13 Suffering and glory

The fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith, and has been in every generation. Its distribution and degree appear to be entirely random and therefore unfair. Sensitive spirits ask if it can possibly be reconciled with God’s justice and love.

On 1 November 1755 Lisbon was devastated by an earthquake. Being All Saints Day, the churches were full at the time, and thirty of them were destroyed. Within six minutes 15,000 people had died and 15,000 more were dying. One of many stunned by the news was the French philosopher and writer, Voltaire. For months he alluded to it in his letters in terms of passionate horror. How could anybody now believe in the benevolence and omnipotence of God? He ridiculed Alexander Pope’s lines in his Essay on Man, which had been written in a secure and comfortable villa in Twickenham:

And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

Voltaire had always revolted against this philosophy of Optimism. Would Pope have repeated his glib lines if he had been in Lisbon? They seemed to Voltaire illogical (interpreting evil as good), irreverent (attributing evil to Providence) and injurious (inculcating resignation instead of constructive action). He first expressed his protest in his Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon, which asks why, if God is free, just and beneficent, we suffer under his rule. It is the old conundrum that God is either not good or not almighty. Either he wants to stop suffering but cannot, or he could but will not. Whichever it is, how can we worship him as God? Voltaire’s second protest was to write his satirical novel Candide, the story of an ingenuous young man, whose teacher Dr Pangloss, a professor of Optimism, keeps blandly assuring him that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’, in defiance of their successive misfortunes. When they are shipwrecked near Lisbon, Candide is nearly killed in the earthquake, and Pangloss is hanged by the Inquisition. Voltaire writes: ‘Candide, terrified, speechless, bleeding, palpitating, said to himself: “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what can the rest be?”’1

The problem of suffering is far from being of concern only to philosophers, however. It impinges upon nearly all of us personally; few people go through life entirely unscathed. It may be a childhood deprivation resulting in lifelong emotional turmoil, or a congenital disability of mind or body. Or suddenly and without warning we are overtaken by a painful illness, redundancy at work, poverty or bereavement. Or again, perhaps we are afflicted by involuntary singleness, a broken love affair, an unhappy marriage, divorce, depression or loneliness. Suffering comes in many unwelcome forms, and sometimes we not only ask God our agonized questions ‘Why?’ and ‘Why me?’ but even like Job rage against him, accusing him of injustice and indifference. I know of no Christian leader who has been more forthright in confessing his anger than Joseph Parker, who was minister of the City Temple from 1874 until his death in 1902. He says in his autobiography that up to the age of 68 he never had a religious doubt. Then his wife died, and his faith collapsed. ‘In that dark hour’, he wrote, ‘I became almost an atheist. For God had set his foot upon my prayers and treated my petitions with contempt. If I had seen a dog in such agony as mine, I would have pitied and helped the dumb beast; yet God spat upon me and cast me out as an offence – out into the waste wilderness and the night black and starless.’2

It needs to be said at once that the Bible supplies no thorough solution to the problem of evil, whether ‘natural’ evil or ‘moral’, that is, whether in the form of suffering or of sin. Its purpose is more practical than philosophical. Consequently, although there are references to sin and suffering on virtually every page, its concern is not to explain their origin but to help us to overcome them.

My object in this chapter is to explore what relation there might be between the cross of Christ and our sufferings. So I shall not elaborate other standard arguments about suffering which the textbooks include, but only mention them as an introduction.

First, according to the Bible suffering is an alien intrusion into God’s good world, and will have no part in his new universe. It is a Satanic and destructive onslaught against the Creator. The book of Job makes that clear. So do Jesus’ description of an infirm woman as ‘bound by Satan’, his ‘rebuking’ of disease as he rebuked demons, Paul’s reference to his ‘thorn in the flesh’ as ‘a messenger of Satan’ and Peter’s portrayal of Jesus’ ministry as ‘healing all who were under the power of the devil’.3 So whatever may be said later about the ‘good’ which God can bring out of suffering, we must not forget that it is good out of evil.

Secondly, suffering is often due to sin. Of course originally disease and death entered the world through sin. But I am now thinking of contemporary sin. Sometimes suffering is due to the sin of others, as when children suffer from unloving or irresponsible parents, the poor and hungry from economic injustice, refugees from the cruelties of war, and road casualties caused by drunken drivers. At other times suffering can be the consequence of our own sin (the reckless use of our freedom) and even its penalty. We must not overlook those biblical passages where sickness is attributed to the punishment of God.4 At the same time we must firmly repudiate the dreadful Hindu doctrine of karma which attributes all suffering to wrong-doing in this or a previous existence, and the almost equally dreadful doctrine of Job’s so-called comforters. They trotted out their conventional orthodoxy that all personal suffering is due to personal sin, and one of the major purposes of the book of Job is to contradict that popular but wrong-headed notion. Jesus categorically rejected it too.5

Thirdly, suffering is due to our human sensitivity to pain. Misfortune is made worse by the hurt (physical or emotional) which we feel. But the pain sensors of the central nervous system give valuable warning-signals, necessary for personal and social survival. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the discovery by Dr Paul Brand at Vellore Christian Hospital in South India that Hansen’s disease (‘leprosy’) numbs the extremities of the body, so that the ulcers and infections which develop are secondary problems, due to loss of feeling. Nerve reactions have to hurt if we are to protect ourselves. ‘Thank God for inventing pain!’ wrote Philip Yancey; ‘I don’t think he could have done a better job. It’s beautiful.’6

Fourthly, suffering is due to the kind of environment in which God has placed us. Although most human suffering is caused by human sin (C. S. Lewis reckoned four-fifths of it, and Hugh Silvester nineteen-twentieths, i.e. 95%7), natural disasters such as flood, hurricane, earthquake and drought are not. True, it can be argued that God did not intend the earth’s ‘inhospitable areas’ to be inhabited, let alone increased by ecological irresponsibility.8 Yet most people go on living where they were born and have no opportunity to move. What can one say, then, about the so-called ‘laws’ of nature which in storm and tempest relentlessly overwhelm innocent people? C. S. Lewis went so far as to say that ‘not even Omnipotence could create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and “inexorable” Nature’.9 ‘What we need for human society’, Lewis continued, ‘is exactly what we have – a neutral something’, stable and having ‘a fixed nature of its own’, as the arena in which we may act freely towards each other and him.10 If we lived in a world in which God prevented every evil from happening, like Superman in Alexander Salkind’s films, free and responsible activity would be impossible.

