What use to me is a God who suffers?

Sermon. St Anne’s Brondesbury. 21 October 2012. Trinity 20.

Hebrews 5.1-10

‘In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered’ [Hebrews 5.7-8].

This is what the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews wants to say about Jesus our High Priest. It is – I imagine – a source of comfort and reassurance to us. Jesus is like us in all things, save sin alone. He can sympathise. He empathises. He knows what it is to suffer. He knows what it is to pray, truly to pray, to plead with God. To cry and cry out. He knows what anguish is. He is truly human.

Indeed, this description of Jesus may be there specifically to emphasise the full humanity of Jesus. It’s not just that he suffers and prays. It is also that he reverently submits and obeys God – the language one uses of a human being aware of their creaturely status before the Creator. Don’t forget, this Letter was written roughly around the end of the first century. This is a long time before the Church had settled on its creeds and insisted on the two natures of Christ, the one fully human (as we are human) the other fully divine (as God is divine). And I even wonder whether the writer is insisting on the humanity of Jesus – the full humanity – precisely because of the use he wants to make of Psalm 110, where God tells the chosen one that ‘you are a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek’.

Why do I say this? Melchizedek is such an evocative, enigmatic, elusive character in the Bible. He suddenly appears (in Genesis 14) as priest and king, brings out bread and wine, blesses, and receives Abram’s tithe. And that’s it. That’s all we hear of him in the Hebrew Scriptures apart from this reference in the psalms itself. So it was thinkable, in the Judaism of Jesus’ day, the Judaism of the Second Temple, that Melchizedek himself was not a human being as we are. The Letter to the Hebrews itself notes that he has no genealogy. Is someone who has no genealogy and who is a model for an eternal priest himself fully human? At least we might wonder whether he isn’t one of those superhuman characters who defy death, like Enoch and Elijah. But he might be more angel than human, perhaps even a prince of angels, perhaps Michael himself.

We won’t solve the riddle of Melchizedek today. He is referred to by Philo, Josephus, in the Dead Sea Scrolls (where he has at least one scroll dedicated to him) and in another roughly contemporary text known as Second Enoch. Midrash and later Jewish tradition also have things to say about him. He attracts both attention and controversy. So I’ll just repeat my claim at its most cautious: for some people at least, it is thinkable that Melchizedek is not a human, but an angelic or otherwise heavenly figure. Yet the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews insists that Jesus, although priest forever after the order of Melchizedek, is fully human.

‘In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.’

And we take comfort in this, because we want to know that Jesus is with us in our sufferings, both in his mortal life and now in heaven.

It’s such a commonplace of Christian teaching, that Jesus is with us especially in our sufferings. So it is worth pausing for a moment and asking: just what is so good about it? The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann has himself been very insistent that the Christian gospel is that God suffers with us in Jesus. One of his books is, after all, called The Crucified God. But someone once asked him… Well, the question only really works in German: ‘Was hilft es mir, wenn es einen Gott gibt, dem es genauso dreckig geht wir mir?’ I paraphrase: ‘What use is it to me, if there’s a God who’s in exactly the same mess I’m in?’ It’s a question we are perhaps not used to facing. So we should. What good does God suffering with us really do?

This is not an abstract-philosophical question. When we come face to face with merciless suffering in our own lives, we ask it with real passion. The list of what I mean is too long. Cancer, depression, addiction, grief, war, injustice, random violence… any of the countless ways in which human lives are in truth ‘made hell’. When we’re in it, we surely look to God not for metaphorical-hand-holding ‘solidarity’ with us, but… rescue. If we have not suffered intensely, we might dismiss this search - this craving - for rescue as something infantile, something we have to get beyond. But, out of the depths, sometimes all you can do is plead with God for rescue. Our lives may depend on it. And, I ask again, when we are pleading with God for rescue, what good does it do to know that God in Jesus is there, somehow pleading and longing with us?

I leave the question hanging. I leave it hanging, because I have another one. It’s not my question. On Monday I had the pleasure of hearing Sam Wells, the Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields. He asked another question, no easier to answer. It’s this: Just what is so good about heaven, any way? You might think it’s a stupid question. Heaven is good because in heaven we do transcend the sufferings of this life; all the desperate pleading and longing is over. But I have two problems with that.

First, there are big hints in the New Testament that the sufferings of Jesus himself are not exactly left behind and forgotten in heaven. His resurrected body bears the scars, remember. He is, in the vision of Revelation, the lamb who is both glorified and who evidently has been slain. He is, as the High Priest of today’s reading, someone who goes on praying, in heaven as on earth. If Jesus bears in eternity the scars of this life, they may be transfigured and transformed, but they never become irrelevant. They stay part of him. Will it really be different with us?

The second problem is that it is not clear that a heaven filled with pure comfort and no pain would be, well, bearable. This is a poor way of putting it, but bear with me… I am sure you are all lovely and fascinating people. I am sure I’d enjoy, oh, I don’t know, the first three billion years with you. But, what about after thirty-three billion years? You take the point? What is it that makes eternity bearable for us? It cannot really just be the music of the angels, can it?

Father Wells for his part had an answer. His answer was to be clear that while, for the world, the basic problem of life from which we are to be saved is mortality (or suffering), according to the gospel, the basic problem of life from which are being saved is… isolation. We are being made fit for eternity. We are being made fit to bear each other’s company, by God’s grace, for eternity. We are being stripped of our excuses, manipulation, resentments and fears, so that we can truly bear being with each other in eternity. This doesn’t tell us anything concrete about what heaven is like (that would be a tall order). But it does give an account of why heaven might be good. In heaven, we will be able to be truly present, both to one another and to God. We shall be freed from isolation, for pure-and-simple being with. Here being with is not a means to some other end; it is the end, the goal.

And, yes, I do know that in heaven we have access to God, can praise, adore, and maybe see God. But, if developed Christian teaching is true, then that adoration is itself a joining in a being with. It is entering the Triune life of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each utterly present to the other, eternally and gloriously.

And if this is right, then we also have an account of what is good about God being with us precisely in our sufferings. It is in and through our sufferings, no less than in and through our joys, that heaven’s being with truly begins.

Perhaps this can mean nothing to you. If you are in agony and anguish (however hidden), know that you are not alone. There are people in forms of agony and anguish here and in every Church. And thank God that the Church and other faith groups are now developing an attitude to people with mental-health needs which is both mature and candid. Mental health needs are normal, and can be managed, says the new Time for Change campaign. (If this is an issue for you or your loved ones, do look up what Archbishop Rowan has said about Time for Change this week.)

So, there are people whose only prayer of the heart is ‘rescue me’. I think the Church has always known this on one level. If we think about what is the prayer of constancy, the constant prayer - in the East at least - it’s that simple plea: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me’. We can all pray that. And/but you can also hope, on behalf of those who cannot hope this for themselves, that there is more to even this life than our efforts to remove agony and anguish. We also hope to find ourselves in a bigger story, the big story, the biggest, where we are called to be one another, for no other sake than the being with itself.

‘In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, having been designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.’

 

What is so good about this? Quite possibly, everything. Amen.