Suffering is the Limit

Mitchell, Brody, Shannon, and Shelby,

Recently I shared a quote from Pope Francis.  It stood out as very meaningful to me and my experiences, so I decided to share it via Facebook.  Sometimes I do these things and I'll get a few people to jump on the "like" button, but very often these little inspirational quotes go unnoticed.  Usually, it's the more complex quotes that people tend to ignore, and in hindsight, it should not have surprised me that the one acknowledgment I got was when someone replied saying that it was nonsense.  I was in the right position so that the language of Francis's thoughts on suffering spoke directly to me in a way that wasn't universal, but highly specific, almost tailored for my reception.  Others wouldn't understand, at least not right away.

Unfortunately, on Facebook people rarely ever ask for clarification and assume that I've phrased things as plainly as possible, so when I try to get across wisdom like this and it doesn't make sense right away, I've had it a few times where people have told me that I don't know what I'm talking about instead of being curious enough to ask "What exactly do you mean by that?"  This this particular instance, the person said "nonsense," that I should stop speaking heresy and start reading my Bible.

Meanwhile, I realize that, given the complexity of the thought, it would be best that I write about it in depth here, where it's more natural to go into depth and take my time.  Now let me repeat the quote, minus the typo:

"Suffering is not a virtue in itself, but the way we accept it can lead to virtue.  We are called to fullness and happiness, in search of which, suffering is the limit.  Because of this, we fully understand the sense of suffering only through the suffering of God made Christ."

Exegesis

I realize that this statement actually looks quite confusing.  The wording works for me, but had it not, what would the most appropriate response have been?  In his book Creative Ministry, Henri M.J. Nouwen says that we shouldn't be competitive with our opinions, but rather be perpetual learners ourselves and always be willing to ask others whose viewpoints don't immediately make sense to us, "Tell me more."  Communication is a two way street, and sometimes we on the receiving end must take the initiative in making sure that we understand.

Therefore, I have to ask three important questions:

1. What is the context in which Pope Francis said this?
2. How can we break this quote down and rephrase it?
3. What parts of this statement are semantically unique to the Roman Catholic vocabulary?

2

Because I'm rebellious and somewhat unpredictable, I'm actually going to start off with the second question.  How can this quote be rephrased?  This is actually, from an exegetical standpoint, the first step in understanding any text, since we must look at internal evidence for meaning to see if it answers itself before resorting to other, possible unnecessary measures for interpreting the text.

Let me brake it down into my more inclusive language:

1. We can't consider ourselves good simply because we suffer, since this is a universal condition of all mankind, but there is a Christian way of understanding suffering.
2. God intended Creation to be good and wishes to restore it to this perfect order.
3. We suffer in spite of this, and we can only find meaning to the sheer offensiveness of suffering in light of God's own voluntary suffering in Christ.

Once you break it down and actually think about what's being said, it's pretty straightforward and there's nothing here that's against the Bible.  It's very sensible, and in fact quite ecumenical.  This initial paraphrase doesn't make any particularly bold truth claims outside of its presumption that Jesus was God.

Yet, there's one thing that I didn't translate that doesn't quite make it into the breakdown.  What am I to make of the statement "Suffering is the limit?"  How does this fit in with the rest of the main theological points?

At this point, I will need to dig a little deeper, because I can't presume to simply know what this means merely by looking at the quote itself.


1

Looking at it now, the post really does need context, and the way I attributed the quote to him is actually a bit misleading.  This isn't a quote by Pope Francis as we know him, but actually before he was pope, and his name was Jorge Mario Bergoglio.  This isn't something that he said while in his current office.

