Christ is With Us in Our Suffering: Brian Zahnd on the Presence of Christ with Us at All Times

While I was working on my message for this past weekend, “When Trouble Comes” from James 1:1-18, I was also reading Brian Zahnd’s newer book The Wood Between the Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross. Zahnd’s description of how Jesus’ crucifixion opens us to the presence of Christ with us at all times, even in our suffering, spoke to me deeply and I wanted to share it with others.

At Golgotha, we see not one, but three crosses. Jesus was crucified, not as a lone martyr, but as Emmanuel among the sufferers. Through the incarnation God joined humanity in its common lot of suffering. As Jesus hung crucified between two fellow sufferers, he descended into the depths of Isaiah’s prophecy that the servant of the God would be ‘a man of suffering, and familiar with pain’ (Is 53:3 NIV). For God to become human is for God to experience suffering. To be human is to suffer.

The inevitability of suffering is a truth recognized in all religions. There is no escaping it. But not all suffering is the same. Suffering for an honorable purpose is more bearable and can even be ennobling. But so much of the suffering that comes upon us is pointless. Most of it comes not from a noble cause but from the cruel vagaries of life. If suffering is inevitable and pointless, it is an inevitable pointlessness endured by God in Christ. Yet once God is involved with something, it can no longer be pointless. There is no nihilism in God. The incarnation is purposeful, never pointless. Christ takes upon himself the pointless suffering of the world for the purpose of redeeming it all through his co-suffering love. ‘By his wounds you have been healed’ (1 Pet 2:24).

Suffering is inevitable, but it does not have the last word. Paul can say, ‘I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us’ (Rom 8:18). The only credible Christian theodicy is that in Christ God fully participates in human suffering, and that suffering is not the end of the story. ‘Creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom 8:21). And even in our present age of suffering, no one suffers alone. Christ is present to every sufferer as the crucified one. Every crucifix speaks to those who are suffering, ‘You are not alone. I am with you in your suffering.’ This is part of what we see in the trio of crosses upon Calvary’s hill.