There have always been some who insist that suffering is meaningless, and that no purpose whatever can be detected in it. In the ancient world these included both the Stoics (who taught the need to submit with fortitude to nature’s inexorable laws) and the Epicureans (who taught that the best escape from a random world was indulgence in pleasure). And in the modern world secular existentialists believe that everything, including life, suffering and death, is meaningless and therefore absurd. But Christians cannot follow them down that blind alley. For Jesus spoke of suffering as being both ‘for God’s glory’, that God’s Son might be glorified through it, and ‘so that the work of God might be displayed’.11 This seems to mean that in some way (still to be explored) God is at work revealing his glory in and through suffering, as he did (though differently) through Christ’s. What then is the relationship between Christ’s sufferings and ours? How does the cross speak to us in our pain? I want to suggest from Scripture six possible answers to these questions, which seem to rise gradually from the simplest to the most sublime.

Patient endurance

First, the cross of Christ is a stimulus to patient endurance. Even though suffering has to be recognized as evil and therefore resisted, there nevertheless comes a time when it has to be realistically accepted. It is then that the example of Jesus, which is set before us in the New Testament for our imitation, becomes an inspiration. Peter directed his readers’ attention to it, especially if they were Christian slaves with harsh masters during the Neronian persecution. It would be no particular credit to them if they were beaten for some wrong-doing and took it patiently. But if they suffered for doing good and endured it, this would be pleasing to God. Why? Because undeserved suffering is part of their Christian calling, since Christ himself had suffered for them, leaving them an example, that they should follow in his steps. Though sinless, he was insulted, but he never retaliated (1 Pet. 2:18–23). Jesus set an example of perseverance as well as of non-retaliation, which should encourage us to persevere in the Christian race. We need to ‘fix our eyes on Jesus’, for he ‘endured the cross, scorning its shame’. So then: ‘Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart’ (Heb. 12:1–3).

Although both these examples relate specifically to opposition or persecution, it seems legitimate to give them a wider application. Christians in every generation have gained from the sufferings of Jesus, which culminated in the cross, the inspiration to bear undeserved pain patiently, without either complaining or hitting back. True, there are many kinds of suffering he did not have to endure. Yet his sufferings were remarkably representative. Take Joni Eareckson as an example. In 1967, when she was a beautiful, athletic teenager, she had a terrible diving accident in Chesapeake Bay, which left her a quadriplegic. She has told her story with affecting honesty, including her times of bitterness, anger, rebellion and despair, and how gradually, through the love of her family and friends, she came to trust the sovereignty of God and to build a new life of mouth-painting and public speaking under the signal blessing of God. One night, about three years after her accident, Cindy one of her closest friends, sitting by her bedside, spoke to her of Jesus, saying, ‘Why, he was paralysed too.’ It had not occurred to her before that on the cross Jesus was in similar pain to hers, unable to move, virtually paralysed. She found this thought deeply comforting.12

Mature holiness

Secondly, the cross of Christ is the path to mature holiness. Extraordinary as it may sound, we can add ‘it was for him, and it is for us’. We need to consider the implications of two rather neglected verses in the letter to the Hebrews:

Both verses speak of a process in which Jesus was ‘made perfect’, and both ascribe the perfecting process to his ‘suffering’. Not of course that he was ever imperfect in the sense that he had done wrong, for Hebrews underlines his sinlessness.13 It was rather that he needed further experiences and opportunities in order to become teleios, ‘mature’. In particular, ‘he learned obedience from what he suffered’. He was never disobedient. But his sufferings were the testing-ground in which his obedience became full-grown.

If suffering was the means by which the sinless Christ became mature, so much the more do we need it in our sinfulness. Significantly, James uses the same language of ‘perfection’ or ‘maturity’ in relation to Christians. Just as suffering led to maturity through obedience for Christ, so it leads to maturity through perseverance for us.

Three graphic images are developed in Scripture to illustrate how God uses suffering in pursuance of his purpose to make us holy, in other words, Christlike. They are the father disciplining his children, the metalworker refining silver and gold, and the gardener pruning his vine. The father-children picture is already seen in Deuteronomy, where Moses says: ‘Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the LORD your God disciplines you.’ The metaphor is taken up again in the book of Proverbs, where it is stressed that a father’s discipline is an expression of his love for his children, and the Proverbs verses are quoted in the letter to the Hebrews and echoed in Jesus’ message to the Laodicean church.14 The Hebrews passage is the longest. It teaches that fatherly discipline marks out the true sons from the illegitimate; that God disciplines us only ‘for our good’, namely ‘that we may share in his holiness’; that at the time discipline is painful not pleasant, but that later ‘it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace’, not indeed for everybody (for some rebel against the discipline), but for those who submit to it and so are ‘trained by it’.

The second picture of God as the refiner of silver and gold occurs three times in the Old Testament, where it is made clear that the place of refinement for Israel was ‘the furnace of affliction’, and Peter applies it to the testing of our Christian faith in ‘all kinds of trials’. The process will be distressing, but through it our faith (‘of greater worth than gold’) will both be proved genuine and result in glory to Jesus Christ.15

The third picture Jesus himself developed in his allegory of the vine, in which the fruitfulness of the branches (almost certainly a symbol of Christian character) will depend not only on their abiding in the vine, but also on their being pruned by the vinedresser. Pruning is a drastic process, which often looks cruel, as the bush is cut right back and left jagged and almost naked. But when the spring and summer come round again, there is much fruit.16

All three metaphors describe a negative process, disciplining the child, refining the metal and pruning the vine. But all three also underline the positive result – the child’s good, the metal’s purity, the vine’s fruitfulness. We should not hesitate to say, then, that God intends suffering to be a ‘means of grace’. Many of his children can repeat the psalmist’s statement: ‘Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word’ (Ps. 119:67). For if God’s love is holy love, as it is, then it is concerned not only to act in holiness (as in the cross of Christ), but also to promote holiness (in the people of God). As we have already seen, suffering fosters perseverance and purifies faith. It also develops humility, as when Paul’s thorn in the flesh was to keep him ‘from becoming conceited’. And it deepens insight, as through the pain of Hosea’s unrequited love for Gomer there was revealed to him the faithfulness and patience of Yahweh’s love for Israel.17 Nor should we overlook the benefits which can come into other people’s lives, such as the heroic unselfishness of those who care for the sick, the senile and the handicapped, and the spontaneous upsurge of generosity towards the hungry peoples of sub-Saharan Africa.

