Suffering with Patience, in Innocence

So much suffering has come upon so many around us. There is one effective, efficacious truth that we can cling to – it speaks to us from the Cross – it is the saving love of God. Jesus showed us this love in His patient suffering on our behalf on the Cross – and in doing so, He also showed us the path to holiness: Take up your own cross, and follow.

I am copying below a portion of a Retreat presentation on this theme that was delivered by the holy priest, Fr. John Hardon, S.J. The italics were added by me for emphasis. The presentation can be read in its entirety HERE.

… But that is not the lesson of the patience of God in the person of Christ. The lesson that Christ's patience teaches us is that someone must suffer, and there is such a thing as someone else suffering for the sins I have committed, and I suffering for the sins that others have committed against a just God. What Christ's patient suffering teaches us is there is a mysterious solidarity among the members of the human family, which is why God became Man: to join the human family, so that the sin of one member of the human family can obtain from God the mercy the sinner needs by the suffering of another member of the human family.

Christ's patience teaches us that by our patience, not by our pain, not even by our suffering, but by our patience we become more and more like Jesus Christ who, having joy set before him, chose the Cross. I just wish I had preached and taught this way twenty-five years ago. I didn't realize, I'm sure I don't fully realize it yet; but no words can describe what faith tells us: the value of patient suffering out of love for God is the most precious treasure that man can possess in this world. Oh, the blindness of the human heart! With the short few moments, which we happen to call years, spent in this life, we fail to realize the priceless value of patient suffering in union with Jesus Christ.

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We are not to be surprised that suffering is part of our faithful following of Christ. Don't be surprised; that's the way it is.

There is a necessary relation between sin and pain. Sin, we believe, is an offense against the will of God. Our created will says no to the will of God, that's sin. Pain is the experience of something against our will. There are two wills involved, the will of God and the will of man. Whatever is against the will of God is sin; whatever is against the will of man is pain.

God sent pain into the world in order to expiate the evil of sin. In other words, had there been no sin there would have been no pain. But now, in God's mysterious providence, he enables us to suffer in order that sin might be expiated.

Everyone suffers, but not everyone suffers willingly. To suffer willingly is always to expiate the evil of sin. Let me repeat. To suffer willingly is always to expiate the evil of sin, either my own sins or the sins of others. And we don't have to read the Washington Post or the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times to know there are mountains, Himalayas of sin.

My Jesuit confrere, St. Francis Xavier, exhausted himself for ten years in India. There were one hundred thousand known baptisms that he personally performed. He kept writing back to Europe, pleading with the easygoing, well-fed, well-groomed European gentry. "How can you be lolling in ease and not doing all you can to keep souls from going to hell?"

All the patience we are talking about in this meditation, the willing endurance of pain, has a purpose. What's the purpose? To prevent souls from going to hell. That's why, faith tells us, God became Man.

The more holy a person is, and therefore the less sins that individual, man or woman, has to expiate, sins which they have themselves committed, the more innocent the sufferer, the more sinless the one who endures pain, the more pleasing that suffering is to God, and the more expiatory in the salvation of souls. Because, you see, it was the innocent Lamb of God, the all-holy Son of God who became man and who suffered. Needless to say there were no sins of his own that he had to expiate. What are we being told? To become as holy as we can, so that when we experience suffering, and patiently endure pain, our sufferings, like that of Christ's, will be sublimely effective in the eyes of God.