During this Easter season, both in the Sunday lectionary and for the Office of Readings (one of the offices that comprise the Liturgy of the Hours) the Church provides us with readings from 1 Peter. This inspired text focuses on the suffering endured by many early Christians.
Because we are in Year A of the three-year cycle of Sunday readings, we read from 1 Peter for six consecutive Sundays. While some readings feature it more explicitly, five out of the six broach the subject of suffering.
As the Buddha observed: to live is to suffer. As Christ painstakingly showed: to love is to suffer. But to love is also what it means to be truly alive. Theologian Herbert McCabe observed: “if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.”1 While it is abundantly clear that suffering, in its various forms, is an inherent part of life, it’s important to note that God does not cause human suffering. On the contrary, humanity caused Christ’s suffering and death.
Both in His suffering and descent into hell, Christ retrieved human suffering from the void of meaninglessness. As Msgr Luigi Giussani insisted: “He mounted the Cross to free us from the fascination with nothingness, to free us from the fascination with appearances, with the ephemeral.” It is because the Lord “was tested through what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.”2 Experience makes abstractions real.
In and through Christ, “the alchemy of grace can turn the lead of suffering into the gold of glory.”3 Being a Christian means steadfastly refusing to let suffering have the last word. Christians are incorrigible about this because we believe in the resurrection. This is what our epistle reading tells us: we rejoice in the “resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” the source of our “living hope.”4
When accepted rather than refused or denied (both of which are futile responses) and united with Christ’s suffering, your suffering can be the means by which your faith is strengthened, your hope enlivened, and your charity increased.
Living this way, which cannot and does not attenuate the seriousness of suffering or dull its pain, will result in “praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”5 When you think about it, not letting your suffering diminish your living hope is the very revelation of Jesus Christ, just as the crucifixion is the deepest revelation of God’s very self.
Today’s Gospel has two distinct parts. In the first part, we hear what is held to be Christ’s institution of the Sacrament of Penance (i.e., confession). In part two, we hear Thomas’ merciful encounter with Christ. So, we might say that within one and the same Gospel reading the Church puts before us faith and doubt.
What ties faith and doubt together inextricably is the reality of suffering. Nothing produces doubt about God’s goodness, God’s power, or even God’s very existence more than suffering. But rather than denying suffering or seeing it as God’s punishment for wayward humanity, or an individual who has misbehaved, or inflicting divine wrath upon yourself, the doubt caused by suffering is vital and perhaps even necessary for faith.
According to our epistle reading, doubt caused by suffering is what makes your faith “more precious” and more enduring “than gold that is… tested by fire.”6 Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Certainty is the opposite of faith. In the context of suffering, it is people who can always produce a reason for suffering, usually by invoking pious platitudes,which grate. As Rich Mullins sang: “I know it would not hurt any less/Even if it could be explained.”7 Suffering is a mystery because there is no explanation that eases our pain.
It is very important to point out something our Gospel for Divine Mercy Sunday makes very clear: the Risen Lord still bears the wounds of his crucifixion. This is perhaps the best explanation of suffering available to us. It is God telling us he has suffered with us and continues to suffer with and even through us.
Thomas, who sadly remains stuck by the descriptor “Doubting,” isn’t faithless. Anyone who has attentively read the fourth Gospel knows that he is faithful start to finish. His experience of the Lord’s suffering and death certainly caused his hope to wane. Most likely, Thomas was heartbroken, despondent, grieving.
Maybe what he was told by the others simply seemed to be good to be true, something he wanted so badly to believe but couldn’t face the risk of disappointment if turned out not to be. Too often, we reduce Jesus’ closest disciples to caricatures, to two-dimensional figures, rather than complex human beings like us.
Thomas’ response should be our response whenever the consecrated host and the chalice are raised: “My Lord and my God!”8 Lest, anyone break his arm patting himself on the back for his superior faith, you are not among those who have not seen! Here today, the Risen Lord says, Eat my flesh and drink my blood, "and do not be unbelieving, but believe."9
On this Divine Mercy Sunday, let’s worship the God who is Mercy and dismiss the omnipotent moral monster of so many imaginations. Taking a cue from the closing prayer for the Chaplet of Divine Mercy: in difficult moments, like one we are presently living, may we not despair nor become despondent, but with great confidence submit ourselves to God’s holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself.
1 From Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching,” London Review of Books, Vol. 28 No. 20, 19 October 2006.↩
2 Hebrews 2:18.↩
3 Ken Boa, from the podcast “In the Studio with Michael Card.”↩
4 1 Peter 1:3.↩
5 1 Peter 1:7.↩
6 1 Peter 1:7.↩
7 Rich Mullins lyrics to “Hard to Get.”↩
8 John 20:28.↩
9 John 20:27.>↩
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