Life is Suffering, So Let Us Love One Another

Siddartha, raised in luxury, awakened to the truth that life is filled with suffering. He set out to see if there were a way out of such suffering.  One night, he discovered there was; life had to be lived out, the suffering of one’s life had to be accepted, but one can experience the cessation of suffering and, at one’s death, enter into eternal peace.

In his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ can be seen as confirming what Siddartha proclaimed to the world. On the cross, Jesus took on the suffering of the world, the suffering that our fallen, sinful life made as life’s norm. He showed us that life is indeed suffering. If we are to embrace Christ, we must take up our cross and follow him in this world, suffering with him the sorrows of life. We must accept life as we have made it is a life full of suffering. It is not that life is without joy and happiness, but even with such joy we will always find our journey in the world includes great sorrow. Like Christ, we might even find ourselves having to cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 15:34 RSV). To experience life is to experience suffering. That is a given. We who follow the Lord of Life will follow him in sorrow. At times we will feel abandoned by God. But our sense of sorrow and pain must never let us believe we have been rejected by God. If we follow the Lord of Life, if we put our full faith in him, we will follow him through the suffering and into the kingdom of God. We must die with Christ to be raised up in glory. We must hold out in faith, realizing that the immediacy of our suffering is often blinding us and preventing us to experience God’s work in and for us in our lives.

The pain and confusion we face in the world can be so great we might even wish that we would die today so we can experience the eternal peace Christ promises us. The trials and tribulations of the world can bring us down, to make us want to give up our ghost. There will be times of great sorrow that the Apocalypse promises that there will a time (or times) when this desire for death will be held by a great number in the world:  “And in those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die, and death will fly from them” (Rev. 9:6 RSV). While many commentators see this as an indication of the suffering God will impose upon the damned, some, like the Venerable Bede see it as what Christians will also wish for themselves in the midst of persecution:  “They prefer that their life of misery be ended by a quick death. As the blessed Cyprian complained had happened during the persecution under Decius, ‘It was not permitted to those who desired to die to be killed.’”[1]

Exploring the world as it is, the writer of Ecclesiastes also saw the sorrow we face in the world. Without God, the world and all we face in it brings us to despair. The world squashes good people to the ground. There is no justice for them. Even for those who find themselves as one of the greats of the world, there will be suffering and what little joy they experience makes little difference. Without God, death will appear better than life:

Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive; but better than both is he who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 RSV).

St. John Chrysostom points out that we must read in Ecclesiastes the cry of a depressed spirit, showing us how horrible human existence can seem. It is affirming the experience, but it is not confirming the meaninglessness of life: “Far from this being his considered opinion, it comes from his confused thinking; in our depressed state we say many things which do not necessarily correspond to our personal convictions. This in fact is the reason Scripture says, ‘I said in my stupor, Everyone is a liar;’ as a result it is not my real conclusion, but the opinion coming from a depressed soul.”[2]

Life is a gift of God, and is to be treasured, but we must recognize that for many, this is quite difficult. One can affirm the gift of life, and seek its preservation, while even wishing for their own demise because they want an end to their sorrows, feeling that the only exit from their sorrows is death. They know their life is not theirs to take, and they should thank God for every day of their existence, and yet they also can long for the time when their struggles are over and they can get their eternal reward. It is the hope for that reward which keeps them struggling and pushing on even if they feel they will get nothing but sorrow in this world.  This is especially true for the dispossessed of the world, those who have found themselves living as outcasts in society.  How many people in the world are lonely? How many feel as if there is no end to their misery because everyone around them ignores them and their plights? How many suffer various levels of depression because no one shows them love, no one gives them the encouragement they need in order to feel as if their life is worth living? Too many! So many people feel as if no one cares for them, as if all they do is ignored. They seek others out but get rejected every step of the way. They need to be shown love. Even if they are homeless or in debt, they need love. Indeed, for the homeless poor, their poverty, though a great problem in itself, is far more acceptable than the way they are treated by society. There is no greater destroyer of hope than by feeling abandoned by all.

No one should be abandoned. Everyone should be shown love. Christ, as the Lord of Life, showed his love for the world and the people of the world and tells us that if we follow him, we too must show love to everyone.  He is coming again to judge the living and the dead. How our encounter with Christ will turn out, how Christ will judge us, will depend upon the love or lack of love we have shown to others. We are to take our own suffering, our cross, and use it to open our hearts so as to be able to show compassion to others, to love those who no one else is willing to love. We all feel the angst of life. We must embrace it so we can share the burden of life with others and hold up the world through acts of love. If we do this, Christ will know us and we will find our eternal reward with him.

Will Christ say he knows us at our judgment? All that is sin needs to be dispelled from us so that we can truly be open to the God of love. As we strive to show love to all, we need to also cleanse ourselves of all that would lead us to unlove. We must plead for grace, crying for mercy to God for all that we have failed to do right, so that we do not let such unlove take over and turn us into people Christ will not know. This Sunday in the East is both the Sunday of the Last Judgment and Forgiveness Sunday (depending upon if one is Orthodox or Catholic).  The two go together. We must root out all that is unlove so that we may be seen by Christ as images of himself, images of love. That is the lesson we are to take. Let us cry out to Christ for forgiveness and seek to show love to one another and prove ourselves to be his followers:

Master, Teacher of wisdom,  Bestower of virtue, You teach the thoughtless and protect the poor:  Strengthen and enlighten my heart.  Word of the Father, let me not restrain my mouth from crying to you:  Have mercy on me, a transgressor, O merciful Lord!  (Kontakion of Sunday of the Last Judgement)