How Can We Rejoice in Our Sufferings?
Our Epistle reading last Sunday was from the fifth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Roman Church, a passage anchored by this weighty dose of encouragement to a young and troubled church: “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” How can we possibly rejoice in our sufferings? This question carries new significance for many of us given all that has happened and is still happening around us.
The answer to this question is simple enough. We can rejoice in suffering because we have been justified by faith giving us peace with God (Romans 5:1), and through this faith have access “into the grace in which we stand” (Romans 5:2). God has given us all of these gifts in and through the gift of his Son Christ Jesus our Lord, granting us an entirely new way to experience and appreciate suffering. That new way is one which is grounded, remarkably, in hope, a hope which can be wholly trusted as more than fanciful wishful thinking because it has been placed in our hearts through the power of the Holy Spirit.
While I have appreciated this passage and the life-giving truth within it for years, it is only recently that I began to glimpse what this experience of rejoicing in suffering is actually like, though only in a small way to be sure. The words to describe this experience are hard to grasp, but I would describe my prayer life as having more texture; my prayers during the prayers of the people are always directed somewhere specific now. Holy Scripture speaks more vividly to me, and the Sacraments are much sweeter than they have been for a long time. I find myself thinking, I really need this, whenever I receive them. Above all, I sense a deep and growing awareness of my own desperate need for God, which I pray I do not lose when life gets “easier” again one day.
That “easy” pre-2020 life that I am mistakenly nostalgic for at times is a strange life when compared to that of most Christians throughout history, so it’s no surprise that Christians of the past, along with our contemporaries outside of our modern way of thinking, once again have much to offer us in how to lead our lives in Christ now. A phrase that summarizes this wisdom of the ancients regarding life’s difficulties is this, “worldly afflictions are spiritual medicine.” The decay of our bodies, the wilful, gradual – and not-so-gradual – shift of our culture away from the kind of life God intended for us, the violent acts we commit against one another; yes, even these worldly sufferings are spiritual medicine for those who hope in Christ. While a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down and life may not feel that sweet right now, we do have this medicine in the precious body and blood of Christ Jesus given to us.
In Christ,
Fr. Matt