The Roman Catholic church has traditionally spoken of ‘redemptive suffering’. Its official teaching is that, even after the guilt of our misdeeds has been forgiven, their due of punishment still has to be completed either in this life or in purgatory (which is ‘the church suffering’). Thus pardon does not remit penance, for punishment has to be added to forgiveness. The best penances, moreover, are not those appointed by the church but those sent from God himself – namely ‘crosses, sicknesses, pains’ – which atone for our sins. There are, in fact, ‘two reasons for suffering for sin: first, atonement to God, and second the re-making of our souls’. For suffering subdues our bodily appetites, cleanses and restores us.18

This kind of teaching, which appears both to underplay the completeness with which God through Christ has redeemed and forgiven us, and to ascribe atoning efficacy to our sufferings, is very offensive to the Protestant mind and conscience. Some Roman Catholics use the term ‘redemptive suffering’, however, simply to indicate that affliction, although it embitters some, transforms others. Mary Craig writes of ‘the redemptive power of suffering’ in this sense. She describes how two of her four sons were born with severe abnormalities, her second son Paul with the disfiguring and incapacitating Höhler’s syndrome, and her fourth Nicholas with Down’s syndrome. She tells the story of her spiritual struggle without self-pity or melodrama. In the final chapter of her book, significantly entitled Blessings, she meditates on the meaning of suffering, and it is now that she introduces the word ‘redemptive’. ‘In the teeth of the evidence’, she writes, ‘I do not believe that any suffering is ultimately absurd or pointless’, although ‘it is often difficult to go on convincing oneself’ of this. At first, we react with incredulity, anger and despair. Yet ‘the value of suffering does not lie in the pain of it,...but in what the sufferer makes of it....It is in sorrow that we discover the things which really matter; in sorrow that we discover ourselves’ (pp.133–144).

Since Jesus Christ is the one and only Redeemer, and the New Testament never uses redemption language of anything we do, we will be wise not to talk of ‘redemptive suffering’. ‘Creative suffering’, a term popularized by Dr Paul Tournier’s book, would be better, so long as it is not imagined that suffering actually creates anything. But it does stimulate ‘creativity’, which is his point. He begins by referring to an article written by Dr Pierre Rentchnick of Geneva in 1975 entitled ‘Orphans Lead the World’. From the life-stories of history’s most influential politicians he had made the astonishing discovery that nearly 300 of them were orphans, from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar through Charles V and Louis XIV to George Washington, Napoleon and (less happily) Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Castro. This naturally struck Dr Tournier, since he had long lectured on the importance for the child’s development of a father and mother performing their roles harmoniously – which is exactly what the most influential politicians never had! Dr Rentchnick developed a theory that ‘the insecurity consequent upon emotional deprivation must have aroused in these children an exceptional will to power’. The same was evidently true of religious leaders, since, for example, Moses, the Buddha, Confucius and Mohammed were also all orphans.19 Professor André Haynal, a psychoanalyst, has worked further on the theory, and suggests that ‘deprivation’ of any kind (not just being orphaned) lies behind ‘creativity’ (which he prefers to ‘will to power’). Finally, Dr Tournier confirms the theory from his own clinical experience. For fifty years his patients have confided in him their pains and conflicts. ‘I have seen them change through suffering’, he says (p.15). Not that suffering (which is an evil) is the cause of growth; but it is its occasion (p.29). Why, then, do some grow through handicap, while others do not? Their reaction depends, he thinks, ‘more on the help they receive from others than on their hereditary disposition’ (p.32), and in particular it depends on love. ‘Deprivations without the aid of love spell catastrophe’, while ‘the decisive factor in making deprivation bear fruit is love’ (p.34). So it is not so much suffering which matures people, as the way they react to suffering (p.37). ‘While suffering may not be creative in itself, we are scarcely ever creative without suffering....One could also say that it is not suffering which makes a person grow, but that one does not grow without suffering’ (p.110).

Biblical teaching and personal experience thus combine to teach that suffering is the path to holiness or maturity. There is always an indefinable something about people who have suffered. They have a fragrance which others lack. They exhibit the meekness and gentleness of Christ. One of the most remarkable statements Peter makes in his first letter is that ‘he who has suffered in his body is done with sin’ (4:1). Physical affliction, he seems to be saying, actually has the effect of making us stop sinning. This being so, I sometimes wonder if the real test of our hunger for holiness is our willingness to experience any degree of suffering if only thereby God will make us holy.

Suffering service

Thirdly, the cross of Christ is the symbol of suffering service. We are familiar with the four or five ‘Servant Songs’ of Isaiah which together make up the portrait of the ‘suffering servant of the Lord’,20 and we began in the last chapter to consider the link between suffering and service. Meek in character and conduct (never shouting or raising his voice), and gentle in his dealings with others (never breaking bruised reeds or snuffing out smouldering wicks), he has nevertheless been called by Yahweh since before his birth, filled with his Spirit and receptive to his Word, with a view to bringing Israel back to him and being a light to the nations. In this task he perseveres, setting his face like a flint, although his back is beaten, his beard pulled out, his face spat upon, and he himself is led like a lamb to the slaughter and dies, bearing the sins of many. Nevertheless, as a result of his death, many will be justified and the nations sprinkled with blessing. What is particularly striking in this composite picture is that suffering and service, passion and mission belong together. We see this clearly in Jesus, who is the suffering servant par excellence, but we need to remember that the servant’s mission to bring light to the nations is also to be fulfilled by the church (Acts 13:47). For the church, therefore, as for the Saviour, suffering and service go together.