Francis said this after due reflection on his own life.  I encountered this quote by picking up a booklet about him, and here's the two paragraphs that directly led into it:

The family was not rich, and his mother was temporarily paralysed [sic] after the birth of her youngest child, so when Jorge came back from school, under her directions, he would cook ingredients previously prepared by her.  Although they did not lack for the necessities of life, they had few luxuries either, so his father asked him aged thirteen to begin part-time work in a clothes factory alongside his studies.  After a few years, he began to work in the mornings at the Hickethier-Bachmann chemical laboratory, controlling food hygiene, while he attended afternoon classes till 8 pm.  In his interviews with Sergio Rubin and Francesca Abrogetti, published as El jesuita, he speaks of his gratitude for what he learnt through this work, especially concerning the importance of the quality of one's work, of the dignity given by work and of the social consequences of good work and leisure 

His own experiences of suffering, especially during a grace illness when he was twenty-one, in which he lost a lung, have formed his compassion in his ministry.  It was only when Sr Dolores, who had prepared him for first communion, said "you are imitating Jesus", [sic] that he found peace and could make sense of his suffering.  In the light of this experience he says [the quote that is the subject of this entry].

Interestingly, I was writing about the relationship between hard work and leisure a lot the other days.  I also wrote about the ironic sense in which work, in its own way, is a suffering of its own, and yet it can be so fulfilling.

Francis's motto is Miserando atque eligendo, which means, as I'm translating it, "Looking at him who needs mercy and choosing him."  Since Latin is fairly flexible, you could actually order these words in several different ways, but the formula and the relationship created is still the same.  There are two words, mercy and choice, which are conjugated into verb forms and are applied by the active subject of the sentence to a direct object.  "Miserando" means to have mercy, "atque" means "upon him," and "eligendo" is the act of making a positive choice regarding that person.  The theme for Francis's ministry, the words which he chooses to be forever remembered by, are words of compassion.

Taking all this into account, I let it inform me of the personality of the person speaking.  Pope Francis is a man deeply committed to service toward others, and I believe that when he speaks of suffering, he's really talking about two things.  One, he's talking about suffering itself, and two, he's talking about suffering as it relates to service.  Then he, like Mark, emphasized Jesus as the suffering servant.  He began to find justification for suffering once he began going into a vocation of lifelong service, at which point he would have undoubtedly also tried to find justification for service.


3

My sister and I had a talk the other day about how Catholics and non-Catholics often believe in the exact same things, but only don't realize it because different traditions use their own words for a shared belief.  In the case of Catholicism, I've noticed that suffering is uniquely honored in the faith in ways that at first seem unfamiliar to non-Catholics.  Suffering characterizes Lent, in which we are called to suffer like Christ.  Mass is traditionally also considered to be union in Christ's suffering.  Catholics have an intimate relationship with this word and it comes with many preconceived notions.

When a lay Catholic speaks on suffering, there aren't necessarily multiple layers of semantics.  However, when a well-educated Catholic speaks of suffering ---- particularly if he's in the priesthood ---- it's important to understand that his way of acknowledging suffering is intimately tied to a broader series of doctrines and insights that together create a holistic portrait for the faith.

In the history of the Christian tradition, one of the first arguments to end up defining the character of the church was the nature of Jesus.  There were those who struggled with the God-Man doctrine, because it was unseemly for God to empty Himself to the point of being a dependent infant, begotten of the line of Man, subject to the random and arbitrary nature of history, and to ultimately suffer and die.  These were a contradiction, because a God who was omnipotent and eternal could not become these things.  What's more ---- and I believe this is the real reason why most would struggle with this doctrine ---- they believed that God should not subject Himself to this.

In the words of Catholic Answers:

Words fall far short when we are undergoing suffering, and reasoning cannot remedy the profound sense of the offensiveness of suffering.

It's offensive.  It's our natural tendency, as theists, to believe that God should be revered.  Not only should we worship Him, but we should refuse to believe anything so as to make Him lower than what our preconceived notions of what an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent God should look like.  In that sense, I'm sure that the Gnostics believed that they were doing Him a favor when they denied His incarnation, and in particular His suffering.  Because suffering was offensive, and to believe that He took on such an offense was a further offense unto Him.

Even today, an occasional well-meaning Christian will struggle with the idea that God was completely human.  Acknowledging that doctrine sounds dangerously close to humanism.  Therefore, while they celebrate Jesus as God, it's hard for them to rejoice in Him as a man.  This still opens some tricky implications, though.  If Jesus was God, than everything He was and everything He did is to be celebrated.  That includes the Resurrection and everything good that happened to Jesus, but how do we celebrate His Passion?  How to we worship and celebrate in His death without indulging in a faith that professes a hatred of God?

