We can be so tempted to view suffering or sadness as an enemy to be avoided, or worse a sign of God’s displeasure (or worst of all, a sign of Divine closeness). Instead, in today’s reflection, Richard Young reminds us that suffering is morally neutral reality – but our response to it can make all the difference.

October 20, 2024: Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
Isaiah 53:10-11
Psalm 33:4-5, 18-20, 22
Hebrews 4:14-16
Mark 10:35-45

The Disciple’s Journey: Through “Everything Stinks” to “Alleluia”

A reflection by Richard Young

I prayed over today’s Scriptures, and it became clear that I had to write about suffering. A downer of a topic! But did you notice all these other depressing themes in our first two readings: infirmity, guilt, weakness, temptation, sin? Then, Mark’s Jesus asks, “Can you … be baptized in the same bath of pain as I?” Bath of pain: what an image! And the focus is not just on physical pain. It’s also the kind of suffering that is mentioned in the beatitudes: “when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of slander against you.” If you try to serve as Jesus taught, there’s bound to be some suffering. You’re bound to get your heart broken – multiple times.

In my searching around to find some way to take the edge off this topic, I ran across a piece from a few years ago by a funny lady, a religious author/blogger named Laura Phelps. This post is titled “The Importance of Finding Humor in Suffering.” She assures her readers, “It’s not that I think that suffering is funny. I don’t. It is … insanely hard, and I wish it didn’t slap me in the face as often as it does.” But Laura began her reflection with something from Saint Philip Neri: “To have a sense of humor,” he said, “is to be wise enough to see things in proportion.” Saint Philip is said to have been a man who drew people to Christ “by the quality of his joy,” even in times of suffering – “by the quality of his joy!” In response, Laura (no doubt, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic) wrote:

As we slowly emerge out of the craziest months of our lives,
bracing ourselves in anticipation as we wait for the next disaster, it would be good to ask, “What is the quality of my joy? How do I see things? How do I view the world? Am I so focused on the tragedy of it all that I have failed to see the joy? Am I so wrapped up in the bad news and suffering, that I have forgotten the commission to spread the good news?” ... We are an Easter people …and “Everything stinks!” is so not our song. Alleluia is!

There is Good News somewhere within the mystery of suffering, and addressing the universal experience of it need not be joyless. Moving from “everything stinks” to “alleluia” is our job as the hope-filled Body of Christ. It’s good to remember that, as we look at the first reading and the gospel today.

The passage from Isaiah is from a series of poems scholars call the Songs of the Suffering Servant. Shortly before today’s reading begins, we read that the Servant “was spurned and avoided by [others], a [person] of suffering and accustomed to infirmity” – words we hear at traditional Good Friday services. Early Christians adopted the prophecy about this mythic character, this broken, rejected, reviled figure, to make sense of the death of Jesus, who became to them the new Suffering Servant of God. The Suffering Servant, today’s reading tells us, “gives [their] life as an offering for sin.” It says further that “through … suffering, my servant shall justify many, and their guilt he shall bear.” It tells us that God was actually “pleased” (can you imagine that?) “pleased to crush him in infirmity.” This all sounds like what is traditionally said about Jesus. Unfortunately, passages such as these became the basis of much of the substitutional atonement theology that has done so much spiritual harm over the centuries – a theology that has been rightly trashed by many contemporary Christians. It suggests that Jesus was sent to fix our sinful human condition and make everything right with a sadistic god by taking on the punishment for our sins. That thinking plunges us ever more deeply into an “everything stinks” place and far from “alleluia.” If the goal is joy, how do we get there with this kind of theology? I know I can’t.

But the late Anglican bishop, John Spong, a great friend of the LGBTQ+ community, had another take on the Suffering Servant that challenges me to go beyond the empty dualisms of sin and virtue, reward and punishment, and into a new consciousness, one that sees suffering, not as a tool used by God as payback for my mistakes, but as an often necessary prerequisite of service. “The role of ... Isaiah’s ‘Servant’ figure,” Spong wrote, “is operative behind Jesus’ words and actions. Wholeness comes … from draining the hurt and anger from the lives of others, absorbing it and returning it only as love. Jesus is clearly living out the vocation of ‘the Servant.’” As other Christs, it’s our vocation, too – absorbing and transforming the world’s hurt and revealing a God who suffers with us, a God who, Spong says, is “seen in the crucified one,” the one “who gives life as he dies, who offers forgiveness as he is victimized, who shows love as he is hated.”