More than this. It is not just that suffering belongs to service, but that suffering is indispensable to fruitful or effective service. This is the inescapable implication of the words of Jesus:

It is hard to accept this lesson from the agricultural harvest. Death is more than the way to life; it is the secret of fruitfulness. Unless it falls into the ground and dies, the kernel of wheat remains a single seed. If it stays alive, it stays alone; but if it dies it multiplies. First and foremost Jesus was referring to himself. Did certain Greeks wish to see him? He was about to be ‘glorified’ in death. Soon he would be lifted up on his cross to draw people of all nations to himself. During his earthly ministry he restricted himself largely to ‘the lost sheep of the house of Israel’, but after his death and resurrection, he would have universal authority and a universal appeal.

But Jesus was not speaking only of himself. He was uttering a general principle, and went on to apply it to his disciples who must follow him and like him lose their lives (vv. 25–26) – not necessarily in martyrdom but at least in self-giving, suffering service. For us as for him, the seed must die to multiply.

Paul is the most notable example of this principle. Consider these texts taken from three different letters:

Paul states in all three texts that his sufferings are being endured ‘for the sake of you Gentiles’, ‘for the sake of Christ’s body’ or ‘for the sake of the elect’. Since he is doing it for them, he believes they will derive some benefit from his sufferings. What is this? In the Colossians verse he refers to his sufferings as filling up what was still lacking in Christ’s afflictions. We can be certain that Paul is not attaching any atoning efficacy to his sufferings, partly because he knew Christ’s atoning work was finished on the cross, and partly because he uses the special word ‘afflictions’ (thlipseis) which denotes his persecutions. It is these which were unfinished, for he continued to be persecuted in his church. What benefit, then, did Paul think would come to people through his sufferings? Two of the three texts link the words ‘sufferings’ and ‘glory’. ‘My sufferings...are your glory’, he tells the Ephesians. Again, ‘salvation...with eternal glory’ will be obtained by the elect because of the sufferings Paul is enduring (2 Tim. 2:8–10). It sounds outrageous. Does Paul really imagine that his sufferings will obtain their salvation and glory? Yes, he does. Not directly, however, as if his sufferings had saving efficacy like Christ’s, but indirectly because he was suffering for the gospel which they must hear and embrace in order to be saved. Once again, suffering and service were bracketed, and the apostle’s sufferings were an indispensable link in the chain of their salvation.

The place of suffering in service and of passion in mission is hardly ever taught today. But the greatest single secret of evangelistic or missionary effectiveness is the willingness to suffer and die. It may be a death to popularity (by faithfully preaching the unpopular biblical gospel), or to pride (by the use of modest methods in reliance on the Holy Spirit), or to racial and national prejudice (by identification with another culture), or to material comfort (by adopting a simple lifestyle). But the servant must suffer if he is to bring light to the nations, and the seed must die if it is to multiply.

The hope of glory

Fourthly, the cross of Christ is the hope of final glory. Jesus clearly looked beyond his death to his resurrection, beyond his sufferings to his glory, and indeed was sustained in his trials by ‘the joy set before him’ (Heb. 12:2). It is equally clear that he expected his followers to share this perspective. The inevitability of suffering is a regular theme in his teaching and that of the apostles. If the world had hated and persecuted him, it would hate and persecute his disciples also. Suffering was, in fact, a ‘gift’ of God to all his people, and part of their calling. They should not therefore be surprised by it, as if something strange were happening to them. It was only to be expected. Nothing could be more forthright than Paul’s assertion that ‘everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted’.21 Further, in suffering like Christ they were suffering with Christ. They were more than spectators of his sufferings now, more than witnesses, more even than imitators; they were actually participants in his sufferings, sharing his ‘cup’ and his ‘baptism’.22 So, as they share in his sufferings, they would also share in his glory. The indispensability of suffering was to be seen not only as due to the antagonism of the world but as a necessary preparation. ‘Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God’, the apostles warned the new converts in Galatia. It is understandable, therefore, that the countless multitude of the redeemed whom John saw before God’s throne were described both as having ‘come out of the great tribulation’ (in the context surely a synonym for the Christian life) and as having ‘washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’.23

It is, then, the hope of glory which makes suffering bearable. The essential perspective to develop is that of the eternal purpose of God, which is to make us holy or Christlike. We ought frequently to meditate on the great New Testament texts which bring together the past and future eternities within a single horizon. For ‘God chose us in Christ before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.’ His purpose is to present us ‘before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy’. It is when these horizons are in our view that we ‘consider...our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us’, because ‘our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all’. And what is this ‘glory’, this ultimate destiny, towards which God is working everything together for good, including our sufferings? It is that we may ‘be conformed to the likeness of his Son’. The future prospect which makes suffering endurable, then, is not a reward in the form of a ‘prize’, which might lead us to say ‘no pain, no palm’ or ‘no cross, no crown’, but the only reward of priceless value, namely the glory of Christ, his own image perfectly recreated within us. ‘We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’24

This is the dominant theme of the book Destined For Glory by Margaret Clarkson, the Canadian hymn-writer and authoress. Born into a ‘loveless and unhappy’ home, and afflicted from childhood with painful headaches and crippling arthritis, suffering has been her lifelong companion. In earlier days she experienced the full range of human responses to pain, including ‘rage, frustration, despair’ and even temptation to suicide (pp.vii ff.). But gradually she came to believe in the sovereignty of God, namely that God ‘displays his sovereignty over evil by using the very suffering that is inherent in evil to assist in the working out of his eternal purpose’ (p.37). In this process he has developed an alchemy greater than that sought by the early chemists who tried to turn base metals into gold. For ‘the only true alchemist is God’. He succeeds even in the ‘transmutation of evil into good’ (p.103). We are ‘destined for glory’, the ‘glory for which he created us – to make us like his Son’ (p.125). It is summed up in a verse of one of Margaret Clarkson’s hymns (p.xii):

