The Jericho Road

Here is one of the first Jericho Road post from Feb. 15, 2006. I’m bringing it to the front for some air and sunshine. I was writing from Wales at the time, three years into pastoral life. Rereading these lines makes me long to be a better theologian of the cross.

A theologian of the cross (the Christian) calls suffering good because God is hidden in suffering. Suffering prepares us for seeing God, now and after the resurrection, by attacking the pride behind our “good works”. Suffering reveals the utter inadequacy of man before God and proves that only “the works of God” can give life. Therefore, the only works the Christian wants or accepts are the works of God; they despise their own as actual hindrances to God. But only suffering will convince us of this. The Christian doesn’t merely repent of evil, but repents of his “good” works, knowing that to claim a good work of his own is to supplant the good work of God. We know our flesh craves adoration and praise that belongs only to God. Our “good works” seen this way, must be seen for what they are: evil against God.

But are they not called to do good works? Oh, yes. But what they do is not what they do; it is what God does in them. As the apostle, Paul, said,  “For through the law I died to the law so  that  I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if justificaiton were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.” Galatians 29-21.

The only works acceptable in the Christian life are the works of Christ done by the Spirit that lives in them. All other’s are accounted as evil. It is suffering the cross in us that reveals the littleness of our works, the weakness of our flesh to perform for God, to entertain and please him with our childish tricks. Suffering temptation, the lust of the flesh to lie, covet, and kill for its own satisfaction, the suffering of our guilt under the law of God, all of this suffering is good and the only means of seeing God. This is the lesson of the cross: God is revealed in suffering.

If I would meditate on the cross, calling suffering good instead of evil, I would see God in the cruciformed figure of the Son of God, “suffering unto death” for my sins. And I would become a person known for bearing sin, not as my own work to glory in, but as the work of the crucified Christ reproduced in his earthly body, the Church. The cross in the life of the Church is God’s work, not it’s own; it is the work of suffering as he bears sin in his body. It is suffering, it is good, it is the work of God.“Therefore, by beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” Philippians 2.12-13

Update on Monday, February 1, 2010 by Jan McKenzie

Though not in this post, I have made clear in other places that I am speaking of the suffeing that comes as a result of faith, for the sake of Christ and God’s glory. There is another type of suffering that comes from our sin, pride, and other lust that does not work the glory of God, at least not until the grace of God leads the soul to repentance. As Paul says at the end of Romans 5, where sin abounds, grace does “much more” abound. All depends on the exercise of faith in the blood of Christ that, by the grace of God, makes something good out nothing.

I am not advocating self-inflicted suffering, as in monkish practices of pennance. That is a particluar species of pride that is completely foreign to the Spirit of the cross.