The Christian Virtue Of Hope

"The Resurrection" by El Greco 1577-79, Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, Toledo

 

Today, as we Christians celebrate the Resurrection of our beloved Christ, I share with you all an essay written by my dear friend Kenny Pierce  specially for Easter Sunday at All Things Beautiful:

"The thing about Easter is that Gethsemane is part and parcel of it. The New Testament ties Christ’s glory directly to His suffering...and then it goes on to tie our glory to suffering.

...he humbled himself and became obedient, even to death on a cross. For this reason God has exalted him and given him the name that is above every name...
...I consider that our present sufferings are not worthy to be compared to the glory that will be revealed in us...
...we will share in his glory, if so be that we share in his sufferings...
...I fill up in my body what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ...
...they rejoiced that they had been counted worthy to share in the sufferings of Christ...

Alexandra and I have a Jewish friend whose value is above rubies; he has a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of Christianity than I can ever hope to have of Judaism, along with a generosity of spirit and humility that I find admirable in the highest degree. It is fascinating to me to see how the teachings of Christianity are reflected in the prism of my friend’s emotional reactions, which of course are quite different from my own in many respects – under ordinary circumstances the emotional reactions you get from non-Christians have actually very little to do with Christian doctrine because they are usually emotional reactions to something that your non-Christian friend thinks is Christian doctrine but in fact is not. To know a person of high character and good will who is not a Christian but whose emotional reactions to Christian doctrine are genuinely reactions to the actual doctrines themselves...well, if you are yourself a Christian then I hope that in your life you find even a single such friend, so that you can see yourself and religion from the outside, with both clarity and charity.

Our friend (the “Guest at the Feast”) and I both comment frequently over at Alexandra's salon of a blog, and some time ago he said in passing something along the lines of how he thought God was merciful enough not to require "the awful sacrifice of himself," or "the abhorrent sacrifice of himself," or something along those lines -- I don't remember the exact words but clearly the Guest feels revulsion toward the idea of the crucifixion as sacrificial atonement. I started to write up a refutation but refutation doesn’t often do either party much good and instead I decided to live, if I could, in his emotions for a while, to try to bring into focus what was the emotional disagreement rather than the factual one. Of course I doubt I really felt what our friend felt, but I could at least do him the honor of trying.

(Let me emphasize here that this is the first the Guest has heard about this -- I have a long list of things I'd love to hear the Guest talk about and this was pretty far down the list, and I hadn't gotten around to raising this particular subject with him. So you certainly ought not hold the Guest responsible for the feelings I attribute to him; they are the product of my imagination and probably he doesn't really feel that way at all. His casual remark was my point de depart, that's all; and this meditation is about Easter and suffering and hope, not really about the Guest.)

As I settled in, I found my thoughts running in familiar channels, for of course this is hardly the first time a non-Christian friend has expressed the opinion that the God of Christianity is an insufficiently merciful God, as a truly merciful God would not exact such a horrific revenge before agreeing to overlook sin. I have never known how to communicate effectively that the Christian God is simply a more extreme God than the God my non-Christian friends seem to imagine. The God of Christianity (biblical Christianity, I mean, not Jack Spong’s God of Ultimate Political Correctness) is a terrible, terrifying God: He is a God Who wipes out practically the whole human race at a stroke in a flood, Who swallows the evil in earthquakes, Who orders the Israelites to commit genocide because of the detestable practices of the doomed culture, Who strikes a man dead simply because he puts his hand on the Ark of the Covenant to steady it or simply because he claims to be donating the entire price of a field when he’s only donating most of it, Who curses the entire human race for the choices of a single man and a single woman, Whose Angel of Death kills the firstborn of all Egypt, Who rains fire and brimstone upon Sodom, Who hands His own people over to conquest and oppression because they defy His Law, Whose holiness is so intolerable that even Moses and Elijah must hide their faces from His glory lest they be consumed, and that Isaiah finds that a burning coal on his theretofore unclean lips is less torment than the sight of the Lord, the King of Glory.

The Guest, as well as most of my casually semi-religious Gentile friends who say things like “I believe in the New Testament God of love, not the Old Testament God of wrath,” seems to me not so much to underestimate how evil the human race is, as to underestimate how blazing and all-consuming is God’s holiness – and that His holiness is intrinsic to His nature and not something He can choose to set aside. The Passion and the Atonement make no sense unless you see that God Himself faced an intolerable dilemma because He cannot choose to be other than He is; and His holiness (for reasons beyond my understanding) requires atonement on the scale of His holiness; any atonement we could offer falls as far short of the atonement His holiness requires as our own holiness falls below His. Our God is a consuming fire, and dreadful it is to fall into His hands.

Yet, as even those with only a passing acquaintance of Christianity know, our faith says that His love blazes as intolerably hot as His holiness. If God were not so holy, then He would have no dilemma; he could be merciful in the sense that so many of my non-Christian friends think He should be: he could simply say, “I love you so I’m going to overlook the sin.” But...would it help for me to say that His holiness consumes us not because He chooses to consume us but because we simply cannot tolerate it? “The gates of Hell,” says (I think) Charles Williams, “are locked on the inside.” The sun might as well try to choose to allow us to live on its surface.

And if God did not love us so, then there would also be no dilemma; He could simply discard us. But He is that holy, and He does love us that much; and so God Himself makes the atonement and makes of Himself the bridge. But my point is that what my non-Christian friends see as a God who loves less than they think he ought (why would a loving God insist upon such unnecessary suffering?), is really a God who is holier than they can begin to imagine. He loves more, not less, than they think is necessary; but He is holier than they even begin to suspect.

Well, that was the refutation I would have written. But I was trying to feel, not refute; and so I tried to set that aside and simply feel. And when I did, what I found in my heart was – as emotions are wont to be for me – hard to express. But I think it is something like this:

I did find the sacrifice horrible, and yet at the same time I found it beautiful. But our friend does not, I think, find anything about it even remotely beautiful, only repulsive. I suddenly remembered Christopher Hitchens’s opinion that The Passion of the Christ was one long sadofest, and I remembered how if you start talking about how suffering can be a good thing the ordinary American agnostic (though not, I think, my friend the Guest) will instantly think, “sadomasochism.” Or else you try to say that suffering can be a good thing and they think you are downplaying the suffering, as if somehow you thought the suffering wasn’t really all that bad.