We may well respond, of course, that we do not want God to change us, especially if the necessary means he uses is pain. ‘We may wish, indeed,’ wrote C. S. Lewis, ‘that we were of so little account to God that he left us alone to follow our natural impulses – that he would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not for more love, but for less....To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God....’25

This vision of suffering as the path to glory for the people of God is undoubtedly biblical. One cannot say the same, however, for attempts to universalize the principle and apply it to all suffering without exception. Consider, for example, one of the official books published in preparation for the sixth assembly of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver (1983), whose advertised title was ‘Jesus Christ, the Life of the World’. This book, although written by John Poulton, arose out of a meeting of twenty-five representative theologians, whose views he therefore incorporates. One of its main themes is that there is a parallel between the death and resurrection of Jesus on the one hand and the suffering and triumphs of the contemporary world on the other. In this way the whole of human life is represented as a eucharistic celebration. ‘Might we not say’, John Poulton asks, ‘that wherever there is the conjunction of suffering and joy, of death and life, there is eucharist?’26 The basis for this interpretation is the fact that ‘the pattern of self-sacrifice and new beginnings is not one that only members of the Christian church experience and live by. Outside their circle, others too seem to reflect it, sometimes quite remarkably’ (p.66). Indeed, John Poulton continues, the crisscrossing of pain and joy, suffering and security, betrayal and love is discernible in everyday life everywhere. It reflects winter and spring, and Good Friday and Easter. Old-style evangelism is no longer needed, therefore. The new evangelism will be the Holy Spirit’s work in ‘bringing into focus in Jesus Christ a shape already glimpsed in human experience’ (p.66).

This is not the gospel of the New Testament, however. Scripture gives us no liberty to assert that all human suffering leads to glory. True, Jesus referred to wars, earthquakes and famines as ‘the beginning of birth pains’ heralding the emergence of the new world, and Paul similarly likened nature’s frustration, bondage to decay and groans to ‘the pains of childbirth’.27 But these are references to the promise of cosmic renewal for both society and nature; they are not applied in the Bible to the salvation of individuals or peoples.

Another example is the moving attempt made by Dr Ulrich Simon, a German Jewish Christian who fled to England in 1933, and whose father, brother and other relatives perished in Nazi concentration camps, to apply the death-resurrection, sufferings-glory principle to the holocaust. In his A Theology of Auschwitz (1967) he tried to ‘show the pattern of Christ’s sacrifice, which summarizes all agonies, as the reality behind Auschwitz’ (pp.13–14). For the holocaust (which of course means ‘burnt offering’) ‘is no less a sacrifice than that prefigured in the Scriptures’, that is to say, in the suffering servant of the Lord (pp.83–84). In this way, ‘the mechanics of murder were turned into a Godward oblation’, and those who gave their lives in the gas chambers became identified with ‘the supreme sacrifice by way of a sharing analogy’ (p.84); they were even scapegoats, bearing the sins of the German people (p.86). But now ‘the dead of Auschwitz have risen from the dust’ (p.91), and their resurrection is seen in Israel’s return to the land, in the conquest of anti-Semitism which ‘both led to Auschwitz and was redeemed there’ (p.93), and in the contemporary Jewish witness to the world concerning the sacred-ness of human life and the loving brotherhood of all men (p.95). The corn of wheat, having fallen into the ground, has borne this fruit. Thus the sufferings of Auschwitz, Ulrich Simon claims, are ‘within the pattern of creation and redemption’ (p.102). In particular, by interpreting the holocaust ‘in the light of the suffering Christ’ and by seeing its aftermath as ‘reflected in the triumph of the Crucified One’, it has been possible to give ‘spiritual meaning to the meaningless’ (p.104). ‘We venture to attribute the glory of the ascended Christ to the gassed millions’ (p.105).

One cannot fail to be touched by this attempted reconstruction, and one fully appreciates Dr Simon’s reasons for wanting to develop a ‘timeless, universal and cosmic conception of Christ’s work’ (p.110). But I fear this kind of ‘theology of Auschwitz’ is speculative rather than scriptural. I believe there is a better and more biblical way to relate the cross to Auschwitz, and I will come to it shortly. Meanwhile, within the community of those whom God in mercy has redeemed, it should be possible for us to echo Paul’s affirmations that ‘we also rejoice in our sufferings’ because ‘we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God’ (Rom. 5:2–3).

So far, in seeking to discern the relationships between Christ’s sufferings and ours, apart from the inspiration of his example, we have seen that suffering (for us as for Jesus) is God’s appointed path to sanctification (mature holiness), multiplication (fruitful service) and glorification (our final destiny). I hope it does not sound glib. It is easy to theorize, I know. But things look different when the horizon closes in upon us, a horror of great darkness engulfs us, and no glimmer of light shines to assure us that suffering can yet be productive. At such times we can only cling to the cross, where Christ himself demonstrated that blessing comes through suffering.

Faith and the book of Job

Fifthly, the cross of Christ is the ground of a reasonable faith. All suffering, physical and emotional, sorely tries our faith. How can it be reasonable, when calamity overwhelms us, to continue to trust in God? The best answer to this question is provided by the book of Job. It will be worth our while to clarify its thesis.

Job is introduced as a ‘blameless and upright’ man, who ‘feared God and shunned evil’. But then (after we as readers have been permitted a glimpse into the deliberations of the heavenly council chamber), Job is overtaken by a series of personal tragedies: he is deprived successively of his livestock, his servants, his sons and daughters, and his health. It would be hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disasters which have overwhelmed him. In the rest of the book the full spectrum of possible responses to suffering is rehearsed in the dialogue which develops between Job, his three so-called ‘comforters’, the young man Elihu and finally God himself. Each of the four proposes a different attitude, and specially noteworthy in each is the place accorded to the self.