Therefore, Gnostics radically reinterpreted history in order to fix this "problems."  The early church was divided, and many of the epistles, particularly by John, address the Gnostic beliefs within their midst.  The Gnostic solutions, to say the least, were contrived, but they had to be in order to counter the offensive claim that Jesus was a human being and that He became subject to the most human of all acts, suffering and death.

They said that Jesus was a human, but that Christ was a separate entity, not unlike the Holy Spirit.  An analogy that might work for some people is that Jesus was sort of like a character from an anime my sister's a fan of, Yugi from Yu-Gi-Oh!, who shares his body with an ancient spirit named Yami Yugi.  Jesus was a mundane human being, although through His miraculous birth He was prepared for His special selection by the Christ.  For thirty years, He lived a normal human life.  Then, upon His baptism, Christ descended upon Him, and He has the Son of God in Him.  It was for this reason that the first thirty years of Jesus' life were unremarkable (because Heaven forbid that the Messiah should enter into the world without fireworks going off every time He ate breakfast).  During His ministry, when He had Christ in Him, He did many remarkable things, and those things could be attributed to Christ in Him.  When He suffered in His Passion, it was Jesus suffering, but not Christ, and when Jesus died, the Christ left His body, because God was too good to die.

By denying suffering, the Gnostics made Jesus more distant and denied His mission, and it was against this heresy that the early church had to struggle against.  The early church fathers, and therefore the Catholic church, had to address suffering in order to make sense of their faith.  The very first Christians came to their faith not by being ideologues, but witnesses, and humbly accepted Jesus' ministry for what it was, no matter how much it challenged their preexisting suppositions.  Jesus' suffering was a fact, and therefore had to be understood.

Therefore, when an educated Catholic speaks of suffering, he identifies it very strongly with Jesus' experiences.  It's the lens from which he understands it, the direction that he's coming from.

According to Catholicism, and historic Christianity in general, the very fact that Jesus suffered validates our own suffering.  He didn't just tell us that it was bad and awkwardly say a prayer for us.  He had enough passion to come down and suffer like us, and with us.  I think it's very important to acknowledge that He suffers with us, because God has a heart for community and relationship.  He has a heart for togetherness.  He proved that those who suffer aren't alone, but rather that all that is good and true in the universe, Himself, the Logos, suffers along with them.  We treat a detached godliness as something to strive for, and sublimity as an ultimate desire, so that when we're suffering, we think something must be wrong.  Yet, Christ suffered, and everything was right with Him.

Suffering, therefore, is beautified.  Catholics respect suffering.  They respect those who go through it, because they are enduring something that Christ endured.  It almost sounds as if they're affectionate of suffering, though, as if it's a good thing, or a virtue, and that isn't the case.  That is why we need people like Jorge Mario Bergoglio to clarify that suffering is still an offense against us and therefore not a virtue, but it is virtuous to accept suffering as Christ did, because Christ did.

Why did Christ suffer, though?

While doing my research, an article on Catholic Bridge explained our reason for suffering in several ways, one of which happened to conform with my interpretation of the Pope's statement that we suffer in order to serve others.  Yes, it is good to find relief from suffering, and we should pray for God's intervention, but when He doesn't take it away, it isn't reason for despair.  There is a reason for it, and one of the reasons is service.

Catholics are not afraid of the Cross. We love the Cross. Catholics feel that if we prayerfully offer up their sufferings to God, they can benefit those in the world who are suffering but who do not know Christ. This is called "redemptive suffering." We don't go chasing after suffering but if it is persistently there even though we pray, then we don't waste the opportunity to use it for good. This is what Catholics mean when they say "I am offering it up."

Christ suffered for us, with us, because He was a servant to the poor.  His suffering was a part of a mission that could not be complete without it.  It had a purpose toward helping others and leading to our Salvation, and it's absolutely necessary.  In 2 Corinthians 5:21, it says that Jesus became our sin for us.  He took on our garbage and our filth, all that was offensive about us, and took the blame for it.  He couldn't just magically forgive us and say that He didn't hold it all against us, because He wanted to fully embrace what forgiveness entails, that is, restoring a complete relationship with us.  God needed to be with us much as He is with Himself in the Trinity, so He came down and forgave us by living life with us, both physically and, through His suffering and death, spiritually.