But the revolutionary force of Easter is not just that the suffering is turned to glory. It’s certainly nice to be told, when you’re in pain, “It’s all going to turn out okay” – at least if the person who tells you is someone you can believe. “I hope so,” we say; and if we have a passing familiarity with Christian doctrine or the New Testament we remind ourselves that hope is one of the three Theological Virtues. But how can I explain that Christian “hope” is something very much deeper than the mere crossing our fingers and hoping things will get better? Easter doesn’t just say that suffering ends in glory. It says that suffering is itself part of the glory; it is the very seed and embryo of the glory; and without the suffering the glory is never born. Easter cannot be separated from Gethsemane. We say, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” and that is true, but it is only a minor variation on the great central theme running throughout the Great Symphony. The drops of blood that fell in Gethsamane or that ran down Jesus’ brow to fall at the foot of the cross, were the seed of the Resurrection.

Dorothy Sayers has said – quite truthfully, in my experience – that you can tell the people who genuinely love Dante simply by asking them what is their favorite part of The Divine Comedy. In fact let me quote the first paragraph of her introduction to the Purgatorio:

Of the three books of the Commedia, the Purgatorio is, for English readers, the least known, the least quoted – and the most beloved. It forms, as it were, a test case. Persons who pontificate about Dante without making mention of his Purgatory may reasonably be suspected of knowing him only at second hand...Press him, rather for an intelligent opinion on the Ship of Souls and Peter’s Gate; on Buonconte, Sapìa, and Arnaut Daniel; on the Prayer of the Proud, the theology of Free Judgement, Dante’s three Dreams, the Sacred Forest, and the symbolism of the Beatrician Pageant. If he cannot satisfy the examiners on these points, let him be to you as a heathen man and a publican. But if he can walk at ease in death’s second kingdom, then he is a true citizen of the Dantean Empire; and though he may still feel something of a stranger in Paradise, yet the odds are he will come to it in the end. For the Inferno may fill one with only an appalled fascination, and the Paradiso may daunt one at first by its intellectual severity; but if one is drawn to the Purgatorio at all, it is by the cords of love, which will not cease drawing till they have drawn the whole poem into the same embrace.

Ms. Sayers lists several possible explanations for the general modern neglect of the Purgatorio, but I think that for Americans at least the deepest explanation is one that she does not put forward as such, though her commentary elsewhere helps throw it into sharp relief. Americans, I think, find the Purgatorio perverse (or would if they read it) because it seems sadomasochistic: the souls in Purgatory embrace and apparently rejoice in their suffering. To quote Ms. Sayers again:

It has been well said by a great saint [St. Catherine of Genoa] that the fire of Hell is simply the light of God as experienced by those who reject it; to those, that is, who hold fast to their darling illusion of sin, the burning reality of holiness is a thing unbearable. To the penitent, that reality is a torment so long and only so long as any vestige of illusion remains to hamper their assent to it: they welcome the torment, as a sick man welcomes the pain of surgery, in order that the last crippling illusion may be burned away...Purgatory is the resolute breaking-down, at whatever cost, of the prison walls, so that the soul may be able to emerge at last into liberty and endure unscathed the unveiled light of reality. To this end:     ...heavenly justice keeps desire     Set toward the pain as once ’twas toward the sin. ...One consideration alone sets limits to the generous friendliness of the Penitent, and even for this they abound in polite apology. If Dante is (as always) disposed to linger in conversation, it is not now Virgil but the shades who urge him on his way...Every moment spared to Dante is a distraction from the blissful pain (“I call it pain; solace, I ought to say”) – a distraction which, even for charity’s sake, must not be prolonged out of measure. Dallying is a postponement of beatitude; even, in a sense, a robbery of God, who looks for the home-coming of his own. “Zeal to be moving goads us so that stay we cannot”; “Now go; I am reluctant to allow thy longer stay; thy presence stems my tears”; “Time’s precious, and I make too long delay”; thus they excuse themselves....That is the mark of Purgatory, the thing which Hell cannot understand...Their desire is turned to the torment as aforetime to the sin; they suffer no coercion but their own unwavering will: “my heart is fixed, O Lord, my heart is fixed.”

I am not trying to turn this into a treatise on Dante, or even to convince you to read him (though I can think of no better Lenten reading than the Purgatorio, with Sayers’s indispensable commentary and in her unexcelled translation for those of us who have forgotten our Italian). But what struck me is that Hitchens would surely react to the Purgatorio in precisely the same terms that he reacted to The Passion of the Christ: “sadomasochism.” He would see in the Christian attitude to the pains of Purgatory – indeed, in the entire Christian attitude toward suffering – the marks of sexual perversion.

The Guest will, someday, tell me how he actually feels about all this, I hope; but I had by this time stopped trying to put myself in his shoes and was exploring my own emotional world. And as I compared the charge of sadomasochism to what my own feelings actually were, a penny dropped. We say that sadomasochism is a sexual perversion, and by this we mean that sex is a good thing but that sadomasochism twists it into an evil direction. But I have just realized that it is the curse of our post-Freudian age that it sees sexuality in everything. And the man who pursues suffering because he finds in suffering sexual ecstasy has not merely corrupted the good of sex. He has also corrupted the good of suffering. The modern man cannot see a person rejoicing in suffering without thinking “sadomasochism” because he can hardly imagine a pleasure that is not sexual, that’s true to a certain extent; but the deeper truth is that he cannot imagine that there is really any good in suffering and therefore thinks rejoicing in suffering must be a sign of something terribly wrong in a person’s psyche; and Freud has taught us all to think that if something’s wrong with somebody it probably comes down to sex.

Yet the Christian virtue of hope is the settling into our heart of the conviction not only that Easter was not a lie, but that Gethsemane and the Cross were not optional features of Easter; that the Passion and the Resurrection are one inseperable and terrible and glorious act; that suffering is the seed of glory; that God Himself chose as the path to glory the Via Dolorosa – for it was the only path. It is true that sex is good; it is also true that suffering is good – not pleasurable, by any means, and not good in itself without reference to the fruit it bears; but good because God has redeemed human suffering on the Cross and every tear we shed can be drawn into his suffering and thus ultimately flower into glory unimaginable. Sadomasochism says that orgasm is good and suffering is good because suffering brings orgasm. Christians say that sex is good and that suffering is also, in a mystery, good, but that sadomasochism is a perversion of both. The Hitchensian agnostic hears the Christian say that one should rejoice in suffering even as one recognizes that it is indeed suffering and that it is terrible and painful, and the agnostic says, “Masochism!”