Job’s own attitude is a mixture of self-pity and self-assertion. Refusing to follow his wife’s advice that he should ‘curse God and die’, he nevertheless begins by cursing the day of his birth and then longs with anguish for the day of his death. He utterly rejects the accusations of his three friends. Instead, he frames his own accusations against God. God is being brutally cruel to him, even ruthless. Worse still, God has altogether denied him justice (27:2). The contest between them is grossly unfair, since the contestants are so unequal. If only there were a mediator to arbitrate between them! If only he himself could find God, in order personally to press charges against him! Meanwhile, he vehemently maintains his innocence and is confident that one day he will be vindicated.

By contrast, the attitude recommended by Job’s friends may best be described as self-accusation. Job is suffering because he is sinful. His afflictions are the divine penalty for his misdeeds. That is the conventional orthodoxy about the wicked, which they repeat ad nauseam. ‘All his days the wicked man suffers torment’, says Eliphaz (15:20). ‘The lamp of the wicked is snuffed out’, adds Bildad (18:5), while Zophar’s contribution is that ‘the mirth of the wicked is brief’ (20:5). From this basic premise they draw the inevitable deduction that Job is suffering for his wickedness: ‘Is not your wickedness great? Are not your sins endless?’ (22:5). But Job will have none of it. His friends are ‘worthless physicians’ (13:4) and ‘miserable comforters’ (16:2), who talk nothing but ‘nonsense’ and even ‘falsehood’ (21:34). And God later confirms Job’s verdict. He refers to their ‘folly’, and says that they ‘have not spoken’ of him ‘what is right’, as his servant Job has (42:7–8).

Elihu enters next. Although he is angry because Job has been ‘justifying himself rather than God’ (32:2), he is diffident on account of his youth to speak. When he does, it is not altogether easy to distinguish his position from that of Job’s three comforters. For sometimes he too repeats the old orthodoxy. He also anticipates Yahweh’s speech about creation. Yet it seems right to call the attitude he recommends self-discipline, for his distinctive emphasis is that God speaks in many ways (including suffering) in order ‘to turn man from wrongdoing and keep him from pride’ (33:14, 17). So God makes people ‘listen to correction’ and ‘speaks to them in their affliction’ (36:10, 15). Indeed, ‘who is a teacher like him?’ (v. 22). His teaching is even a kind of ‘wooing’ (v. 16), in which he pleads with people to repent and so seeks to deliver them from their distress.

At last, when Job, the comforters and Elihu have exhausted their arguments, Yahweh reveals himself and speaks. Judging from Job’s response, the recommended attitude now may be called self-surrender. God is far from joining Job’s three friends in their accusations, and he does not blame Job for maintaining his innocence (42:8). He takes his complaints seriously, and therefore replies to him. Yet Job has uttered ‘words without knowledge’, since it is never right to blame, accuse, let alone ‘correct’ God (40:2). ‘Would you discredit my justice?’ God asks (40:8). And Job replies: ‘My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes’ (42:5–6). Previously he has defended, pitied and asserted himself, and accused God. Now he despises himself, and worships God. What has he ‘seen’ which has converted him from self-assertion to self-surrender?

Job has been invited to look afresh at the creation, and has glimpsed the glory of the Creator. God bombards him with questions. Where was he when the earth and the sea were made? Can he control the snow, the storm and the stars? Does he possess the expertise to supervise and sustain the animal world – lions and mountain goats, the wild donkey and the wild ox, the ostrich and the horse, hawks and eagles? Above all, can Job comprehend the mysteries and subdue the strength of behemoth the hippopotamus and leviathan the crocodile? What God gave Job was a comprehensive introduction to the wonders of nature, and thereby a revelation of his creative genius, which silenced Job’s accusations and led him – even in the midst of his continued bereavement, suffering and pain – to humble himself, repent of his rebellion, and trust God again.

If it was reasonable for Job to trust the God whose wisdom and power have been revealed in creation, how much more reasonable is it for us to trust the God whose love and justice have been revealed in the cross? The reasonableness of trust lies in the known trustworthiness of its object. And no-one is more trustworthy than the God of the cross. The cross assures us that there is no possibility of a miscarriage of justice or of the defeat of love either now or on the last day. ‘He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?’ (Rom. 8:32). It is the self-giving of God in the gift of his Son which convinces us that he will withhold nothing from us that we need, and allow nothing to separate us from his love (vv. 35–39). So between the cross, where God’s love and justice began to be clearly revealed, and the day of judgment when they will be completely revealed, it is reasonable to trust in him.

We have to learn to climb the hill called Calvary, and from that vantage-ground survey all life’s tragedies. The cross does not solve the problem of suffering, but it supplies the essential perspective from which to look at it. Since God has demonstrated his holy love and loving justice in a historical event (the cross), no other historical event (whether personal or global) can override or disprove it. This must surely be why the scroll (the book of history and destiny) is now in the hands of the slain Lamb, and why only he is worthy to break its seals, reveal its contents and control the flow of the future.

The pain of God

There is a sixth way in which Christ’s sufferings are related to ours. It is the most important of the series. It is that the cross of Christ is the proof of God’s solidary love, that is, of his personal, loving solidarity with us in our pain. For the real sting of suffering is not misfortune itself, nor even the pain of it or the injustice of it, but the apparent God-forsakenness of it. Pain is endurable, but the seeming indifference of God is not. Sometimes we picture him lounging, perhaps dozing, in some celestial deck-chair, while the hungry millions starve to death. We think of him as an armchair spectator, almost gloating over the world’s suffering, and enjoying his own insulation from it. Philip Yancey has gone further and uttered the unutterable which we may have thought but to which we have never dared to give voice: ‘If God is truly in charge, somehow connected to all the world’s suffering, why is he so capricious, unfair? Is he the cosmic sadist who delights in watching us squirm?’28 Job had said something similar: God ‘mocks the despair of the innocent’ (9:23).

