No
one in his or her right mind likes to suffer. No one welcomes
affliction with open arms. No one answers trouble’s knock on
the door with a cheery, “Well, come on in! I’ve been hoping
you’d get here soon!” I think we’d all say there’s something
wrong with people who lap up hardship and suffering with the
enjoyment of a child eating an ice cream cone.
Look
at our Lord Jesus Christ. He wasn’t like that. In the Garden of
Gethsemane He prayed He wouldn’t have to drink the cup of
suffering. His human nature shrank from the agonizing death that
was His Father’s will for Him. He didn’t see how He could
possibly bear it. And yet, in the end, He prayed that God’s will,
not His, would be done. And strengthened by God, our Lord faced
the shame of the Cross. He embraced its suffering. He allowed
Himself to be dragged down into death. And so He suffered for our
redemption. He won our forgiveness and salvation. He died so we
could live.
Jesus is no stranger to suffering and affliction. He knows what
it’s like to be tempted by the devil – just like us. He knows
what it’s like to endure bodily deprivation – just as we sometimes
do. He knows what it’s like to grieve and to be anguished of
spirit – just as we all do. He knows what it’s like to hurt and
bleed and die. He’s been there. He’s done that. And by
faithfully enduring our experience of temptation and sorrow and
suffering and death in obedience to His Father’s will, He was
perfected for His role as the world’s Savior. The book of Hebrews
says: Though He was a Son, He learned obedience by the
things which He suffered. And having been perfected, He
became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.
It was the Lord’s will to crush Him and cause Him to suffer,
we read in Isaiah 53. God didn’t send His Son into the
world to lead a soft, cushy life of luxury and leisure – a pina-colada
kind of life. Jesus didn’t die on a velvet cross surrounded by
portable air conditioners, with soothing elevator music playing in
the background. It was a crude, rough, fierce, death-dealing
Cross He died on, in the full blaze of a sub-tropical sun, with
the full weight of God’s wrath over human sin pounding down upon
Him. God sent His Son into the world to suffer and die for
sinners, and the Cross was just the place for all that to happen.
Affliction? Hardship? Jesus knows what it’s like.
St. Paul knew what it was like to suffer too. He was stoned. He
was flogged. He was hated and ostracized. He was shipwrecked
three times and faced many other perils as a preacher of the
Gospel. But today’s epistle tells us he also had to put up with a
bodily affliction so severe that he referred to it as a
thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan. Some speculate
that Paul suffered from an eye disease; others go so far as to
wonder if he was epileptic. But Paul doesn’t tell us the nature
of his thorn in the flesh. What he does tell us is that he was
tormented by it. And that he wanted to get rid of it.
So three times he pleaded with the Lord to take it away. I’m sure
these weren’t just random, matter-of-fact,
crank-it-out-and-get-it-over-with kind of prayers. They came from
Paul’s heart. They were wrenched out of him by his experience of
bodily suffering. No doubt there was an undercurrent of
desperation to Paul’s fervent prayers that his thorn in the flesh
would be taken away.
But the Lord didn’t answer those prayers as Paul had hoped.
Instead He told Paul, My grace is sufficient for you, for My
power is made perfect in weakness. That’s definitely not
the answer Paul was looking for. He wanted to be healed, not to
remain sick! He wanted to be made strong, not to have to endure
weakness and affliction the rest of his life! What kind of answer
to prayer was that?!? My grace is sufficient for you? My power
is made perfect in weakness? It’s certainly not the answer we
would like. But it was the answer that Jesus gave Paul, and it’s
the answer He sometimes gives us in our struggle against weakness
and affliction and suffering.
It would be easy to dismiss Jesus’ response to Paul as callous and
uncaring except for one thing: Jesus knew firsthand what
affliction was like. He was a Man of sorrows,
acquainted with grief, Isaiah says. He fasted forty days
and nights in the wilderness and so was familiar with the gnawing
pangs of extreme hunger. He was beaten cruelly by the Romans
before His crucifixion, was mocked and abused and hated by His
enemies. He didn’t have to put up with a mere thorn in the flesh;
He had a twisted, ugly crown of thorns jammed down onto His head
until the blood streamed down His face. All the afflictions of
this fallen world were experienced by our Lord Jesus Christ during
His earthly life. Like a big sponge, He soaked it all up – the
anguish, the agony, the sorrow and grief, the tears, the injuries
and wounds to which the human race has been subject ever since the
Fall into sin. Jesus suffered all things so He could redeem us in
our sufferings. So He could give us hope and peace even in the
midst of affliction.