But that is only because the agnostic is on the wrong side of the Cross -- and of the empty tomb."

Kenny elaborates further here expanding on the above meditation and carrying it to new levels.

Meanwhile, my dear friend Jeremiah, the talented and hunky author of the Jeremayakovka blog, is wandering whether Paris is praying? Indeed.

Comments

[Kenny Pierce]

Michael,

Found it. There's quite a bit of other stuff too; the part about God's perception of time is toward the end.

[Kenny Pierce]

Michael,

I'd say you pretty much grasp the idea, difficult as it is to express.

If you want to explore this further, there's an old post someplace, I think, where I try to explain more about God's perception of reality -- that we see time in three modes, as it were, while God sees it only in one. That is, we perceive the past in memory, where we know what happened but we can't change it; and we perceive the future in speculation, where we can act now to try to change the future but don't really know what's going to happen; and we perceive the present instant in actual reality, where we know what's happening and also are free to act. But the past is immutable (to us) and the future unknown (to us) only because neither is presently real to us: we've lost the past and have yet to find the future. We only have, in reality, the present, that single point in which we can both truly know and truly act.

Well, to God all times are real, and therefore He knows all times as we know the present: they are truly known, and both He and we are truly free and active.

I'll try to find that post -- it was a bit off-topic because it was a refutation of a semi-atheistic argument that either God doesn't know the future or else our sins are God's fault rather than ours; but you can apply the principles to topics other than the arguments of one particular rather silly deist.

[Michael van der Galien]

So what you are saying is this: It says it like that (about us being saved) because God constantly experiences us being saved? In other words: 'He knows' we will be saved, because He experiences it. This is hard to explain without getting into the 'time' - I was going to say; He knows we will be saved because He experienced us being saved, long before we were saved, due to the fact that God is not dependant of 'time'.
But 'long before', once again, implies the passing of time. Maybe this is just as close as one can get to talking about it...

Kenny I think I understand what you are trying to say; would it be right for me to say that God adjusts us to be what, or who, we already are to Him, because He (already) experiences us like that? Or, maybe, that He adjusts us so we can be the best we can be (in the likeliness of Christ) because He already experiences us chosing that direction?

Correct me on points where I am wrong.

[Kenny Pierce]

And one other thing and then I really will shut up: Guest, the reason I asked whether you had read The Mind of the Maker, is that it's from Sayers that I first learned that when you as an artist are truly committed to the art, the art gains a will of its own, and that the more truly you love the art the more you long for it to achieve that spark of independence and it-ness, that point at which even when you haven't yet clearly grasped what direction is the right direction, you find that there must be a right direction because when you try to go in certain directions where you'd love to go, you realize quite clearly, "Wait, that's not right; I can't go there." I read the Sayers book long, long ago; but it has held up ever since to a certain degree in my own writing even though I don't do fiction or drama (where of course the effect is at its fullest).

[Kenny Pierce]

Just a quick clarification:

"Those he foreknew, he predestined to be conformed to the likeness of Christ," is cast in terms of the sequence in which we experience it: we experienced in our past actions that God took then because he already then knew what we are going to do two years from now and wanted to see to it that in the future we will come to be conformed to the likeness of Christ.

Now recast exactly the same thing, not from our sequential perspective, but from the perspective of God's timelessness in which the only tense is the present tense:

"Those he knows, He conforms to the likeness of Christ."

And when it you put it that way, why should His method be imposition rather than cooperation?

[Kenny Pierce]

Michael,

I would add further that the whole problem with hyper-Calvinistic soteriology is that it forgets the maxim of St. Thomas that things predicated of God are predicated neither univocally nor equivocally but analogically -- and therefore when St. Paul tries to express God's timeless experience of our redemption by talking of how "those He foreknew He predestined to be conformed to the likeness of His Son," the hyper-Calvinist imagines God experiencing things in sequence like us and thinks that this "predestination" rules out free will.

Causality can work backward in time precisely because of God's timelessness. By analogy, the first edition of The Hobbit was rather different from the version that everybody knows and loves now. When Tolkien set to work on the "sequel" (which of course become The Lord of the Rings), he struggled at first until he realized that the Ring had to be the unifying element. But the problem was that the Ring wasn't that big a deal when The Hobbit was first published, and in particular it was not malevolent. So before Tolkien could make progress on LOTR he had to go back and significantly rewrite Hobbit, especially the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter.

Creative writers will tell you that when they're doing really first-rate work, the characters come alive, and then they stop doing what you want them to! They acquire, in fact, what feels like a will of their own. You get to a point in the plot where you need them to do something, and then you realize, "Yeah, but she would never actually do that" -- the character, in a very real (though difficult to communicate to non-writers) sense, tells you to go soak your head, as it were. You may find yourself having to go back and completely rework earlier incidents that you had already finished but that no longer pay due reverence to the true personality that you have now come to realize belongs to this or that character. You may find that a character who was originally just a throw-in character has stolen your heart. (Not to blow my own horn, but just to confirm that I'm not making this up: you might be interested in a post I wrote along these lines that didn't have anything to do with theology, and I would add as confirmation that I'm not just talking through my hat that professional writer and actress Sheila O'Malley loved the piece.)

What I think St. Paul is trying to express is that the causality of our choices works backwards in time as well as forwards -- that there are critical points that define us, as it were, to God, and that in response to those critical choices He reshapes the plot in both directions in order to bring us to the fullness of that unique character that He has built into us and in which He rejoices. Those He foreknows, He predestines to be conformed to the likeness of Christ -- though each of us is like Christ in a way that no other person could be, and thus the more we become like Christ the more we become truly ourselves...but not only does the predestination not preclude our free will, the predestination is actually precisely God's response to our free will...

...and I have gotten entirely too mystical and will stop now. Sorry about that.

[Michael van der Galien]

That is a great explanation. That is a wonderful thing indeed and it makes sense. Indeed, God knows that we are saved anyhow and the fruit of it; so He regards our sins in a loving and understanding light, constantly.

It is always great to talk about topics like these, on blogs. Alexandra, hopefully you will post more often about topics such as this one.