It is this terrible caricature of God which the cross smashes to smithereens. We are not to envisage him on a deck-chair, but on a cross. The God who allows us to suffer, once suffered himself in Christ, and continues to suffer with us and for us today. Since the cross was a once-for-all historical event, in which God in Christ bore our sins and died our death because of his love and justice, we must not think of it as expressing an eternal sin-bearing in the heart of God. What Scripture does give us warrant to say, however, is that God’s eternal holy love, which was uniquely exhibited in the sacrifice of the cross, continues to suffer with us in every situation in which it is called forth. But is it legitimate to speak of a suffering God? Are we not impeded from doing so by the traditional doctrine of the divine impassibility? The Latin adjective impassibilis means ‘incapable of suffering’ and therefore ‘devoid of emotion’. Its Greek equivalent apathēs was applied by the philosophers to God, whom they declared to be above pleasure and pain, since these would interrupt his tranquillity.

The early Greek Fathers of the church took over this notion somewhat uncritically. In consequence, their teaching about God sometimes sounds more Greek than Hebrew. It was also ambivalent. True, they knew that Jesus Christ the Incarnate Son suffered, but not God himself. Ignatius wrote to Polycarp, for example, of the God ‘who cannot suffer, who for our sakes accepted suffering’, that is, in Christ.29 Similarly, Irenaeus affirmed that by reason of the incarnation ‘the invisible was made visible, the incomprehensible comprehensible, and the impassible passible’.30 True again, they knew that the Old Testament authors wrote freely of the love, pity, anger, sorrow and jealousy of God. But they added that these were anthropomorphisms which are not to be taken literally, since the divine nature is unmoved by all emotions.31 Gregory Thaumaturgus in the third century even wrote that ‘in his suffering God shows his impassibility’.

These and other ancient church Fathers deserve our understanding. They were wanting above all to safeguard the truths that God is perfect (so that nothing can add to or subtract from him) and that God is changeless (so that nothing can disturb him).32 We today should still wish to maintain these truths. God cannot be influenced against his will from either outside or inside. He is never the unwilling victim either of actions which affect him from without or of emotions which upset him from within. As William Temple put it, ‘there is a highly technical sense in which God, as Christ revealed him, is “without passions”; for he is Creator and supreme, and is never “passive” in the sense of having things happen to him except with his consent; also he is constant, and free from gusts of feeling carrying him this way and that’. Nevertheless, Temple rightly went on to say that the term ‘impassible’ as used by most theologians really meant ‘incapable of suffering’, and that ‘in this sense its predication of God is almost wholly false’.33

It is true that Old Testament language is an accommodation to our human understanding, and that God is represented as experiencing human emotions. Yet, to acknowledge that his feelings are not human is not to deny that they are real. If they are only metaphorical, ‘then the only God left to us will be the infinite iceberg of metaphysics’.34 In contrast to this, we may be thankful to the Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel, who in his book The Prophets refers to their ‘pathetic theology’, because they portray a God of feeling. The frequent Old Testament ‘anthropopathisms’ (which ascribe human suffering to God) are not to be rejected as crude or primitive, he writes, but rather to be welcomed as crucial to our understanding of him: ‘the most exalted idea applied to God is not infinite wisdom, infinite power, but infinite concern’ (p.241). Thus, before the flood Yahweh was ‘grieved’ that he had made human beings, ‘and his heart was filled with pain’, and when his people were oppressed by foreigners during the time of the Judges, Yahweh ‘could bear Israel’s misery no longer’.35 Most striking of all are the occasions when through the prophets God expresses his ‘yearning’ and ‘compassion’ for his people and addresses Israel direct: ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love.... Can a mother forget the baby at her breast...? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!...How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel?...My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused.’36

If God’s full and final self-revelation was given in Jesus, moreover, then his feelings and sufferings are an authentic reflection of the feelings and sufferings of God himself. The Gospel writers attribute to him the whole range of human emotions, from love and compassion through anger and indignation to sorrow and joy. The stubbornness of human hearts caused him distress and anger. Outside Lazarus’ tomb, in the face of death, he both ‘wept’ with grief and ‘snorted’ with indignation. He wept again over Jerusalem, and uttered a lament over her blindness and obstinacy. And still today he is able ‘to sympathize with our weaknesses’, feeling with us in them.37

The best way to confront the traditional view of the impassibility of God, however, is to ask ‘what meaning there can be in a love which is not costly to the lover’.38 If love is self-giving, then it is inevitably vulnerable to pain, since it exposes itself to the possibility of rejection and insult. It is ‘the fundamental Christian assertion that God is love’, writes Jürgen Moltmann, ‘which in principle broke the spell of the Aristotelian doctrine of God’ (i.e. as ‘impassible’). ‘Were God incapable of suffering..., then he would also be incapable of love’, whereas ‘the one who is capable of love is also capable of suffering, for he also opens himself to the suffering which is involved in love’.39 That is surely why Bonhoeffer wrote from prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge, nine months before his execution: ‘only the Suffering God can help.’40

Worthy of special mention, as a doughty opponent of false views of the divine impassibility, is the Japanese Lutheran scholar Kazoh Kitamori. He wrote his remarkable book Theology of the Pain of God in 1945, not long after the first atomic bombs had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was inspired, he tells us, by Jeremiah 31:20, where God describes his heart as ‘yearning’ or ‘pained’ for Ephraim, even as ‘broken’. ‘The heart of the gospel was revealed to me as the “pain of God”,’ he writes (p.19). To begin with, God’s anger against sin gives him pain. ‘This wrath of God is absolute and firm. We may say that the recognition of God’s wrath is the beginning of wisdom.’ But God loves the very people with whom he is angry. So ‘the “pain” of God reflects his will to love the object of his wrath’. It is his love and his wrath which together produce his pain. For here, in Luther’s arresting phrase, is ‘God striving with God’. ‘The fact that this fighting God is not two different gods but the same God causes his pain’ (p.21). The pain of God is ‘a synthesis of his wrath and love’ (p.26) and is ‘his essence’ (p.47). It was supremely revealed in the cross. For ‘the “pain of God” results from the love of the One who intercepts and blocks his wrath towards us, the One who himself is smitten by his wrath’ (p.123). This is strikingly bold phraseology. It helps us to understand how God’s pain continues whenever his wrath and love, his justice and mercy, are in tension today.

