There is a profound mystery alluded to in what seems like an interesting footnote to the Passion narrative:
They pressed into service a passer-by, Simon, a Cyrenian, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross. (Mark 15:21)
At first glance, it’s not surprising that Jesus needed help carrying the cross, considering what he had suffered during the scourging. But on a deeper level, this passage is about redemptive suffering. Saint Paul helps unlock this meaning in his letter to the Colossians:
Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the Church. (Colossians 1:24)
Now what was lacking in Christ’s Passion? Nothing! It was absolutely effective in conquering sin and death and opening the gates of Heaven for us. So what is Saint Paul talking about here? The key to understanding this passage is the phrase “on behalf of his body, which is the Church.” In several letters Paul refers to Christ as the head and the Church as the body, going on to explain that as each body part has its own unique and critical role to play, so too does each Christian contribute with their own unique gifts to building up the Church:
Living the truth in love, we should grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, with the proper functioning of each part, brings about the body’s growth and builds itself up in love. (Ephesians 4:15-16; see also the famous “one body, many parts” passage in First Corinthians, 12:12-31)
So how do we build up the Church through our suffering? Why do we suffer? And why does God seem to distribute sufferings at random?
First, pain and suffering are an inevitable part of life. Every philosophy tries to account for why there is suffering, what meaning (if any) we can draw from it, and what it tells us about God. Christians believe suffering is a collective consequence of sin. This doesn’t mean there is a one-to-one correlation between each person’s sufferings and their sins. (Jesus said so himself – see Luke 13:1-5). But sin (disobedience to God’s will) introduced disharmony into the natural order of things, where mankind stands in humble service to our all-loving Father. Suffering is a consequence of this disharmony.
Is suffering always fair? Of course not! We know this from the Book of Job, and the lives of so many saints who bore their sufferings patiently for the faith. We also trust that God always brings forth good things from the bad. He brings forth light from the darkness. Through our suffering he leads us back to him. For it is most often in our sufferings rather than our comforts, our labors rather than our leisure, that we seek and find the Lord. It is in suffering that we become aware of our utter dependence on the God for everything, and when our souls are most ready to surrender everything we have to him. C.S. Lewis (in The Problem of Pain) put it this way: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Not only does suffering brings us closer to God, but offering up our sufferings to God is an efficacious form of prayer for the salvation of souls. Mary confirmed this to the children at Fatima. And this is Saint Paul’s point. When one part of our physical body suffers, the whole body suffers. But when one part of the body grows stronger, the whole body becomes healthier. So too with the Church: when one member of the Church (one part of the body of Christ) grows in holiness through suffering, the other members of the Church grow in holiness as well. This is how we can help others get to Heaven when we offer up our suffering to God. This is redemptive suffering. Just as Simon helped Jesus carry the cross, we can help Jesus carry the cross when we bear our sufferings patiently and offer them up to him.
Image: Christ Carrying the Cross by el Greco (downloaded from Wikipedia Commons).
