Occasionally theologians, visionaries, saints, and homilists assert that no human being ever suffered pain, abandonment, and humiliation to such a degree as did Jesus in his Passion. I certainly have heard that from the pulpit. I have had conversations in which people speak movingly of their belief that no one ever suffered as much pain, or was tortured as cruelly, as Jesus was; that no human suffering can ever compare to it.
It's possible. I confess it is not an assertion on which I will stake everything, even interiorly. And because of that uncertainty, I definitely would not give voice to it, lest I wound some listener. Among mere humans, to sit in judgment over sufferings, deciding whose pain measures up and whose doesn't rate so highly, is fruitless and cruel. "You have suffered, but I know someone who has suffered more; let me tell you about him." Even some believing Christians, thinking back on their own suffering, find this approach dismissive. This assertion sounds dangerously close to: Your suffering doesn't matter, is nothing, in the shadow of this greatest suffering.
(Sometimes, in the midst of a sermon about Having Some Perspective, it sounds exactly like this.)
But our faith does not rest in any way on the assertion that Jesus's suffering was the worst-ever suffering in the history of the human race.
Here is another approach:
Our Lord had two natures, human and divine.
As God, He could not die. Further, He could neither suffer nor die.... And just as He could never sin, He also could never die, for, like sinning, dying is a lack of power.
Even as man He could die or not die; for although it is a general law that all men die, nevertheless He could have ben exempted from that law because there was no sin in Him. Remember, it is sin that gave death entrance. But our Lord never chose to avail Himself of this privilee, and so took a passible and mortal body. He became incarnate in order to be Saviour.
He chose to save us by suffering and dying, and to take on Himself, in His sacred humanity, and in strictest justice, what we had merited because of our iniquities. He was so one in His divine and human natures that even though He suffered only in His humanity and not in His divinity, which is impassible nevertheless, when one sees the manner in which He suffered, one cannot tell, so to speak, if it was God or man who suffered, so admirable are the virtues He practiced.
Even though he suffered nothing as God, yet His divinity united with His humanity gave such price, value and merit to these sufferings, that the smallest tear, the smallest movement of His Sacred Heart, the smallest loving sigh was more meritorious, more precious and more pleasing to God than would have been all imaginable torments of body and spirit—more pleasing even than the torments of Hell—endured by creatures endowed with the greatest perfection.
I will say even more: all the pains in a hundred thousand million Hells suffered with the greatest perfection possible to a human creature would have been nothing compared to the smallest sigh of Our Lord, to the smallest drop of the blood that He shed for love of us.
For it is His divine Person, infinitely excellent and infinitely worthy, that gives price and value to such actions and sufferings.
Yet His divinity is so united with His humanity that we can truly say God suffered death, death on a Cross, to redeem us and give us life.
This is St. Francis de Sales's "Sermon for Good Friday, March 25, 1622."
What makes the sufferings of Jesus valuable is not the degree of suffering that He endured. All such sufferings are (by their nature) finite. What gives them value is the infinite and uncreated value of the One who willingly underwent them. It is the Incarnation: the Passion is what brings it to fulfillment and completion; but the value of the Incarnation alone is infinite.
God who is all Good and whose will is all Good willingly chose suffering of all kinds. Therefore we can know that human suffering (of all kinds) is not worthless, has been baptized with the value of one who suffered all the little scrapes and stings of life with us in His compassion, all the way to the end.
The Passion cannot overshadow our human sufferings and make them worthless by outshining them in horror or shame or intensity. The Incarnation, the moment when God entered into human suffering, infuses all human suffering with its value and power. Our suffering is not worth less because God suffered all the things He did: it is worth more.
I immersed mysel in de Sales's Intriduction to the Devout Life for Lent this year. Marvelous! Am now going to be guiding my 17yo son through the book ...
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Posted by: Penelope | 21 April 2019 at 05:11 AM