[Kenny Pierce]

Michael,

It is indeed a joyful thought. Let me also encourage you to think about this for a few minutes:

When Darcy is such a rude bastard at the Netherfield Ball, the first time you read Pride and Prejudice you dislike the man as much as Elizabeth does. But the second time, and all subsequent times, that you read it, you are amused and you like him even though you shake your head at his cluelessness. That's because you know the real Darcy -- that is, the Darcy that is the sum of his actions including his newfound humility that comes from knowing and loving Elizabeth.

Now, God is not looking at you and thinking, "He's a jerk but I hope he's going to turn out okay eventually." He's already rejoicing in who you (from your perspective) will be, and even every sin you commit He sees in the light of the fruit He causes (though you haven't seen it yet) to spring from it by His grace and your (as yet unsuspected by yourself) penitence. So you are a joy to His heart, now and always.

Of course it's perfectly reasonable to say from our perspective that God has blessed us on multiple occasions, because that's how we experience it. But God's love for us is driven by His experience of our relationship with Him, not by ours; and His experience is timelessly and eternally a single experiential Act of triumphant and passionate rejoicing.

[Michael van der Galien]

I was thinking about this a little more and realized that I agreed with the both of you about God's conception of 'time'. That being that time is irrelevant to God. 'Time' is something humans are obsessed with. God is not. God is. God does.
But although I realized that before we talked about this subject in this thread; I never 'connected' it to, for instance, the Golden Calf. But now, I started thinking about this a little bit more.

I thought to myself: If God is 'angry' so to speak 'constantly' - It means that if God blesses you, He does it constantly as well. With that I mean to say that quite a lot of people have the idea that God did something for them 'once', or maybe 'twice', but that's about it. But if one would follow the logic the two of you set forth, one could also argue that, because God is, He blesses you constantly.

Not much 'break through' about that, but it is a joyful thought.

[Guest at the Feast]

Glad I made your day- and, yes, we believe wholeheartedly in human Free Will (sorry, all Calvinists present).

[Kenny Pierce]

Guest,

I hasten to clarify: of course hyper-Calvinism is distinguishable from your view insofar as it says that Adam and Eve had no choice but to eat the forbidden fruit; you, unlike hyper-Calvinists, do (I think) believe in free will and this is a MAJOR distinction. All I mean to say is that hyper-Calvinists would agree with you, and disagree with me, on the basic question of whether God's intention was ever for our world to be a sinless one. And therefore hyper-Calvinists do NOT have at their disposal the apologetic tool of the Fall of Man, because the only sense in which they believe in a Fall is a sense that is useless as a refutation of the theodical argument for atheism. But the hyper-Calvinists can still appeal to the Jobian argument, and it's just as valid for them as for you and I.

[Kenny Pierce]

Guest,

>
The Christian vision sees mankind, warts and all, and concludes that God couldn't possibly have created man as such a miserable creature (mutatis mutandis, echoes of the Rotten World critics you so excoriate in your own postings!); man must have done this to himself.
>

I don't know that we conclude that He couldn't have -- you perceive quite rightly that the doctrine of the Fall of Man is not apologetically necessary, from a logical standpoint, as a refutation of the atheistic argument from suffering -- just that He, as a matter of fact, didn't. Historically there has long been a major strand of hyper-Calvinistic/hyper-Augustinian theology that, in saying that man was created in order to fall and couldn't help but fall because that was God's design all along, is largely indistinguishable from your (I think) position that what we see is what God made (and called "very good") to begin with.

But of course, for those of us who do believe that in fact the doctrine of the Fall is true, that doctrine, along with "God plays by His own rules," then becomes available to us for apologetic purposes, and by apology I mean not the logic of refutation, but the ministry of persuasion. The advantage that the suffering of Christ gives the Christian apologist isn't that it tightens up the logic of the Jobian argument that you and I both understand and accept, which argument doesn't need tightening in the first place. It's that it gives us a resolution to a particular class of emotional difficulties that the argument from Job (despite its unanswerable logical validity) does not -- and people are far more emotional than they are rational. But the ministry of persuasion is its own topic, too far off this thread for me to pursue it here.

And of course you're quite right about the primary sources point. Even the primary sources that you and I share are colored heavily by my choice to accept, and your choice to reject, the ones we don't share.

At some point I'm going to try to express why I think it is that I personally find Judaism much more difficult to grasp and bring into focus than agnosticism -- and it's not by any means just because I once was an agnostic and have never been a Jew.

[Kenny Pierce]

Guest,

You have completely made my day, I suppose you know.

Not having time to respond as your comment deserves, I'll simply pass on something I think you'll find amusing in re the book of Job.

The greatest strength of fundamentalist Christianity is its insistence that every Christian is responsible for being intimately familiar with Scripture; and it's quite common for Baptist and similar churches to set up a schedule by which, if you read a little bit of Scripture each day, you can get through the whole Protestant Bible in a single year. And back when my father was quite a bit younger than I am now, back when he was a young man with two very small children whom fatherhood had motivated to get serious about his faith, the pastor of his little church challenged everybody to read the Bible through together. About twenty people actually did. And so, every Sunday night they would discuss what they had read the week before, and every Sunday night Brother Al would give each person there a single question the answer to which would be found somewhere in the next week's reading.

They got to Job, and Brother Al went around the room telling each person what his questions was, until he got to my father. "Darrell," he said, "your question is this: which of Job's three friends was the shortest?"

Well, my father went home and he started at chapter 1 and he got all the way to the end and didn't know which of Job's three friends was the shortest. "How did I miss it?" he wondered. So he read it again. He still didn't see it. He read it at least twice more, in ever-growing frustration, and then he was out of time because it was Sunday night.

Brother Al went around the room again and each person answered his question. He got to my dad. "Darrell, which of Job's three friends was the shortest?"

My father held out his hands in a gesture of bewilderment. "I'm sorry, Brother Al; I read the book four times, but I just couldn't find it. I don't know which of Job's three friends was the shortest."

Brother Al looked at my dad and smiled. "Why, Darrell," he explained, "it was Bildad -- he was only a Shuhite."

