Enabling Suffering
Sermon
In my first job as a newly-qualified physiotherapist, I had to treat a young woman with a fissure. That's a kind of deep wound which tracks back into the body from a tiny hole on the surface. The problem is, the surface wound is so small it often heals over, so that everything appears to be all right. But because the depth of the wound hasn't healed, pus builds up inside the fissure in a kind of abscess, until eventually the surface wound breaks open again and the pus is discharged. And as you can imagine, all this is accompanied by recurrent bouts of extreme pain.
By the time I saw this patient, her wound had already healed and broken down again several times. This was, of course, many years ago. But my job at the time was to insert a probe into the wound, and go on inserting it until I reached the very bottom of the fissure. Then I had to shine artificial sunlight down the probe, so that the wound would heal from the bottom up, not just across the surface.
It was a very slow process, taking several weeks. And it was intensely painful, because quite often I had to break surface skin which had formed between treatments, by pushing the probe through it. I hated doing it. I would have given anything to have avoided treating that patient. But needless to say, nobody else wanted to do it either. And I was the junior.
And I think that's the usual human reaction to any suffering experienced by other people. We generally try to avoid it. Rather than face such pain in somebody else, we tend to walk away from it. Sometimes we do that by denying the pain.
When my father died, somebody said to me: "I expect it was a happy release. I expect you're pleased really." It was well meant, but it was far from the truth, and it was a denial of my pain.
It's a very common reaction. If somebody tells me something awful is about to happen to them, or has happened to them, my initial reaction is to lift them out of their pain by saying: "I'm sure it won't be that bad." Or: "Never mind. Things'll be better soon."
But do we have the right to remove people from their pain? Would it perhaps be better to enable suffering? To help people through their suffering rather than taking it away from them?
If I remove someone from their suffering, if I don't allow them to feel their pain, if I don't allow them to cry, or to express their misery or their anger, then what I'm doing is ensuring their wound heals across the surface. And at some later date, the misery will erupt again, because the depth of the wound never had a chance to heal.
I once made a funeral visit to a woman whose elderly aunt had died, senile, in an old people's home. The woman had not been particularly close to her aunt, yet when I visited her she was suffering immense grief. It soon became clear the grief was actually for her husband, who had died very suddenly five years earlier. But at the time of her husband's death, she had only healed over the surface. The wound was still raw deep inside. So that now, with the death of the aunt, it had erupted again.
Wounds will only heal properly if they heal from the bottom up. This is a painful business. It means enabling people to face their suffering. Encouraging them to feel their pain even when they don't want to. Sometimes it means helping them see the truth about themselves, even though the truth is usually intensely painful.
And this is precisely what Jesus did. He walked forward into suffering. He made no attempt to evade or avoid his own suffering. He faced it. At any time he could have walked away, but he didn't. He chose to endure the agony of the cross. He refused to chicken out. And the result was a healing beyond anything anyone could ever have imagined. The result was resurrection, new life.
And that's the result for all of us if we're prepared to actually face our own suffering. Suffering is a part of human life. We all suffer. But that suffering is also an opportunity. It's the opportunity for deep healing to occur within us so that we can become whole. So that we can become more real, more integrated. So that we too can experience resurrection, new life.
Jesus said: "If you wish to be a follower of mine, you must leave self behind. You must take up your cross and follow me." Peter and the other disciples discovered the cost of that very early on, very soon after Jesus had ascended and they started their missionary work. They had enough strength through the Holy Spirit, the God within, to face terrible suffering for the sake of their integrity.
We're no longer called upon to face that sort of suffering for the Gospel. But we are called to face our own suffering. To go through it, rather than trying to side-step it or to deny it. Jesus said: "If you care for your own safety you'll be lost. But if you let yourself be lost for my sake, you'll find your true self." If you allow yourself to suffer, you'll find out who you really are. You'll change, deep inside.
As Christians, our job isn't to pat each other on the head and say: "There, there!" Anyone can do that. Our job is much more demanding. It's to enable each other to suffer. To have the courage to share each other's pain. To have the courage to stand there so that deep wounds may heal from the bottom up. To have the courage to help each other take up the cross.
