Christ who suffers

As part of the Uganda mission trip, I'm reading the book Compassion by Henri Nouwen, Donald McNeill, and Douglas Morrison. We're supposed to be reflecting on the readings, asking ourselves questions that probe why we are committed to this mission work. So far, I've completed Chapter 1 (slow reader!) and have been trying to blog about this for some time, without any success.

Today's passage was about the mystery of God's compassion as embodied through Christ Jesus:

In Jesus, all suffering was sensed with a perfect sensitivity. The great mystery revealed to us in this is that Jesus, who is the sinless son of God, chose in total freedom to suffer fully our pains and thus to let us discover the true nature of our own passions. In him, we see and experience the persons we truly are. Jesus who is divine lives our broken humanity not as a curse (Gn 3:14-19) but as a blessing. (15)

Now that we are in this seemingly silent space before Sunday morn, I can't help but think about what it means for us to dwell on a Christ who suffers for us and with us. Not one who is a knight in shining armor, charging down the streets on a white steed, ready to save us in a grand and triumphant way, but one who suffers with us. This is a Christ who hungers with the hungry children in Uganda, thirsts with the women and children who have to carry water for miles and miles, ails with the children sickened by malaria, dies with the children dying of HIV/AIDS.

Easter Sunday has not been a mystery for us for quite some time -- at least, not like the mystery fraught with uncertainty on that one morning thousands of years ago. We know the story. We can pretend to re-enact the fear, the uncertainty, the anxiety, etc., but we all believe and know what happened. (Come now, how many of us recall that story about the empty plastic Easter egg that symbolizes the empty tomb on Easter Sunday morning?)

But for some kids in Uganda, in Africa, in Vietnam, in China, in the U.S., each morning is an uncertainty -- do they die from cold, thirst, malnutrition, sickness? Do they live to see the sunrise? Will there be another morning of light and freedom from death?

My thoughts are convoluted tonight as I write, but I'm struck by the messages about compassion in this book... Compassionate being, compassionate living.... It's not that easy. As I read the section on "Toward New Life," I wondered how many people think that for the millions who are suffering, does that mean God is not compassionate? Or, what if some folks believed that there were not enough people praying for the sick, the elderly, the weak, the dying? What are we saying about God? What are we thinking about God? Are we defining God with our limited human understanding? How dangerous it would be if we started thinking that God's compassion Being is measured and defined by who is rescued and who is not!!

"The mystery of God's love is not that our pain is taken away, but that God first wants to share that pain with us" (14). Indeed. That makes sense to me. It's not that we are unloved if we are not "saved" or "cured" or "rescued". It's not that God is not compassionate to me, to them, to us. It is about how we as the Body of Christ choose to embody Christ in the best way we can -- to be instruments of Godly compassion and vehicles through which Christ's resurrection is seen, felt, experienced, and understood.