What greater suffering could there possibly be than that of the
condemned soul in hell? And yet on the Cross, as Jesus was
bearing the sins of the world away, He endured the hell of His
Father’s wrath over those sins. What greater suffering, what
greater affliction could there possibly be than that of Jesus who
suffered and died for our forgiveness and salvation? This is
precisely the Jesus who says to Paul, and who says to you in your
affliction, My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is
made perfect in weakness.
The Christian who is dying from cancer, weak and bed-bound, is
nonetheless strong in the Lord, for the grace of the Triune God is
sufficient, and Christ’s power is made perfect in weakness. The
young Christian widow, wondering how she’s ever going to raise her
family without her husband, is strong in the Lord, for His grace
is sufficient, and Christ’s power is made perfect in weakness.
The troubled, penitent sinner, whose faith seems so weak and whose
sin seems so big, is strong in the Lord, for the grace of our Lord
Jesus Christ is sufficient. And His power is made perfect in
weakness. We don’t have to qualify for any of this. We don’t
have to measure up to get grace. We just have to be what we
already are. Weak, needy creatures. Poor, miserable sinners who
know we have a gracious, compassionate Savior in Jesus Christ.
It’s not the proud Pharisee in the temple who benefits from the
grace of God. It’s the weak, sin-laden tax collector who can’t
even bear to lift up his eyes to heaven – he’s the one, Jesus
says, who goes home justified, declared righteous. God’s grace in
Christ Jesus is sufficient. It was sufficient for Paul, the chief
of sinners. It’s sufficient for you and me in our sins and
weakness, too.
Paul didn’t grumble and complain when his thorn in the flesh
wasn’t taken away. He took Jesus’ answer to heart. You might say
it became his motto. I’ll boast all the more gladly about
my weaknesses, Paul said, so that the power of
Christ may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight
in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in
difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
When you think about it, that list of things in which Paul took
delight is exactly what Christ Himself endured in order to win our
redemption. He was made weak when He was handed over to the
murderous will of His enemies. He suffered insult, hardship,
persecution, difficulty. We Christians therefore delight in,
rejoice in, the sufferings of Christ, for it’s by His sufferings
that we’re forgiven and saved. And whenever we have to endure
suffering we do so with the knowledge that Jesus has been there
before us. We do so with the assurance that our suffering is
somehow, in some mysterious way, taken up into and joined with
Christ’s suffering, so that He doesn’t leave us alone when we
suffer, but is right there with us. We Christians have been
united to the sufferings and death of Jesus in our Baptism. So
for us – radical as it may sound – suffering is the place of God’s
grace. Weakness is the place of strength when we are in Christ.
The holy Christian Church isn’t a fitness club where Christians
come to get pumped up for Jesus. It’s a hospital for sinners, a
clinic for weak, suffering people pierced through with their own
crippling thorns in the flesh. And Jesus is there as the Great
Physician, taking care of us with His nail-pierced hands, washing
our wounds daily in the absolving waters of our Baptism,
nourishing us with the healing, saving, forgiving meal of the
Lord’s Supper. Jesus is a doctor who allowed Himself to be
stricken by our disease so we could be made well. He made Himself
weak for us so we could be made strong in Him. Out of His
shameful, agonizing death come life and salvation for those who
are dead in trespass and sins. His Cross is the Tree of Life for
those who were killed by the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
And Baptism, Absolution, and Christ’s body and Blood in the
Sacrament are the medicine He uses to heal us of our fallen,
sinful, mortal condition. They’re the medicine by which we’re
forgiven and made strong in Him.
So His grace is sufficient for you, dear Christian, because the
Gospel is sufficient for you. It’s sufficient in life and in
death. In sickness and in health. In sorrow or in joy. You and
I all put up with weakness in one form or another. But by the
grace of God, in Jesus Christ we are strong unto life eternal, and
to the resurrection of the body, because His grace and His power
rest upon us.
In Nomine Patris. . .