The Catechism puts it this way:

Moved by so much suffering Christ not only allows himself to be touched by the sick, but he makes their miseries his own: "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases." But he did not heal all the sick. His healings were signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God. They announced a more radical healing: the victory over sin and death through his Passover. On the cross Christ took upon himself the whole weight of evil and took away the "sin of the world," of which illness is only a consequence. By his passion and death on the cross Christ has given a new meaning to suffering: it can henceforth configure us to him and unite us with his redemptive Passion. (1505)

Where is says that He covers our sins for us, that He paid them for us, is standard Christianese and, pragmatically, all we really need to know.  Yet, I took the liberty of adding emphasis to where the Catechism goes the extra mile, right there at the beginning and the end of the paragraph.  It says that not only did He associate with the sick, but He was truly touched by them, inside and out.  He was touched not just physically, but at His core.  This is the type of God who would weep with us when we showed signs of death, because He didn't just intellectually acknowledge our suffering as real but experienced it for Himself.  The Catechism then reaffirms that suffering is purposeful if we don't deny it but accept it and allow Christ to take it on for us, because then we become united in Christ.

To that extent, Catholics believe that by suffering we show salvation to others, because we can more authentically live as one flesh when we suffer together.  It breaks down the barriers we have with one another, and we become one.  Extra ecclesia novum salus.  True salvation requires the reception of a relationship, and we cannot share that with others when we limit our ways of being spiritually available to others.  The Holy Spirit wants to be active inside the workings of interpersonal communion.

Even more poignantly, Pope John Paul II spoke about suffering as a vocation and its salvific implications.

Man hears Christ’s saving answer as he himself gradually becomes a sharer in the sufferings of Christ. The answer that comes through this sharing, by way of the interior encounter with the Master, is in itself something more than the mere abstract answer to the question about the meaning of suffering. For it is above all a call. It is a vocation. Christ does not explain in the abstract the reasons for suffering, but before all else he says: "Follow me!" Come! Take part through your suffering in this work of saving the world, a salvation achieved through my suffering! Through my cross. Gradually, as the individual takes up his cross, spiritually uniting himself to the cross of Christ, the salvific meaning of suffering is revealed before him.

That's a pretty heavy declaration, and very distinctly Catholic to the extent that non-Catholics would instinctively shy away from accepting it, but it also isn't one that's made lightly.  John Paul II knew what suffering was like.  He knew it well, more than most.  He had the right to talk about it.  He also looked at Christ and saw a God who, though He was better than him in every way, was nonetheless relateable.  As much as Catholics celebrate life every mass with the Eucharist, His suffering is still a historic fact of His ministry.  It's intuitively obvious that God should live.  That God should resurrect  --- that is to say that He must come back to life after having suffered and died ---- is another ordeal.  It says a lot about His nature.  It was such an out-there idea that many had trouble believing in it, and the Gnostics came up with wild theories about how Jesus and the Christ were two different people, and that the Christ was not in Him when He suffered.  He saw a Christ who didn't ask him to enter into the suffering to be more Christlike, but a Christ who entered into suffering much like him.

He speaks of taking up our own cross, and that could sound enough like a call to give up pleasure in pursuit of righteousness, but that isn't exactly what he's getting at.  After all, he had already been suffering.  It isn't something he chose to do; he received the offense of suffering in one form or another whether he asked for it or not.  Taking up one's own cross involves making peace with our own suffering and accepting it for what it is, that it doesn't distance us from Christ but rather gives us an idea of just how humble He was in order to experience what we experience.  Incidentally, this also gives us strength.  We don't become superhuman, but when we're free to make peace with our pain and offer it up to God, we're enabled to endure it better.

