Do you ever wonder how God came to be so infinitely patient with humans and the unfolding of creation? I believe it is because throughout eternity God has endlessly suffered with all beings who have experienced loss, helplessness, abandonment, pain, destruction, and death and has endlessly witnessed the transformation and new life that inevitably follows such suffering. God trusts the process, and Jesus trusted God, so Jesus submitted to his passion and death.
It is painful to recall Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, trial, torture and death at the Triduum every year. However, as Richard Gaillardetz points out in Give Us This Day, “To grasp who Jesus was, what his life was really about, one had to encounter him on the Cross. There, the unfathomable love of God was revealed in suffering, vulnerable, forgiving love.” Jesus came to show us that God loves us and suffers with us, and Jesus’ resurrection shows that, as Gaillardetz continues, “This Cross was not the final word, for … out of suffering and death comes resurrection.”
To resist suffering is to resist a more expansive life that awaits us. To resist suffering also prevents us from being midwives of the suffering of other people — from being instruments that lead them through pain to the deliverance of new life.
When we pray for patience, God provides us with opportunities to learn it. Ultimately, however, it is to our benefit, because suffering cracks open the shell of the self that prevents new life from emerging.
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