Looking at the world during the second half of the twentieth century, there have probably been two outstandingly conspicuous examples of human suffering, the first being hunger and poverty on a global scale, and the second the Nazi holocaust of six million Jews. How does the cross speak to such evils as these?

It is reckoned that one thousand million people today, because they lack the basic necessities of life, may rightly be described as ‘destitute’. Many of them eke out a pitiful existence in the slums and shanty towns of Africa and Asia, the barriadas of Spanish Latin America and the favelas of Brazil. The penury of the people, the overcrowding in their ramshackle shelters, the lack of elementary sanitation, the virtual nakedness of the children, the hunger, disease, unemployment and absence of education – all this adds up to a horrific tally of human need. It is not surprising that such slums are hotbeds of bitterness and resentment; the wonder is that the sheer inhumanity and injustice of it all does not breed an even more virulent anger. Rolf Italiaander imagines a poor man from one of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, who climbs laboriously up to the colossal statue of Christ, 2,310 feet high, which towers above Rio, ‘the Christ of Corcovado’. The poor man speaks to the statue:

What would Christ say in response to such an entreaty? Would he not say ‘I did come down to live among you, and I live among you still’?

This is, in fact, how some Latin American theologians are presenting the cross today. In his Christology at the Crossroads, for example, Professor Jon Sobrino of El Salvador develops a protest both against a purely academic theology which fails to take appropriate action and against the traditional, mournful ‘mystique’ of the cross which is too passive and individualistic. Instead, he seeks to relate the cross to the modern world and its social injustice. Was God himself, he asks, ‘untouched by the historical cross because he is essentially untouchable?’ (p.190). No, no. ‘God himself, the Father, was on the cross of Jesus.’ In addition, ‘God is to be found on the crosses of the oppressed’ (p.201). Provided that Professor Sobrino is not denying the fundamental, atoning purpose of the cross, I do not think we should resist what he is affirming. Here is his summary: ‘On the cross of Jesus God himself is crucified. The Father suffers the death of the Son and takes upon himself the pain and suffering of history.’ And in this ultimate solidarity with human beings God ‘reveals himself as the God of love’ (pp.224, 371).

What, then, about the holocaust? ‘After Auschwitz’, said Richard Rubinstein, ‘it is impossible to believe in God.’ One Sunday afternoon, in a sub-camp of Buchenwald, a group of learned Jews decided to put God on trial for neglecting his chosen people. Witnesses were produced for both prosecution and defence, but the case for the prosecution was overwhelming. The judges were Rabbis. They found the accused guilty and solemnly condemned him.42 It is understandable. The sheer bestiality of the camps and the gas chambers, and the failure of God to intervene on behalf of his ancient people, in spite of their frequent and fervent prayers, have shaken many people’s faith. I have already said that I do not think the way to interpret Auschwitz and its aftermath is in terms of death and resurrection. Is there, then, another way? I think Elie (Eliezer) Wiesel can help us. Born a Hungarian Jew, he became an internationally acclaimed author, and he has given us in his book Night a deeply moving account of his boyhood experiences in the death camps of Auschwitz, Buna and Buchenwald. He was not quite fifteen when the Gestapo arrived to deport all Jews from Sighet in the spring of 1944. They travelled by train for three days, eighty in each cattle wagon. On arrival at Auschwitz, the men and women were segregated, and Elie never saw his mother or sister again. ‘Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke (sc. of the crematorium)....Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith for ever....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul, and turned my dreams to dust ....’ (p.45). A bit later he wrote: ‘Some talked of God, of his mysterious ways, of the sins of the Jewish people, and of their future deliverance. But I had ceased to pray. How I sympathised with Job! I did not deny God’s existence, but I doubted his absolute justice’ (p.57).

Perhaps the most horrifying experience of all was when the guards first tortured and then hanged a young boy, ‘a child with a refined and beautiful face’, a ‘sad-eyed angel’. Just before the hanging Elie heard someone behind him whisper, ‘Where is God? Where is he?’ Thousands of prisoners were forced to watch the hanging (it took the boy half an hour to die) and then to march past, looking him full in the face. Behind him Elie heard the same voice ask, ‘Where is God now?’ ‘And I heard a voice within me answer him: “Where is he? Here he is – he is hanging here on this gallows....”’ (pp.75–77). His words were truer than he knew, for he was not a Christian. Indeed, in every fibre of his being he rebelled against God for allowing people to be tortured, butchered, gassed and burned. ‘I was alone – terribly alone in a world without God and without man. Without love or mercy’ (p.79). Could he have said that if in Jesus he had seen God on the gallows?

There is good biblical evidence that God not only suffered in Christ, but that God in Christ suffers with his people still. Is it not written of God, during the early days of Israel’s bitter bondage in Egypt, not just that he saw their plight and ‘heard their groaning’, but that ‘in all their distress he too was distressed’? Did Jesus not ask Saul of Tarsus why he was persecuting him, thus disclosing his solidarity with his church? It is wonderful that we may share in Christ’s sufferings; it is more wonderful still that he shares in ours. Truly his name is ‘Emmanuel’, ‘God with us’. But his ‘sympathy’ is not limited to his suffering with his covenant people. Did Jesus not say that in ministering to the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner, we would be ministering to him, indicating that he identified himself with all needy and suffering people?43

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross’. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. ‘The cross of Christ...is God’s only self-justification in such a world’ as ours.44

Edward Shillito, shattered by the carnage of the First World War, found comfort in the fact that Jesus was able to show his disciples the scars of his crucifixion. It inspired him to write his poem ‘Jesus of the Scars’:

If we have never sought, we seek thee now;

Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;

We must have sight of thorn-marks on thy brow,

We must have thee, O Jesus of the scars.

The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;

In all the universe we have no place.

Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?

Lord Jesus, by thy scars we know thy grace.

If, when the doors are shut, thou drawest near,

Only reveal those hands, that side of thine;

We know today what wounds are, have no fear;

Show us thy scars, we know the countersign.

The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak;

They rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne;

But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,

And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.45