[Guest at the Feast]

Thank you, Kenny, for explaining my meaning to Michael; you have done an excellent job.
I enjoyed greatly both the posts of yours that you linked to- and I concurred heartily with the Job one; in fact, as I was reading your first posting (Christ validates suffering), I was thinking "No, that is not the answer that Job gives"- but you stole my thunder. It might interest you to know, by the way, that the Jewish prayer of mourning over the dead, Kaddish, consists entirely of an extolling of God's greatness and magnificence: exactly the answer God gave to Job. The only place I disagree with you is where you attribute that answer entirely to Job's being an arrogant sot; I think the answer would have been identical even had he been a lot more humble; there are simply things that we are not capable of comprehending- maybe it would blow all our brain circuits if God even tried.
Also, regarding your first post: actually, a Jewish person would definitely have expected Jesus to be born in PRECISELY those circumstances. One of the great themes of the Bible is that "the stone rejected by the builders has become the foundation stone;" and Midrash Rabba (which was surely known to the early Christians) states: "Where did I find My servant David? I found him in Sodom." That is, the kingly line of Israel was descended from a Moabitess convert- the lowliest of the low, in the religious view of that time; Moabite males weren't even allowed to convert into Judaism, unto the 10th generation. In both locations chosen by God for His worship, Shiloh in Samaria in the time of the Judges, and, later, Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem, we see that the chosen site is a low hill surrounded by much taller ones. Again, God is continually emphasizing that it is He who makes things holy, not any intrinsic merit on their part which won this role for them. Moses was chosen because he was "the most humble man on earth." [Parenthetically, I would note that this is why the Christian choice of St. Catherine's, the highest peak in that desert, as the location of the Mt. Sinai of revelation is almost surely wrong; it contradicts all the other precedents God set, and all the known locations we know He chose to hallow]
Yes, I did foresee your answer regarding the question of humiliation: what I am saying, however, is not that man is unworthy of such an awful thing (since the whole point of Christian theology is obviously that he IS indeed unworthy, but that God's love and grace is thereby commensurately greater), but, rather, that mankind is too puny to be capable of thwarting God's will in such a fashion- of throwing His works out of kilter in a really fundamental way- that such a drastic remedy should ever have been necessary to begin with. This is the other quality of God that I think the thwarting idea fails to take into account: God's omniscience.
The thwarting, of course, according to orthodox Christian doctrine, is Original Sin: the idea that mankind's disobedience permanently, through all generations, marred and altered the spiritual nature that God created. I believe I have stated before on this blog that the Biblical silence on such a thing in Genesis (where the text does enumerate quite specifically the other consequences of mankind's disobedience) seems to me to refute that line of thinking entirely; if there really were Original Sin, God would have mentioned that salient fact, not only in Genesis, but also somewhere, sometime in the thousands of years of direct revelation and intimate covenental relationship which preceded the birth of Christianity- particularly if it were the key factor in man's salvation.
The question really boils down to one of how much power you believe man has to alter the innate fabric of God's work; I think the Christian idea of Original Sin aggrandizes man by viewing him as far more powerful than he actually is. Let me be clear on this: any given individual can definitely ruin or improve his own spiritual nature. In the terse Talmudic dictum: "A good deed brings another good deed in its wake." That is, when people once start out trying to be good and do good things, it not only becomes easier and easier to keep on in that path, but also has a noticeable spiritual effect upon one- and the converse is true as well. People who set out on a bestial path normally end up by acting more or less like beasts-although repentance is always a possibility.
The problem I am concerned with here is a different one. The Christian vision sees mankind, warts and all, and concludes that God couldn't possibly have created man as such a miserable creature (mutatis mutandis, echoes of the Rotten World critics you so excoriate in your own postings!); man must have done this to himself. The Jewish vision is humbler in that accepts that, imperfect as we are, that is how He made us, for His own unfathomable reasons, and we never were angels, ut middling, muddling beings. I simply don't believe that any crime or disobedience of ours or of our forefathers' could ever have the power to thwart God's work and design in such a fundamental fashion as to inherently alter man's very spiritual fabric for all time. The Jewish view of mankind is fundamentally a lot humbler: humanity is not like the characters one encounters in Mark Twain, claiming to be former dukes and lords who came down in the world; it is, rather, as humble and flawed as God created it- and we accept His wisdom in this, as in all other decisions. Perhaps free will would never have been possible had we been greater...
Again, in the end this boils down to Scripture: my primary sources don't ever mention Original Sin-spiritual degeneracy- as a punishment for Adam and Eve's disobedience; your primary sources do, so I don't think this is a difference we shall ever resolve through discussion. The best we can do, I think, is ponder and contemplate these differences, and hopefully emerge- each on his own side- strengthened thereby in his wisdom and faith. But I have so enjoyed reading everything you have written!

[Kenny Pierce]

Guest,

Thanks, that clears that up for me quite nicely, and now that I'm clear on what you mean I agree with you about the eternal implication. Or at least, I think I know what you mean -- which I will now try to explain to Michael, and then you can point out where I'm still off base.

Michael, one of the difficulties in thinking about God and His actions, and therefore even about such seemingly straightforward things as causality, is that God does not exist within Time at all. It is something He created. Jesus, of course, was incarnated into Time, but God in His nature is present in all times at once -- or, rather, all times are eternally present within Him.

I find that the easiest way to think about it is this: our universe is to God as a novel is to the author, and in this special case the author has written himself into the book at one point. Whenever I read Pride and Prejudice (which I have all but memorized), Elizabeth Bennet is to me a single, perfectly unified character who is more en toto than she is at any given point in the work, because all the various Elizabeth Bennets -- the prejudiced and foolish girl of the early pages, the humiliated and despairing girl whose sister has ruined the family, the beloved fiancée who puts a newfound guard on her tongue because she reflects that the man she loves "had yet to learn to be laughed at" -- all those are present simultaneously for me even as I watch her turn Darcy's initial insult at the Netherfield ball into a lively anecdote for her own and her friends' amusement. Yet even I can only reread the book in sequence; I can't be reading both the first chapter and the last chapter simultaneously, and thus the analogy breaks down -- for God, being God, eternally and fully experiences all moments simultaneously at their full intensity. Therefore God is eternally experiencing the self-alienation of the Cross; but then He is also eternally experiencing the glory of the Resurrection and the casting down of the crowns of the Elect.

