Is Suffering Redemptive?

Speaking of the Passion, the sermon preached by our associate pastor yesterday made what I thought were some very good points, and some that I was less sure about. She started off by noting that we in the advanced industrialized West aren’t all that good at dealing with suffering. She attributed this to the fact that our prosperity and technology enable us to go through at least large swaths of life relatively insulated from the kind of suffering that folks elsewhere in the world are all too familiar with. The idea that we can somehow totally abolish suffering from human life is a pernicious illusion that blinds us to important features of reality.

This strikes me as right, and importantly so. Not only do I think our obsession with insulating ourselves from suffering is ultimately doomed to failure, it also tends to be used to justify a great deal of evil inflicted upon others. War, abortion, economic exploitation, euthanasia, etc. have all been justified as part of the grand plan to eliminate suffering.

Our pastor then went on to talk about how Jesus’ Passion teaches us about the true nature of suffering. It’s here, though, that things started to get a little murky, I thought. She said that Christianity teaches that “suffering is redemptive.” Now, I certainly agree that the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are redemptive, but is suffering per se, or even generally, redemptive? On the contrary, it seems to me that suffering, considered in and of itself, is intrinsically bad. After all, isn’t the promise of the Gospel that God will “wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more: the first things are passed away”? (Rev. 21:4) The fact that God can bring good out of evil does not make evil good, I would think.

The attitude of the NT seems to be that suffering is something Christians endure for the sake of following Jesus, but not necessarily that it’s something redemptive in itself. Followers of Jesus should certainly expect suffering, but not seek it out. And Paul says that “our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us,” (Rom. 8:18) which seems to indicate that they are relatively unimportant.

I think part of the issue at hand is that we moderns tend to take human suffering to be a much bigger theological problem than the ancients did. Entire theologies have been written to show that the whole point of the Gospel is that God “identifies with us in our sufferings.” I don’t want to deny that this is a part of the story of redemption, but focusing on it tends to obscure the elements that cast us in a less than flattering light. If God’s purpose is to identify with us in our sufferings, it means that we’re the victims and the onus is somehow on God to do something about the situation. But in the traditional understanding of the Passion, God is the victim (literally!) and we are the victimizers. In fact, to say that “suffering is redemptive” may in a way tend to exculpate us from complicity in Jesus’ death. Rather than a crime visited on the Son of God, it becomes an illustration of a general truth offered for our edification.

(In fairness to my pastor I may be reading way too much into what she said. Regardless, I think the idea that “suffering is redemptive” has enough general currency that it’s worth thinking about.)