Does God Suffer? What the Cross Really Reveals

Does God Suffer?

Christ chose to suffer on the cross. This challenges our understanding of human existence since suffering challenges and changes our understanding of the world.

In July 1943, a terrified fourteen-year-old boy watched helplessly as thousands of bombs fell on his hometown. He and his friends had been conscripted only a few months earlier to operate an anti-aircraft battery built on a platform in the middle of a lake. With their radar jammed, their gun was useless against the hundreds of bombers flying over the city. The bombs ignited a firestorm that would burn at over 1,000°F and cast flames almost a thousand feet into the air. Nine nights of terror culminated in the loss of 37,000 lives, including the boy’s friend, who was decapitated by a bomb exploding at the battery. The horror of witnessing the deaths of thousands of people as whole neighborhoods were reduced to ash prompted the fourteen-year-old to ask questions. He said “My question was not, ‘Why does God allow this to happen?’ but, ‘My God, where are you?’ And there was the other question, the answer to which I am still looking for today: Why am I alive and not dead, too, like the friend at my side? I felt the guilt of survival and searched for the meaning of continued life” (Mark Giszczak, Suffering. What Every Catholic Should Know, p. 50).

Jurgen Moltmann, the frightened boy from the story, would go on to be one of the most prominent theological minds of the 20^th century. This theologian proposed the doctrine of a suffering God, and many other German Lutheran theologians continued along the same line of reflection, deeply impacting the theological atmosphere of the century as a whole. Was he right to present a suffering God?

A God Who Knows What It Is To Suffer?

Today, as we celebrate the mystery of the death of Christ on the Cross, we are faced with one whom we could call a suffering God. Yet, we must be careful, lest we fall into heresy. God certainly faces evil, and Jesus, in his humanity, certainly experienced suffering. However, we cannot truthfully say that God suffers.

Nevertheless, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, Jesus, suffered in his human body. It is truly Jesus who suffers. Though Jesus is also fully God, it is in his full humanity that he experiences suffering – real, excruciating, human suffering. This means that the one who holds the universe together also knows what it means to weep, to bleed, and to die.

Challenge to Suffer

Suffering challenges us. It can even distort our sense of what is good and evil. Extreme situations, such as World War II and the Holocaust, led many theologians to depict God as suffering – a view that, while powerful, risks distorting the traditional understanding of God’s nature. They miss something important about God, even as they portray the gravity of the situation. For us too, it is hard to deal with evil and suffering. It seems unnatural.

Indeed, suffering was not part of God’s original plan for humanity. Before the Fall, human beings did not suffer. This changed when,

as John Paul wrote in his Theology of the Body, self-assertion trumped self-gift as Adam and Eve ate of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:17). But the evil that entered creation did not cancel out the good that God had declared about the created order during the “six days” in which the Creator brought something out of nothing (Gen. 1:1–31) (George Weigel, “John Paul II: Knowing Suffering From Inside”).

With his cross, Jesus establishes limits as to how far evil can go. The Devil wants us to think that he is all-powerful, but he is subject to God. By Jesus’ crucifixion, the Devil wants to make us think that he has won. However, the cross conquers the Devil, death, and evil.

Christ Understands Our Suffering

The Cross shows us as well that Christ understands what it means to suffer. Suffering makes us feel isolated. Yet, because of his understanding of our suffering, we have the capacity to unite our suffering to Christ. Precisely when we feel most in pain and alone, Christ invites us to share in the mystery of his suffering and death. Rather than feeling excluded, we can be included in the mystery of the Cross. Christ does not want us to feel alone. He accompanies us in our darkest moments. Through his humanity, Christ gives value to all our emotions, even the most painful ones.

In the midst of what constitutes the psychological form of suffering, there is always an experience of evil, which causes the individual to suffer (St. John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris, 7).

In the Crucifixion of Christ, we have the most profound encounter with evil, and Christ’s suffering goes beyond anything we ourselves could ever know. This Holy Week, take some time to contemplate the Passion of Christ and to thank him for stemming the tide of evil in our world.

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