubt in his mind that he was doing what God had called him to do—and he understood all his sufferings, all his afflictions, in the light of that fact. Much that he suffered, of course, was in direct response to that, as his opponents tried multiple times to destroy him (and came very close once or twice); but even those pains which came in the normal course of life, such as the hardships of life on the road, came in the course of a life devoted to serving God. With everything he did focused on following Jesus, he could and did regard all his suffering as suffering for Christ; and so the mission that gave his life meaning also gave meaning to his suffering.This is why he says, “in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” Paul is not saying here that Jesus’ crucifixion was insufficient for the salvation of his people (and still less that Paul’s own sufferings are necessary to complete that work); rather, he’s drawing on the Jewish concept of “the woes of the Messiah.” In Jewish thought, this was the time of distress and suffering that would precede the coming of the Messiah to put all things right and make all things new; a roughly similar concept in Christian thought is the time of the Tribulation. The idea was that it was necessary to pass through this time in order to enter the kingdom of God. What Paul’s working with here is the thought that there is a definite measure of suffering that must be filled up before Christ will come again, and that in taking on more than his own share of suffering, absorbing more than his share of affliction, he’s reducing the amount that his fellow Christians will have to endure.This is a strange thought to us (though I would think it must have made sense to the Colossians), but it underscores two key points: first, suffering for Christ is not something to be avoided, but something we need to accept, and even embrace, because when we suffer for Christ, it draws us close to him. Paul makes this explicit in Philippians 3:10, where he writes, “I want to know Christ, the power of his resurrection and the participation in his sufferings, by being conformed to his death.” We cannot experience the power of Christ’s resurrection, which we have through the Spirit of God, if we are unwilling to walk his path of suffering; these two are inextricably linked. As well, if we suffer for Christ, then we suffer with Christ—we do not suffer alone, but in our suffering, we share in his suffering—and so we are drawn closer to him, we come to know him and share in his life in a deeper and more intimate way than we ever could otherwise.The key is that, in joys and in sorrows, whatever may come, we keep focused on Christ. That’s the example Paul sets us here; and note the way he uses his example to help set the Colossians straight, and bring them back to that focus on Christ. Remember, they’ve fallen in with these teachers who are promising them an experience of God in his glory if they will just obey all their rules and regulations; the teachers are holding up those rules and regulations as the Colossians’ hope of a fleeting experience of glory. Paul points them, and us, to a far greater hope: the true riches of the mystery of God are not locked away from everyone except the select few who can manage to obey him well enough—instead, they’re available to everyone, because the mystery is that God was in Christ, and by his Holy Spirit, Christ is in you. That, Paul says, is the hope of glory: the promise that we can live life, even in this fallen, broken world, in the constant presence of our loving God, and that when death comes, we will be gathered fully into his presence, able fully to experience his glory—and not only to experience it, but to share in it. That’s the hope, that’s the promise, that enables Paul to rejoice in his sufferings, because he knows that whatever he may suffer now as a result of his service to Christ will only contribute to the glory he will experience later; and it’s the hope and promise that enables us to do the same. It’s the promise we were given by Christ himself, who is our sure and certain hope of glory.