"Is anything too wonderful for God?" This question appears both in the Old and New Testaments. It resonates through the story of the Bible, a story of a people's quest for God, but primarily a quest of God for his people. In such quest one is surprised at the lengths that God goes for the sake of his people.
Much of the quest is filled with suffering. Most of it, like all suffering, is hard to make sense of. And yet, it is not hard to agree with the poet who said "great suffering breaks our heart so that good comes out."
Jesus himself was part of this history of suffering. He came out of a history and a people deeply affected by exile. Some of the people of his lineage were great men and women, and others not so great.Yet all were burdened by sin.
Jesus' missionary urgency, his concern for the poor and the marginalized, perhaps partly came out of his identity as a man of the covenant, and partly as the Son of God who came to restore life, and set his people free.
The suffering that had been the lot of God's people because of disobedience, is transformed in Jesus. As St paul says in the letter to the Hebrews, Jesus is "crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death... he was made "lower than the angels," [so] that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone." The Son of God became man by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that "through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who through fear of death had been subject to slavery all their life." Great suffering broke his heart and the world was never the same.
Posted by Carlos J. Medina
(This post is half lecture notes, and half my thoughts on the lecture notes taken from Don Senior's presentation at the Inter-Community Novitiate in Techny, IL, 2009)
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