And that is the point I tried but really failed, I think, to make effectively. One of the deepest meanings of Easter is that humiliation that springs from love becomes something intrinsically glorious; that the Passion and the Resurrection are both eternally present to God because they are eternally a single act, and that God Himself rejoices in the humiliation -- even while it remains awful -- because He rejoices in the glory and love of the act as a whole. Christian Hope is that theological virtue (i.e., a virtue that would be difficult to deduce from ordinary unaided natural reflection on morality) that says that a Christian who is suffering does not simply grit his teeth and "hope" that this will all be over eventually. The theological virtue of Hope says, "In my suffering, right now, God is doing something glorious, and so long as I do not in the end reject His grace I will one day look back at this suffering and rejoice that it befell me; there will be a time when I look back and understand what God was really doing. When that time comes I will realize that I would not trade this suffering for all the pearls in the sea -- and therefore I choose right now to rejoice in God's grace, even before I can see the glory -- for I know, by Faith and Hope, that the glory is there." The virtue of Hope, allied with Faith, is what makes it possible to obey Paul's injunction to "rejoice always," that makes it possible seriously to "in everything give thanks," that caused the Apostles in all sincerity to rejoice that they had been counted worthy to share in the sufferings of Christ. God's humiliation is, as the Guest says, eternally present to Him -- and He eternally rejoices in it, not as a sadomasochist, and not as one who has forgotten how much it hurt or who likes pain for its own sake, but as One to Whom the whole act of Easter is eternally whole, eternally glorious, and eternally a fount of joy. For His humiliation on the Cross is the point at which His Love reached its most glorious level of expression. "Greater love hath no man than this..." Christian Hope is the echo, in our own temporally bound experience, of this eternal rejoicing of God in every moment of His act, including Gethsemane and Calvary just as much as Easter morn.

So, yes, Michael, God is eternally angry in the sense that the moment at which the Israelites are dancing and orgying around the golden calf is eternally present to Him; but then He is also eternally delighting in their redeemed presence in His glory, just as each moment in which you and I betray him in our sin is eternally present and yet He is eternally delighting in our redeemed presence (which for us is still in our future just as both of Darcy's proposals are still in Elizabeth's future as she is rejecting that of Mr. Collins).

Guest, I'm sure you know my rejoinder about the humiliation being necessary: the less mankind is worthy to challenge God, and the less we are worthy His humiliation, the more that humiliation shows His love. We will someday have a long conversation, God willing, about what the word "necessary" means as applied to the actions of God...in the short term, if you haven't read this, then reading it is probably the express route to understanding how I think and feel about the necessity or lack thereof of God's humiliation and abnegation and sacrifice. (And I just discovered, searching my own blog for that old post, that I have posted several other things I'd forgotten about...I would absolutely love to get your reaction to and critcism of my reading of Job, as set out here.)

[Michael van der Galien]

Guest. There is something I do not understand in your logic. You say (I think ;)) that if Christ suffered 2000 years ago, He (God) must still suffer because for God everything is eternal. In the Old Testament God is angry on certain occasions; does this mean He is constantly angry?

[Michael van der Galien]

There is indeed something 'positive' about suffering. My view on this is that suffering itself is not 'good'; how could it be good? But that we can use it to be good.

For instance when people suffer there are several choices they can make, these are 2 of them:
1- give up: in that case: it was, of course, not good at all to 'suffer'
2- get better / stronger. Let God live from within you. Listen to God and act on that.

(St.) Paul, for instance, I think makes the point that if we suffer and we choose to let God do His work, we are actually stronger than we ever thought possible. So; if we make the right choice, we do not just 'overcome' the suffering, but when the 'suffering' stops, we are more wise and stronger than we were before.

Just my 2 cents

[liquid]

I love Johnny Cash and to be honest, his last video "HURT" is very emotional and sums up the concept of empire of dirt and you can have it all....because in the end the riches of materialism that we gain here means nothing.

[Jeremayakovka]

Am not versed in the Bible as well as some, but via pop culture I do not hesitate to nod in Johnny Cash's general direction - there's an early album of all Christian hymns, plus certain tracks on his prison albums (Folsom, San Quentin), like "Greystone Chapel", "Green, Green Grass of Home", and "The Old Account Was Settled". There's a close-to-the-earth, spiritual tradition that comes through Cash's music, that he worked to preserve and embody, fame and glitter notwithstanding.

Besides the Man in Black, thanks for all the exegesis today about The Son.

[Giacomo]

Wow ... how nice it is to read a brilliant discussion that doesn't degenerate into vitriol ... I was begining to think such happenings had gone the way of the dinosaur (at least on a blog, that is).

To, perhaps, add to North by Northwest when he states ...

"Growing up in today's affluent societies brings with it a fatal imbalance: On the one hand our young have a seemingly never ending string of daily comforts and luxuries, satisfying their every material wish and desire, constantly lifting the bar to ever increasing expectations. On the other hand, that same society imposes ever more rigid barriers to what it advertises as long-term success; requiring from our young years and years of hard work and unfaltering dedication so as to achieve what in the end often proves to have been nothing more than an illusion of a fulfilling achievement."

I believe that some of what you state speaks directly to Matthew 19:24 (with similar verses in Mark 10 and Luke 18) where Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”. While there are myriad interpretations for this "eye of the needle", it makes no difference to the narrative. The riches that Christ speaks of are often minimized to mere financial wealth ... offering an opportunity for one to feel both safe in ones "poorness" and pity toward those of disimilar circumstance. However, Christ seems to be referencing riches as anything that would preclude one from believing in their own need of salvation ... the sentiment of self-sufficiency, which is perhaps one of the most daunting misperceptions of modern life. Clearly, suffering is not a phenomenon that fits into our world ... and the confident aversion we maintain toward it is an evanescent wealth that leaves us all poorer.

I pray all had a blessed Easter weekend.

- Giacomo

[liquid]

Just in case nobody gets confused on what I meant on the last line....

Just like man in the beginning, in the end of this life of ours on this earth, it's our choice exercising our free will just like it was in the beginning.

[liquid]

Happy Easter to you all! God bless each of you!

I don't feel God turned to "dust" as Jesus is alive! I feel the good news is that He rose on the 3rd day and defeated death and the grave! Through his work on the cross we have our narrow path home!

As for the why of it all and the mystery of it all, I guess one could look also at why were animals offered in sacrifice before? Blood had to cover sin! There's Power in the blood and there's power in the resurrection.

