Suffering with God

Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me. MATTHEW 26:38

A prisoner has time to think about suffering. In Tegel, Bonhoeffer was surrounded by it — his own, his fellow prisoners’, the city’s under the bombs, and behind all of it the vast suffering of a continent at war. He did not write about it as a detached theologian. He wrote as a man who was himself afraid, separated from those he loved, uncertain whether he would live. And some of the most searching things he ever wrote concern the question every sufferer asks: where is God in this?

The God who is pushed out

In the summer of 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote to Bethge a thought that has been much quoted and much debated. God, he said, lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and precisely in that way he is with us and helps us. Christ helps us not by his almighty power, as the world expects a god to help, but by his weakness and his suffering. And then came the phrase for which this letter is remembered: that only a suffering God can help.

What did he mean? He was not denying God’s power or sovereignty; the same letters are full of trust in God’s providence. He was pointing to the cross. The world looks for a god who will rescue it from above, a god of power who intervenes to set things right. The God of the Bible has come down into the world’s suffering in the person of his Son and borne it himself. The help he gives is not the help of a distant ruler but of one who has been where we are.

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. ISAIAH 53:3

In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them. ISAIAH 63:9

Some readers from the classical tradition will be cautious about language of a suffering God, since the church has long taught that God in his own being is not subject to change or passion. That caution is worth keeping. Bonhoeffer’s phrase is best read as he meant it: as a statement about the cross, where the eternal Son truly suffered in the flesh. God has not remained untouched by our suffering. In Christ he has entered it, and borne it, and overcome it.

Standing by God

In another piece written in prison, a short poem, Bonhoeffer drew a contrast between two ways of turning to God. All people, he observed, go to God when they are in trouble, asking for help, bread, comfort and forgiveness. That is natural and right. But Christians do something more. They go to God when he is in trouble — they stand by him in his suffering, as the disciples were asked to watch with Christ in Gethsemane.

And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour? MATTHEW 26:40

This is a striking thought. We usually think of prayer as asking God to share in our troubles. Bonhoeffer asked his readers to consider sharing in his. Christ still suffers — in his body, the church, and in the least of his brothers. To be a Christian, in part, is to be drawn into that suffering, to watch with Christ, to refuse to sleep while he is in anguish.

That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death. PHILIPPIANS 3:10

Living fully in this world

On 21 July 1944 — the day after the failed attempt on Hitler’s life, when he must have known what its failure meant for him — Bonhoeffer wrote a letter that many consider the most personal of all. He looked back on his own younger ambition to live a holy life, and on a conversation years before with a fellow pastor who had wanted to become a saint. He now saw, he wrote, that faith is not learned by cultivating one’s own holiness, but by giving up the project of making something of oneself and living wholeheartedly in the world as it is, with all its tasks and its failures, its muddle and its helplessness. The one who does that, and simply entrusts himself to God, stops being preoccupied with his own troubles and begins to share in God’s suffering in the world. That, Bonhoeffer thought, is what faith and repentance actually look like.

This is not the otherworldly piety he distrusted, nor a worldly activism without God. It is the life of a disciple who has stopped trying to be impressive and simply lives, day by day, in the world God has given, trusting and obeying, watching with Christ. It is striking that he wrote it on that particular day.

And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together. ROMANS 8:17

Who am I

Among his prison poems is one that has moved many readers: a meditation on the question of who he really was. Those around him in prison saw a man who seemed composed, cheerful and steady. Inwardly he knew fear, weariness and a hunger for freedom and friendship. Which was the real man — the one others saw, or the one he knew from the inside? He could not tell, and he did not pretend to.

He ended the poem not with an answer but with a turning to God. What he could not settle by looking inward was settled by belonging: he was known by God, and he was God’s.

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. PSALM 139:1–2

Every sufferer knows the gap between the face shown to others and the fear inside. Bonhoeffer did not pretend it away. He handed it over.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. When you next suffer, ask not only for relief but for the grace to share in Christ’s sufferings. Read Philippians 3:7–11 slowly.

2. Where is Christ suffering in your neighbourhood today — in the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the persecuted? Go and watch with Him there.

3. Stop trying to make something of yourself this week. Throw yourself into the ordinary duties in front of you, trusting God with the outcome.

4. Write down honestly the gap between how others see you and what you feel inside. Pray Psalm 139 over it.

5. Write to someone who is suffering, and share with them the comfort God has given you.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You were a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. You did not rescue us from a distance; You came down and bore our suffering Yourself.

Forgive me for coming to You only when I am in trouble. Teach me to watch with You, and not to sleep while You are in anguish in Your people.

Where I cannot tell who I really am, remind me that You know me, and that I am Yours.

Teach me to live fully in the world You have given, throwing myself into Your arms, and to comfort others with the comfort You have given me. Amen.