Some would still hold John Paul II suspect for claiming that through our own suffering we take part in saving the world.  That sounds a lot like humanism again, like he's claiming that Christ's sacrifice wasn't enough.  Except it is.  Christ's sacrifice, and particularly His resurrection, is enough.  He's saved us, and our salvation comes from having the identity of Christ in us.  Because God can't say our name anymore without acknowledging His Son, it transforms us.  If we confess that we're free to truly be who we really are, then we can truly be with one another.  We can live with them and die with them.  Through that relationship, the Holy Spirit works wonders.  Through genuine relationship, it redeems the messenger and the receiver of the message.  We share the Word with people by truly sharing ourselves.  That is how salvation spreads.

Another common opinion that people have is to suppose that we cannot possibly enter into Christ's suffering, that nothing compares to His sacrifice.  They're right.  They're also wrong.

Have you ever heard someone try to be optimistic and say "At least it can't get any worse!"?  Then, of course, the irony gods feel provoked enough to respond with a thunderclap, followed by an instant downpour of rain.  Things just got worse.  In the same way, imagine if Jesus, in the midst of His crucifixion, comforted Himself with the same motivational thinking.  Then it rained, or a Roman officer decided to stab him in the groin a few times, or scorpion crawled onto Him and stung Him several times.  It doesn't take much imagination to imagine how that death could have been worse.

As a writer, I've explored the idea of pain through science fiction.  I invented a character who had his spine ripped out, replaced with a cyborg spine, and had his brain altered to that he could experience pain beyond that which was humanly possible.  At the end of the day, we have only so many nerve endings to pick up pain, and our brain has only so many neurons to comprehend it.  This character had his limits unnaturally redefined to the point where he experienced pain fifty-three times greater than what a human technically can biologically experience.

At least it can't get any worse.  Well, no, not really.  This young man thought that he was the be-all and end-all of suffering, until someone else much, much later in the story came around and willingly suffered even more.  This person had his brain transformed so that it was bigger on the inside, the size of a universe, and converted into the substance of time-space itself so that it didn't have biological restrictions.  He was then inflicted pain to great that it literally filled that entire universe.  Every unit of quantum foam of space and time within him groaned under the weight of physical and mental pain.  He was in agony.  The human brain processes information at about forty miles per hour, but one side of his universe-sized brain could conceive the pain on the other side of his cranial universe instantaneously, a billion times over.  All the while, the people who inflicted this on him mocked him, and let him suffer while the wicked prospered.  They inflicted pain on those he loved, and those he loved turned their backs on him.  He was constantly reminded of his past sins and made to not only suffer, but to hate himself.  It shattered him.

Right there, I just imagined a type of suffering that technically eclipses Cavalry.  To enter into Christ's suffering, therefore, does not necessarily mean to be beat, whipped, and given a slow, torturous death.  I think that it's unfortunate that Catholic ministers use the term all on its own, "entering into Christ's suffering," when on its own it sounds so presumptuous.  It makes non-Catholics think that Catholics are full of themselves or blind to the blackness that Christ went through.  That isn't the case.

Catholic Answers puts it this way:

Indeed, the suffering of Christ overcomes the worst possible suffering of the human person—permanent alienation from God, the source and summit of all goodness. All suffering in this life—like all happiness—is imperfect, partial, and finite. Even the worst possible human life, spread over the longest spans, comes to an end. Hell does not. It lasts forever. In comparison to the pains of hell, the worst human suffering on earth pales. Jesus saves his people from hell.

All suffering is finite.  Even Jesus' suffering while on earth was finite.  Cavalry was finite.  It doesn't matter if we suffer in exactly the same way as Jesus did, but rather that we suffer at all, and that we acknowledge that through this suffering we share our humanity with Christ.

Christ's suffering came to an end.  He died.  No matter how much we suffer or how much we receive blessings, we all die.  It comes to an end, all of it.  Except, according to the [Apostle's Creed], which the Catholic church acknowledges, He descended into Hell.  This would, by definition, be perfect suffering, and one that I do not believe that we an ever truly endure in this lifetime.  I do not know if the Catholic expression that we enter into His suffering covers this area of Christ's ministry.  If this statement by Catholic Answers is anything to go by, and if the author's statements perfectly represent Catholic doctrine, than no.  We never have to consider ourselves as being peers in Christ's trip to Hell.