As for thinking about why "the fatal flaw" or "the fall" being remedied by One such as Himself, one cannot leave out the humanized free will in each of us that God continues to give us even today! The work was done but what good is the work for us if we don't accept it? God gave us choice even when he allowed the tree of knowledge of evil to exist in the garden. We have always had choice. We were given free will and we exercised that. God sacrificed His only begotten Son even while we were still in sin. The mystery of that will unfold for all of us one day, but how many times have we each thought "WHAT IF" What if we hadn't chosen to eat the apple which we were warned not to eat? Again, this puts us right there face to face with free choice and free will. Just as today, in our lives, we understand that each of our choices have consequences. We learn real quick in life that when we obey the laws that life is much easier on us. So, we cannot leave out our free will when trying to understand what was and what is and what is to come in the future. Yes, to us it all seems like a human thing which is too complicated to "think on holy things" and perhaps for some, as humans we cannot separate that humanistic thing...but in the future...for however much future we have in "this" life...we everyday are given the gift to exercise our free will. Everyday we choose a step closer to God or a step away from God. In the end...it's our choice just like it was in the beginning.

[Guest at the Feast]

Dear Kenny,
First of all, apologies for the typo in my eschatol- it should, of course, read "last", not "least"!
I agree with you that God likes us to strive with him; the name "Israel" in fact, "Yisra'el" in the original, means, literally, "one who struggles with God" (as you will recall, it is the name given to Jacob after he spends the night struggling with the angel).
What do I mean by "spending an eternity suffering"? To me, the enormity of the Christian vision of the Passion- the central fact of Christianity- lies in the fact that, since God remained God- eternal and outside of time- even while He was, according to this theology, incarnate and suffering on the cross, His eternity must of necessity imply that He always was, is, and always will be up there on that cross. That is, for one outside of time, any given moment in time is always present. This is, after all, implied in His very name, which He gives to Moses in the second book of the Bible: "I am that I am" (can also be rendered "I will be what I will be"); or His proper name, which in Hebrew is an amalgamation of the words "he is/will be" (commonly transliterated into English as "Jehovah"). Thus, the humiliation of God implied by the Passion is not one little, passing moment in the history of the world; it is Eternal, as He is Eternal. For Him, all moments are the present; nothing is ever lost, or past- including that moment of supreme humility and humiliation. I understand the implications of the enormity of this Christian vision of divine sacrifice; in fact, I find it literally incredible in its overwhelming implications. I simply do not think that human beings, paltry as we are, mere dust, could ever have managed to thwart His will and to have posed such a challenge to the extent that such an "awe-full" and terrible sacrifice should ever have been necessary. Again, to me, the majesty of God and the puniness of man are too incommensurate for that.
I hope that clarified my point. Sorry, all, it is nearly 11 pm here, and I am retiring for the night.
Once again, I bid you all a most joyous Easter.

[Kenny Pierce]

My dear Guest,

One of the things I like enormously about you is your generosity in clarification. I do apologize, again, for dragging you into this; and you were very gracious about it as always.

So, basically, when you said "awful" you intended "awe-ful" rather than "atrocious"? Duly correcting my impression as we speak...having inferred the wrong connotations at the very beginning it's no wonder I went rather broadly astray. (And also, of course, no surprise: Christian hope I can speak about reasonably reliably, but I still have a ton I'm looking forward to learning about you.)

On God's omnipotence: If we can challenge God, it is only because He has bestowed upon us the ability to do so, and because His creative vision, which is part of His nature and His design for this particular creation, imposes its own limitations upon Himself. Have you, by any chance, read Dorothy Sayers's The Mind of the Maker?

Did you mistype when you spoke of God's "spending eternity suffering"? If that's when you meant to type, you'll have to explain to me what you mean by it.

Thank you very much indeed for your Easter wishes, and I heartily concur in your final toast, as it were. In fact I'm looking very much forward to it.

[Guest at the Feast]

Dear Kenny,
Thank you very much, both for your very kind words, and also for taking so seriously what I say. Yes, it was a bit hard to recognize myself in your essay; but then, we all see "through a glass darkly" (or, for all you agnostic/atheistic Existentialists out there, in a Heideggerian "field"). First, let me congratulate you on writing a beautiful piece. Second, please let me redeem my honor and set the record straight on two items: first, I wrote "awful", most certainly not abhorrent. What strikes me about the Christian theology of the Passion is by no means the ugliness you impute to my vision of it (on the contrary; I would not have spent the time and effort I have on reading Christian theology if I had found it repugnant or abhorrent; I see much beauty and spiritual good in it, particularly in its appreciation of the pulchritude and redemptive nature of suffering- remember, that comes directly from Job, Jeremiah, and Isaiah. As a matter of fact, I once wrote an Easter homily on God's humility and humiliation for my best friend, who was somewhat spooked by it- according to him, he could have sent it in to his church newspaper and they would have published it), but what I consider to be its unnecessariness, the actual enormity of what Christian theology is proposing- hence the carefully-chosen word awful.
You claim that I- or, by imputation, Orthodox Jews generally- underestimate God's holiness (this must surely be the first time I have ever heard us accused of THAT); I would say, in return, that you underestimate the Almighty's omnipotence. This omnipotence, according to our belief, both foresaw and understood all man's weakness and evil from before Man was created, and therefore, when He sent the Biblical Revelation, He did so specifically as a sufficient remedy to enable us to come to Him in the end. Now, we may very well have to undergo aeons of purification after death before we can enjoy the light of His presence; I do not know, for He has never revealed that to us (although it would certainly make sense). But I do know that if He specifically prescribed a yearly Day of Atonement, and asked of us a broken and contrite heart, then that will be sufficient unto Him; He can manage things so that he doesn't have to go into what seems to me to be a) an awfully legalistic contract with himself; and b)a lese majeste of the sort that Incarnation theology inplies. In fact, it is my deep understanding of the unbridgeable abyss, the unfathomable gulf between beings of dust and Holiness, which leads me both to consider incredible the abasement which the Incarnation would imply, but also to appreciate the true awfulness, in quite a magnificent way, of the humiliation implied in that theology.
However, in light of His omnipotence, I consider God too holy for it not to seem to me personally unspeakable blasphemy to imagine his ever NEEDING to accomplish salvation by such a taxing means. I think of St. Gregory's famous image of where exactly human beings come out of- he was not being scatological, he was emphasizing the incredible love which, according to his belief, led God to undergo such humiliation. Again, to me, God's omnipotence is so beyond our ken that it just seems natural to me that he is, was, and ever will be able to work out our salvation without becoming dust Himself. God, in my admittedly limited, lowly understanding, is NEVER "in a dilemma;" because He has so ordered and arranged things from the beginning, that the "fatal flaw" which, according to Christian theology, was introduced by Original Sin, was not only foreseen but easily remedied by One such as Himself. To my mind, there is and was nothing human beings could do to themselves or their nature, nothing they could come up with, which God could not have easily solved without recourse to such a drastic and extreme remedy; Christianity seems to me to give too much credit to human beings, to think that they could come up with anything that could challenge God to the extent that He should have to sacrifice Himself.
Again, please let me emphasize that I do see all the beauty of that image; yet the image seems to me to be (as indeed it is) a transfiguration of human suffering, an ideal image of it, rather than an accurate reflection of the immensity of God's glory- the emphasis is on the human rather than the divine. The humanization of God implied by Christianity seems to one raised on the idea of the God of Glory to be a literal impossibility, however beautiful and true its vision of human redemption through suffering. And, remember, since God is eternal, His crucifixion would not be a thing of the past: it IS happening, from His standpoint, even now, and was from the beginning of eternity. God eternally up on a cross seems to me- forgive me, I mean no insult by it- too much like Odin up on Yggdrasil; it underestimates too much His power of salvation and transfiguration. And, yes, I am well aware of Tolkien's words about God speaking to humankind through myth and thereby preparing them for Truth. In short, one can believe in the concept of Purgatory and purification without believing that God has to become human and spend eternity suffering in order to take us through it and purify and transmute our dross; for all things are possible through and to Him.
Kenny, Alexandra, and all other Christians on this list: I wish you all joy and blessings on this, your most significant of all holidays. May we all meet someday in God's presence, where all our differences shall at least melt away and be resolved.
In love and charity,
Guest