Only a few years ago, we all heard stories of nurses and doctors treating paranoid, anti-vaxxer COVID patients, who cursed at and spit at health care workers, screaming that their illness was a hoax and demanding dangerous and ineffective treatments and accusing hospital staffs of violating their freedom – even turning them magnetic and installing some kind of tracking chip so that the “evil” government could monitor them. These dedicated medical professionals needed to have a thick skin. They were people who often suffered as they served: suffering servants, trying to save the lives of the ungrateful. To most of us they were heroes, other Christs, “draining the hurt and anger from the lives of others, absorbing it and returning it only as love.”

“Who can take away suffering without entering it?” the late Henri Nouwen asked. Suffering, if it is to do any good, can’t be bypassed. It has to be entered – AND shared. I am not meant to enter it alone. It’s a task that requires community, the support of others. The word “compassion” literally means “suffering with.” We may never understand what the mystery of suffering means. It just is. The more important question is how to enter it and go through it in such a way that you arrive at joy. Joan Chittister wrote that “no one escapes suffering. It is part of the rhythm of life, part of the process of living … it is important,” she says, “to spend it well.” If you’re going to suffer anyway, use it wisely. Let it be your teacher in the ways of compassion.

How to spend suffering well is behind the teaching of Mark’s Jesus today. James and John want a couple of cushy jobs – ones that they think would give them status and privilege in the reign they assumed Jesus was planning to establish. Their new prestigious positions at Jesus’ right and left would be highly lucrative and would take them away from the everyday grind of living, away from all the poor and the sick, the brutality of their Roman occupiers, the constant threat of those who “lord it over them.” In the new “kingdom,” they would get, they hoped, an exemption from suffering – at least a partial one. But Mark’s Jesus couldn’t be clearer: if they wanted to remain among the disciples, they would have to encounter the same “bath of pain.” They would carry on the Suffering Servant role that Jesus accepted – with a special emphasis on serving. If they wanted greatness, service would be the price. They would spend their suffering well by refusing to try to go around it, instead going directly through it and letting it break their hearts. A disciple spends suffering well by entering into the misery of the lowly and the infirm, the hungry and the lonely, the angry and the grieving, the broken, the hated, the rejected. We spend suffering well, when we allow ourselves to be moved by the sight of asylum seekers being lied about for political gain, the cries of those mourning the victims of gun violence, the cruelty dished out to our transgender siblings. If you spend your “bath of pain” well, you will be only too happy to serve, and then joy is bound to arrive. And “everything stinks!” gets transformed into “alleluia!”

When I was eleven, my eighteen-year-old brother was killed in a horrible accident. Our mother, who had always struggled with depression and anxiety, grieved so intensely, so deeply, that it shook me to the core. I was sad over the death, too, of course, but my memory of that event is focused on the mental agony she endured. There was no escaping that suffering, and it was a hell of a lot for a young boy to absorb. But she was a woman with a strong faith. She held tightly to her rosary beads every day and prayed. “I believe the Blessed Mother helps me,” she would say. Now, I have worked in the helping professions my entire adult life (teacher, mental health counselor, priest), and I sometimes wonder if I went in that direction because of that particular “bath of pain.” My mother, a product of the Great Depression, never wasted anything. I doubt if she would waste a good prayer or a good period of mourning. Perhaps she would have agreed with Joan Chittister that not even suffering should be wasted, but spent well. Maybe she spent hers by pushing some of the power of her rosary in my direction and praying that her son might grow up to be a Suffering Servant, full of compassion, radical hope, and ultimately joy. May that be so for all of us.

Rev. Richard P. Young is a retired Catholic priest and mental health counselor. He chairs the Liturgy Committee of Dignity/Dayton’s Living Beatitudes Community and has worked with several Dignity Chapters since the late 70s. He once served for a term on the national board of DignityUSA and has attended all the national conventions/conferences since 1981. He is married to former DignityUSA national secretary, Bob Butts. Richard was honored with a President’s Award at the 2022 Dignity National Conference in San Diego.