This now sounds more like something non-Catholics can be comfortable with.  That all sounds about right and consistent with ecumenical Christian beliefs, just expressed in different words.  It also leads into where they're technically right when they say that we can't truly feel what Christ felt when He suffered.  John Paul II says:

His suffering has human dimensions; it also is unique in the history of humanity—a depth and intensity that, while being human, can also be an incomparable depth and intensity of suffering, insofar as the man who suffers is in person the only begotten Son himself: "God from God." Therefore, only he—the only begotten Son—is capable of embracing the measure of evil contained in the sin of man: In every sin and in "total" sin, according to the dimensions of the historical existence of humanity on earth. (SD 17)

At the end of the day, our suffering is merely human suffering.  That's bad in itself.  I can't put a value on just how bad that is.  It's not like we can say "Look on the bright side: it's only suffering."  Only suffering?  Is there anything worse than suffering?  Something worse than suffering, though, would be suffering.  Still, there's an added dimension to this.  None of us can experience suffering on the sheer level offensiveness as it was inflicted on Jesus.  It is our place in life to suffer, but Christ was innocent, and furthermore, He was God.  Considering His divine identity, His was suffering on the most depraved level.  He took it on.  He accepted that insanity.  At least with us, we can suffer and call it just.  Yet, for God Himself to suffer, it's like dividing by zero, and it literally redefines the universe.

In this way, the Catholic faith reaffirms what non-Catholics believe about Christ's suffering.  It admits the greatness of His incarnation and His ministry and His death.  It also reaffirms that he truly suffered on our behalf, and that His life and only His life is sufficient for us to live ours in eternity.  The Catholic faith doesn't teach "He does His part and I do mine."  It teaches something very familiar.  Again, it's in different words.  It's painted in different colors, but it's there.  There are still some discrepancies, and among other things, not everyone agrees on exactly how much this peace, once it is revealed to us, outwardly transforms us.  Not even all Catholics agree on that one, so at this point I can't really speak for the Catholic church on what a Christian looks like, and I'm merely speaking from myself and my experience.

Finally, the Catholic church has to address this problem of pain.  It's a church founded by witnesses to the greatest representation of truth the world has ever known.  It's founded in history and in actual experience.  The church has to address suffering and synthesize it with its worldview.  Suffering isn't something that can be escaped but rather a universal, inevitable part of the human experience.  The job of any religion isn't to try and come up with a poetic story that sounds good on its own, or to force an agenda on reality that prevents us from seeing it as it really is.  It has to explain suffering as we actually experience it.  In the words of Dr. Robert Stackpole:

So, in Catholicism I found the bloody crucifixes not to be disturbing but just plain honest, because that's precisely where most of us are, most of the time, in one way or another: We are with Jesus, on the Cross. The fact that the Son of God Himself once cried out on the Cross: "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mk 15:34) is one of the greatest comforts of the Catholic faith to me.

This isn't liturgical language, but a Catholic writing in his own words, sharing his own life with anyone who cares to listen, and I think it hits the heart.  Jesus shared in our suffering on that cross, admitted to its existence, validated it.  He didn't say "On the bright side, it's only suffering," because He knew how terrible and wrong even the slightest bit of suffering is.  This is a personal God.  This is a God who comforts us by being with us in Spirit and Flesh.  This God is the most realistic, personal God there is.  Once people realize that, they finally make peace with their suffering and live.  They will also become more compassionate, more honest, more truly themselves because of Christ's suffering.

Hermeneutics

Asides from the deep semantics, there's a personal reason why this quote stood out to me.  It brought out some thoughts that I had been having, and I thought that quoting the Pope on this could function as an appropriate prelude to them once I felt I was ready to share them.  Some of those thoughts I already covered when I explained the Catholic views on suffering, and that's natural, because I believe this is all tied together.

Around Easter time, I had made some thoughts perfectly clear: that I didn't believe that we could forgive out debtors but rather allow God to forgive them, and that Jesus' greatest achievement was not the crucifixion, but the Resurrection.  I've been thinking about what else I had to say on that subject.

