Canter Bridge

A handful of well-received twentieth-century writers were particularly adept at probing the deep structure of reality and the meaningful juxtaposition of suffering and redemption that resides there. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis come to mind. These men spun tales nourished by the notion that deep suffering lodges itself in the anteroom to liberation and even to glory.

It is of course a prevailing biblical motif. In the garden of Gethsemane—the Hampton Inn of Jesus and his disciples—some ominous words point in its direction:

Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus. Jesus said to Peter, ‘Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?’

This is not the only moment Jesus frames by reference to a bitter ‘cup’ of suffering. A determinism stands behind such words. There is nothing here of the misbegotten theme of Jesus, the blind-sided victim of his Father’s murderous heavenly logic. Indeed, if anything Jesus and his Father are more closely linked in the Johannine rhetoric that brings us up to this passage as anywhere else. Indeed except for the awful moment of Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross—’My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’—Jesus’ passion seems almost the pinnacle of his intimacy with his Father.

Jesus has willingly taken the bitter cup that the deep structure of biblical logic has his Father offering him. One gathers that he might have chosen to pass, to imbibe something sweeter, though with terrible consequences for this world and its people. Yet he does so not happily, if that is the right word. It is a kind of obligation, a fulsomely dark responsibility that only he can undertake.

It is, indeed, a terrible thing.

It is not a mistake that deep joy, too, should fill the paragraphs of discourse leading up to this passage. Suffering and joy, in the world Tolkien and Lewis understood better than most, live next to each other, their roofs almost touching, their antipodal realities somehow becoming proximate, even contiguous, when a world must be released from its horrible enslavement.