Listening in at the Last Supper - Meditation on St John II
- Jun 7, 2014
- 4 min read
It is said that eavesdroppers, those who listen in to the conversation of others, never hear any good of themselves. In tonight’s gospel, however, as we tiptoe to the door of the upper room, as it were, where the Lord is talking over supper with his friends, what we overhear is certainly good for ourselves. It’s also good, potentially, for those whom we most long to comfort with the news of Christ’s friendship and healing, but in whose presence we often struggle to find words that are not uselessly glib and insensitive. Because, at the heart of tonight’s gospel, the Lord gives us, so to speak, his last word, the last word of the Word of God, on the meaning of suffering.
Many of us have doubtless been rendered speechless when others have asked us, whether aggressively or wistfully, some variant of the question “how can you believe in God when there is so much suffering in the world?” Perhaps, when confronted with our own affliction or that of those we love, we have posed the same question ourselves, and been similarly reduced to silence. And that inarticulacy is not necessarily any bad thing: it’s far better, surely, than the neat and tidy answers that are sometimes purveyed but ultimately unsatisfying. What good is it to talk of human free will or the power of suffering to educate when we, or those we love are crushed beneath the weight of intolerable distress? What we see when we dare really to gaze steadily at human affliction, after all, is not “the problem of pain”, resolvable if only we pull ourselves together and think clearly enough, but the mystery of suffering, vast, overwhelming and deadening. And Jesus, speaking to his disciples moments before he goes to pray in a sweat of blood in the garden, hours before his unspeakably brutal judicial murder, knows this better than anyone. He doesn’t, therefore, give us a syllogism but a story, he doesn’t point a moral but paints a picture. A woman, he says, in labour suffers, because her time has come; but when she has given birth she forgets her suffering and rejoices in the birth of her child.
There are many mistaken ways of approaching the mystery of suffering, and in this image of childbirth, at once every day and awe-inspiring, intimate and universal, the Lord has given us the resources to counteract at least two of the most deadly.
Perhaps most prevalent amongst our contemporaries is the inability to believe that suffering can co-exist with dignity. There is not necessarily anything wrong with the motivation behind this. Many of those who object most vociferously to the Catholic Church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death, for instance, have a straightforward, and laudable if misguided desire to prevent, or at least minimise pain. This is a desire which the Church herself shares, of course, hence her worldwide and longstanding commitment to healthcare and social justice. But, in isolation, such a stance all too easily tips over into a desire to tidy away all human vulnerability, to sanitize all those moments, like the moment of birth and the moment of death, when we can no longer deceive ourselves into thinking that we are in control, and can lead, ultimately to a kind of cult of the perfect and the powerful. Paradoxically, it can seem to say to those who suffer: you do not matter; your experience of pain and powerlessness dehumanises you: surely, if anywhere, it is in the strongest, the cleverest, the most beautiful that we see the image of the all-powerful, all-knowing and all lovely God most fully displayed, and the further you are from that image, the further you are from being fully human. Thus an additional burden is laid upon those who are already perhaps immobilised by their pain as their life is evacuated, apparently, of meaning and purpose.
Yet the gospel says something different. It tells us that we see the perfect image of God in a man transfixed in agony on a cross, and the theologians of old loved to speak of Jesus on the cross giving birth to the Church; the pain of crucifixion as the birth pangs of the body of Christ. As in baptism we become part of this body, then, in a mysterious but real way, our sufferings too, become part of that great act of labour so that, far from destroying our dignity, our afflictions in a certain sense guarantee it. As with the woman delivered in childbirth, joy comes forth from suffering: it is not simply that first there was suffering, then there was joy, as though there is no connection between the two. Rather, as labour leads to birth, the suffering leads to joy, the joy of knowing that, because our suffering is the suffering of Christ himself, it plays its part, perhaps apparently a tiny part, in the redemption of the world.
But there’s another kind of mistake we can make about suffering, perhaps rarer, thank God, but still more damaging. Precisely because the suffering Christian is endowed with such immense dignity by the cross of Christ, some have thought that Christians should seek suffering for its own sake, that it should be embraced rather than shunned, that the more we suffer, the better Christians we shall be. If ever we are tempted to this – and it is a dark and a terrible temptation – once again, we should remember the new mother that Jesus puts before us for our contemplation in tonight’s gospel, she who is so far from clinging on to her suffering that she “forgets” it, we are told, in her exultation at the birth of her child. The groans of labour give way to the infant’s first tremulous wail, as the cry from the cross gives way to the wordless joy of encounter with the risen Lord on Easter morning. Suffering in itself is always ugly, always an evil, but a beauty and a goodness can come from it, as travail leads to birth, crucifixion to resurrection. And once we allow that truth to penetrate us, our hearts will be full of a joy that no one can take from us, because it will be the joy of Christ himself.
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