When Francis said "suffering is the limit," then, it gave me something to think about.  I could explain everything else he said, but his use of that clause didn't make sense.  Even after all this exegesis, I still can't quite explain what he meant.  It's just sort of there.

So what I say now, I don't necessarily speak on the behalf of the Pope.  These are just my own thoughts, the things that he got me thinking about.  To say that suffering as the limit, though, strikes me, and it gets me thinking, because something about that made sense to me.

One thing I thought was maybe that when we pursue rebirth, it's necessary to die along the way.  Another thing I thought was that all suffering is suffering, and we can't say "On the bright side, it's 'only' suffering."  Also, I considered that there's something to say here about how death is the ultimate penalty for sin and, after that, we can do nothing more to pay for it.

Considering this within the context of servanthood, though, I thought about what we could do for others in our pursuit of the coming Kingdom.  How are we limited in our service?  What boundaries has God set in place?

Well, here's what I suppose.  Jesus died, and then He resurrected.  As it happens, I'm going to die, too.  That's an act of suffering, a curse put upon me for my sins and the sins of my distant ancestors, Adam and Eve.  Dying doesn't make me virtuous, of course.  It just makes me dead.  Everybody does it.  This suffering, this apparent final act, caps my ministry on this Earth.  The very best I can offer my neighbor is to love them unto death.

What I can't do for them is to resurrect myself after my death so that they may have life.  I can preserve life, for a while, but I can never create it.  I cannot be a source of life for them.  I can't.  Only Jesus can do that.  Only Jesus could rise from the grave.

Because of that, I suppose I will rise from the grave as well, someday.  However, by then, I think that my calling for service will be over.  I think it will have ended when my final act of suffering reached its limit.

I can suffer for them, but I can't give them life.  Instead, I pursue happiness and fulfillment, expressed through my hope for the coming Kingdom, by living it out today and living as Christ did, but lowering myself, emptying myself, and giving up glory for the sake of truly being with others by taking on the curse of the world with them.  In a way, that's life.  It isn't necessarily salvation, but I suppose that it make salvation possible.  My passion is the limit to what I can give others when I share the Gospel.

Acknowledgments:

These entries have lately become more and more about essays filled with research, citations, and challenging exegetical conclusions, and so as not to lose track of what I set out to do in the first place, I really want to really address you specifically, especially since time has gone by.

I want to give you all my heartfelt thanks.  Shannon, you were a godsend in helping inspire me to finish the second half of this entry.  You also such a sister in Christ when I expressed my love of Christ but my annoyance with Christianity.  From one blogger to another, thank you.

Mitchell, we're reaching the end of the spring semester and I suppose you'll be busy, so I think I'll wait for another couple of weekends before calling you.  The phone call I had with you this last Easter, though, was one of the freshest experiences I've had in all this last month.  I really look forward to the next time that we can catch up.

Brody, it was a pleasure talking with you on Easter, too.  I tried calling a lot of people, and you and Mitchell were the only ones who picked up, which was a happy coincidence.  You two are the two I consider my best of friends, and if I could have called only two people, it would have been you.  So that worked out just perfectly.  Anyway, I hope that things go awesome down in Mardi Gras land.  Also, though I don't want to call it quite yet, I just want you to know that I might get a new job over the summer and have that kind of work schedule you had last year, with work weeks totaling up to 80 hours or so, all of it dedicated to welding.  It's intimidating me, but you're an inspiration.

Shelby, congratulations on the engagement!  I know I told you that in person, but I just want to also get it in writing.  I'm officially congratulating you, happy for you, and wishing the best for you.  Justin's a great friend, and now I no longer feel uncomfortable and tentative about all those jokes I made about you two tying the knot.  Remember that painting I gave Justin?  I considered including you in it as one of the great things in his life, but at the time it was just a little presumptuous.  Now I know that if I do something like that again for him, I will have some interesting new things to include.  I hope to be able to make it to your wedding, and even if I can't, I also hope to have a great wedding present prepared.  And if neither of those things, by goodness, I'll just wish you the best!

Sincerely,
John Hooyer