[Patrick]

Excellent post. Alexandra, Kenny this has such a range of visual and tactile interpretations to explore. Bravo on the essay, and Guest, thank you for inspiring Kenny.

NxN, I like your approach to this subject. I myself prefer the specific imagery of the forge better. A Master Smith takes base iron into his forge and using intense heat, intense hammering blows, a sprinkling of carbon, and the magic of tempering (controlled cooling), makes a work of art that is both incredibly stong and incredibly beautiful.

Base iron is dull and quite malleable. It takes the fire, the pressure, and periods of respite from both to make fine steel. The process is hard and the longer you spend working the metal (folding the layers), the more functional, beautiful, and true is the blade. Interestingly enough, without that carbon (hope, faith, call it what you will) no matter how long you work iron, it will never turn to steel. Well made steel holds an edge much longer than a piece of iron and no matter how you bend or flex it, steel will return to its true shape without breaking once the physical tension is released. Iron will remain in the shape it is twisted into.

I think the difference between suffering and S&M can also be illustrated by this example. If you thow a good steel into a hot fire, for no purpose, and it then returns to normal temperature, you have robbed the blade of its temper and it readily shatters. It takes a master to know how much heat, hammering and carbon it takes to make a lump of iron into a work of art that is both beatiful, strong, and true. There must be purpose to the heat and hammering for a productive result to occur. You can polish and paint iron and make it look good, but it will never have the strength of steel.

Those who do not see the empty tomb, have no idea of the purpose of the Master. They only see the ugly forge, the unbearable heat, and loud banging. The beauty is that work of art that is the end product. Working with wrought iron is much quieter. I prefer steel.

As to today's society, eventhough we wish to protect our children from everything, if they are kept in the manicured garden and not taught to walk in the woods with all of its unexpected beauty and dangers, they will only be able to live in the garden. They should be allowed to make decisions that can lead to pain and suffering so that they can live on their own. If we prevent this, they will stay our children forever and never step into the wide world with both feet. We should all ensure those children do not become 40 year old KIPPERS (Kids In Parents Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings). This is happening more and more in today's society.

Happy Easter!

[Kenny Pierce]

All,

Let me just emphasize again that the Guest is not in any way responsible for that essay and that there's a good chance he won't recognize himself in it at all...the Guest suffers under a rare and peculiar burden: I find practically everything he says to be exceptionally thought-provoking. Unfortunately what that mostly means is that practically everything he says kicks me haring off across the fields of thought into hinterlands unknown, and if he were going to try to tag along on every such random excursion he would hardly have time to get any work done...so I try to limit how much I pester him...

And, NxN: it is unfortunate that Alexandra used my rather incoherent meditation as a post instead of your comment, which was quite a bit better than anything I had to say.

[North by Northwest]

In German two words "Leid Läutert" express best the phenomenon; the notion that pain, torment or sorrow purify, cleanse or purge our soul.

Daily hardship is a necessary prerequisite for such a notion. The more physical the hardship, the more obvious, the more meaningful becomes this transformation.

And therein lies IMO the root cause why it is so difficult for so many in our Western societies of relative material comfort and security to comprehend the deeper but equally simpler meaning of "Leid Läutert".

Our ancestors of old struggled daily against the elements to farm land, harvest crop and rear animals in order to feed their families. The young grew up united with the old in the daily experience of triumph and failure, taking struggle for granted. Priorities, defining success and failure, were much simpler, consisting of having a roof over one's head and regular nourishment. Thanksgiving and prayer were quite naturally a daily occurrence based on and inspired by real and immediate experiences.

Growing up in today's affluent societies brings with it a fatal imbalance: On the one hand our young have a seemingly never ending string of daily comforts and luxuries, satisfying their every material wish and desire, constantly lifting the bar to ever increasing expectations. On the other hand, that same society imposes ever more rigid barriers to what it advertises as long-term success; requiring from our young years and years of hard work and unfaltering dedication so as to achieve what in the end often proves to have been nothing more than an illusion of a fulfilling achievement.

Try explaining in this given reality the joy and happiness derived from a hard days work, at the end of which success or failure are synonymous with being able to enjoy sharing bread and butter under a dry roof, or not.

No longer being part of nature's daily transformation has IMO caused much alienation and abstraction. Many of the familiar 'counter measures' in play, such as sports, provide the sense of achievement, but due to the focus on the individual performance as supposed to nature as the essential partaker and thus in a much more 'tangible' form on God's presence, loose the sens of "Leid Läutert" as it was known and understood by our forefathers.

Our complex world allows for so much more rationalization that it has become that much more difficult to experience a blessing, a miracle or for us to pray with genuine faith for relief and mercy.

The sacrifice, which is committed at the moment when Jesus accepts the cup and surrenders himself to His will, the suffering and the resurrection is therefore increasingly harder to understand lest we remind ourselves that joy and happiness is never given but must be earned by overcoming adversity and hardship; and that adversity and hardship is an inextricable part of our daily lives.