Canter Bridge

It is famously dangerous to attempt an articulation of what suffering is for. It is by contrast an easy thing to observe what suffering in fact accomplishes in the lives of those who know its whip.

Purpose is one thing, ethereal and elusive. Result is quite another, lying there on the table, open to inspection.

Suffering accelerates those instincts that lie deep in one’s bones. It is capable also of diverting, refining, even of maiming them. To our glory or for our shame, suffering turns us inside out. It is difficult to keep the costume up when pain hollows one’s bones or one’s soul lurches about in agony.

Something has happened to the apostle Paul and to Timothy, his young aide. The reader wishes he knew more:

We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, of the affliction we experienced in Asia; for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.

One who has known suffering can just about insert himself, generically, into the despair of which Paul writes. One cannot know its shape and texture, yet one recognizes the dull terror of despairing of life itself. It has no romance for this kind of reader, no exotic allure. This kind of suffering neither entertains nor enthralls. One hates it.

Yet Paul and his company can speak as genuinely of what suffering has done in them, even with sure anticipation of what it can accomplish in others. Paul does not do so in order to reduce the decibel level of pain’s noise. He has no interest in domesticating the experience. He will not smile upon it, nor chuckle that it was less than it was, that it claimed less of his soul. He will not say it was not so bad.

Yet he can speak of it. He does so with words like this:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ.

The key to Paul’s ability to draw water from the dark shaft lies perhaps in this claim: ‘Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.’

The final five words of this profoundly suggestive description of God abbreviates a nation’s long struggle with its merciful, demanding, patient overlord. Paul speaks here as Abraham’s son, as one who has been hewn out of cold rock by a tool held in Jacob’s own hand. If he can know Israel’s God at all, Paul can know him precisely as that one who–over and ever again—raises the dead. Israel itself is YHWH’s son, a nation whose death wish has too often had its way, but never with the finality that despair claims as its prerogative. ‘His mercies endure forever’ would to Paul not have described a fencing off from folly, decay, suicide, and the grave, but rather a heavenly determination not to let those things be.

Israel’s God brooks no competition with regard to finality. He is, according to biblical witness that is often narrated and occasionally distilled into terse confession, ‘the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.’

So Paul can speak with utter candor of the comfort that one provides to suffering fellows when divine comfort has soaked one’s agony in resurrection waters. Or simply promised such in a way that can scarcely be doubted.