Spirituality and suffering: the compassion that flows from grief in the ministry of Jesus

Trinity 11: 03.08.08 – Isaiah 55.1-5; Romans 9.1-5; Matthew 14.13-21 St. Mary’s: Revd. Dr. Alan Winton

It was a real pleasure and a joy last Sunday morning to welcome Geoffrey Tristram and Bishop Tom, the Bishop of Massachussetts, to St. Mary’s. The service was a beautiful one, the sermon excellent, and I found it a very moving occasion. The Bishop, glowing marvellously in his orange cope, said to me at the end of the service that it was the most beautiful liturgy he could remember and that he was so impressed by the deeply prayerful and worshipful congregation. I wanted to tell you that because the quality of the worship we offer is a joint undertaking and responsibility, and the Bishop’s words reflect well not just on those who take a leading role in our worship week by week, to whom we are all so grateful, but also on all the people who make up the congregation here at St. Mary’s and come along each week prayerfully, expectantly and in a spirit of love and friendship. What each person brings to the service and offers to God really does matter. I hope you will be encouraged by that but also challenged by that if you are ever tempted to wonder whether it matters if you come to church on a particular Sunday: what each of us offers in worship and to worship really does matter.

I was most moved when Sheila prayed a prayer of thanksgiving for all those who have ministered here and she listed in particular those of us who have had the privilege of serving as Rector, the late Terence Wenham and Geoffrey and me. It made me think of how conscious I am of the debt I owe to Terence and Geoffrey for the seeds they sowed before I arrived, and so it was really good to actually meet Geoffrey, about whom I’ve heard so much – my meeting with Terence will be equally fascinating but hopefully a little way further off.
 
Geoffrey spent seven or eight years in the parish and by next month I will have spent nine. There are, as you can no doubt imagine, some frustrations and difficulties in the work of a parish priest but these are almost always outweighed by the enormous sense of privilege I feel in my work, and much of that has to do with the way that people let me as a priest into their lives.

There are occasions when I get to share in people’s joys, happy times when there is something to celebrate, but a priest is also privileged to be with people through times of sorrow and hardship and challenge, and inevitably I spend a quite a lot of time praying and thinking about the suffering that I often see.

Perhaps because of that experience and the thoughts that go with it, my eye was caught by an aspect of the story of the feeding of the five thousand that I’d never really paid much attention to before. Of all the Gospels, Matthew is at pains to point out what Jesus was doing immediately prior to the incident we recall today.

Jesus had heard the news that John the Baptist had been beheaded and he withdrew into a deserted place by himself. In typical biblical style, that is all the detail we get, and we have to fill in through our imaginations what those few brief words might imply.

Jesus had heard about the death of someone who must have meant much to him, a relative, the man who had helped initiate his ministry through baptizing him, a man with whom he shared in the work of God, proclaiming the coming Kingdom of God. At the very least, there must have been immense personal grief for Jesus in hearing the news of John’s death. And I imagine that it must also have caused Jesus a certain amount of anxiety and fear for what awaited him: it was a foretaste of what was to come for Jesus in the opposition and suffering he knew that he would face.

And so Jesus takes his grief and his fear and his all his complex feelings away from his disciples and the people who were following him and quite understandably seeks some time alone. We are not told how long this period of solitude lasted, but the implication is that it was not long before the crowds found him and gathered before him. And they gathered having brought their sick and their needs and their demands.

It is hard to imagine that this was exactly what Jesus wanted at that time, but as we read on we see that he responds with profound compassion, he begins by curing the sick and the story then goes on to speak of the way that his feeling for the crowd’s hunger and helplessness led to one of the most beautiful of the miracle stories when Jesus found a way to feed five thousand people from some loaves and fishes.

Out of Jesus’ intense personal experience of grief and pain comes this double act of compassion, of healing and feeding.
Here, I think, is a moment when we see why the Christian life is so well-described in the phrase following Jesus. Jesus here has something important and profound to teach us about suffering and how we might respond to it.

Now it’s very important that I preface these remarks with some preliminary comments. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” is a text that comes to mind, because sometimes, in some seasons, suffering is so overwhelming or so raw that all we can do is rage at it, all our energies are needed to endure it. It would be so easy to sound glib in trying to talk constructively about how following Jesus can affect the way that we respond to suffering. And it is not my intention to make anyone feel guilty or inadequate or a failure. There is a time for everything and it may be that Jesus spent days in the deserted place raging at God for the death of his friend John; he may have sobbed his eyes out and he may have been tempted to throw rocks at the ravens.

And even if we are not given much to raging out loud, it may be our experience that suffering is sometimes so intense that our thoughts and energies are all driven inwards because the only thing we can do is focus on enduring, on trying to get through it. There will be times when we are either fully occupied with our rage or with getting through the pain we feel: and I accept that and don’t wish to underestimate the way that suffering can be so all-consuming.

But this story of Jesus’ compassion does suggest a way that, in due season, our suffering might begin to be transformed. And the way that we should approach these thoughts is to see them as part of a spirituality of suffering much more than what you might call a morality of suffering. A morality of suffering would say that this is what you must do in order to be counted a good person: and I want to make it very clear that that is not what these thoughts are about. A spirituality of suffering is about looking to the example of Jesus and seeing how the perfect human being draws on his relationship with God and out of his own experience of grief and suffering discovers a stream of compassion. In this sense, maybe through suffering we can draw closer to God and not be driven further from him.

With this story of Jesus there is no sense of him being stuck in denial and cheerfully throwing himself into addressing the needs of others whilst ignoring his own needs, but there is much more of a sense that out of the depths of his own grief, faced honestly, there grows this deep sympathy and compassion which moves him to help others. Through Jesus’ openness to God it becomes possible for this deep sympathy and compassion to well up in him and grow out of the very real pain and suffering that he himself has experienced. And in the way that Jesus responds, he draws closer to the heart of God and finds himself strengthened and renewed.

The challenge for us is to earth all this by asking ourselves what it might mean to follow Jesus on this path.  What are the sort of steps we could imagine ourselves taking to follow Jesus’ example?  And we need to start by believing that even a small act can begin to be transforming. It may be that we can offer a smile or a kind word to someone who cares for you. It may be that out of your experience of bereavement, still painful and ongoing, you can find a way of offering sympathy and understanding to someone recently bereaved. It may be that amidst the anxiety and the pain of your own ill-health and difficulties you can find space to pray for others or to offer a word of sympathy and support, to be the person who has the courage to stay with them long enough to listen to their story.

For many of us, the truth is that if we wait around for our lives to be free from hardship and suffering before we think of helping another person, we may never be in a position to act. And by taking this action in the spirit and after the example of Jesus we may find our lives surprisingly enriched, because it is to win a small victory over the tragedy of suffering.

The experience of suffering need not lead only to the question of why we suffer, why does God allow this? Sometimes that can be a fruitless path to go down, and even if we cannot escape that question completely, it need not be the only one we ask. How we are to live with suffering and how we can begin to transform it are questions that I find myself asking when I read this beautiful story of Jesus’ pain and compassion in the Gospel.

Jesus was shocked and grieving and he went off seeking a place to be alone, but the people found him and out of his suffering came this stream of compassion that led him to turn out from himself to address their needs, with healing for the sick and food for the hungry.

Even if we can only see ourselves taking a tiny step along this path, surely this is one of the ways in which we are called to follow Jesus. Amen.