Dear Grace,
Lent is so difficult for me every year because of the focus on the suffering of Jesus. It’s so hard for me to think of it. I couldn’t even get myself to go see the The Passion of The Christ movie last year because of this. I don’t understand why Jesus had to die to save us, and why did He have to suffer like that? Why did God choose that way to save us?
I used to wonder about this myself when I was younger. I too did not understand why Jesus had to die the way He did. And because of my own person struggles growing up with a physical disability, suffering seemed to me to be totally unfair and meaningless. All that changed, however, when I studied the Catholic faith and came to see the great value in the mystery of human suffering. So, I am happy to share with you what I have learned.
Suffering is not useless. Suffering has value — it has meaning and a purpose. The world is wrong to teach us to run from it. Jesus never did. In fact, He knew always that suffering was to be a part of His mission, and He embraced it.
If you question why He had to suffer, or why we do, turn to the Cross. Jesus wants to answer us from the Cross. And He is the only one who can give us the answer and help us unlock the mystery of human suffering. It was there — at the Cross — that suffering and love were linked in the most mysterious way. Because it was there that He accomplished the greatest “good” — our salvation — by way of the greatest evil. There is no greater evil than to kill the only Son of God. And why did that happen? Why did Almighty God become a man so that He would suffer and die?
We know that Jesus went to the Cross, underwent agonizing suffering, and died willingly out of love for us — in order to save us. It was because of love. Thus, as we said above, at the Cross, suffering and love were bound up together. Therefore, it is important that we understand this link between suffering and love if we are ever to make sense of suffering, whether it is Jesus’s suffering or our own. You may be asking, “Suffering and love go together? How can that be? It doesn’t feel like love when I am suffering.”
Perhaps we need to understand love better in order to see its connection with suffering. There are certain essential characteristics of love that we must realize. These are that love is reciprocal, love is free, and love is just. This is a story, so it has to be told from the beginning. Obviously, we cannot give all the details here, but I think we can say enough so we will be able to comprehend it in a general way that will maybe lead us to want to know more.
You say that you do not understand why Jesus had to die. Let us go to the Book of Genesis. There, we read about the beginning — the creation of the world and the creation of man. Throughout the ages, so many have pondered and asked, “Why? Why did God do it all? Why did He create the world and man if He knew what would happen? Why did He make a man, only to have him reject Him?” The answer has to be love.
Here we will talk about the first characteristic of love, that it is reciprocal — it wants to love and be loved back. God is love, and therefore, everything He does is done out of love.
So, we can say that God, who is love itself, created man out of His infinite, over-flowing love. And He created him for Himself. He wants for man to love Him back. We are made by love, and we are made for love. So, while on this earth, we are on a journey back to love. This world is not our home. Heaven is our home! You and I have a heavenly destiny. We were created to be eternally happy. We were not created to suffer. And yet, suffering came into the world.
Why did God allow that if He loved us so much? We will see why in next week’s column as we continue our discussion of the value of human suffering.
© Copyright 2005 Grace D. MacKinnon
For permission to reprint this article, or to have Grace speak at your event, contact Grace MacKinnon at grace@DearGraceMinistries.org .
Grace MacKinnon holds an MA in theology and is a syndicated columnist and public speaker on Catholic doctrine. Her new book Dear Grace: Answers to Questions About the Faith is available in our online store. If you enjoy reading Grace’s column, you will certainly want to have this book, which is a collection of the first two years of “Dear Grace.” Faith questions may be sent to Grace via email at: grace@DearGraceMinistries.org. You may also visit her online at www.DearGraceMinistries.org.
