Mature holiness
Mature holiness
Secondly, the cross of Christ is the path to mature holiness. Extraordinary as it may sound, we can add ‘it was for him, and it is for us’. We need to consider the implications of two rather neglected verses in the letter to the Hebrews:
In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God...should make the Author of their salvation perfect through suffering (2:10).
Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him (5:8–9; cf. 7:28).
Both verses speak of a process in which Jesus was ‘made perfect’, and both ascribe the perfecting process to his ‘suffering’. Not of course that he was ever imperfect in the sense that he had done wrong, for Hebrews underlines his sinlessness.13 It was rather that he needed further experiences and opportunities in order to become teleios, ‘mature’. In particular, ‘he learned obedience from what he suffered’. He was never disobedient. But his sufferings were the testing-ground in which his obedience became full-grown.
If suffering was the means by which the sinless Christ became mature, so much the more do we need it in our sinfulness. Significantly, James uses the same language of ‘perfection’ or ‘maturity’ in relation to Christians. Just as suffering led to maturity through obedience for Christ, so it leads to maturity through perseverance for us.
Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature (teleioi) and complete, not lacking anything. (Jas 1:2–4; cf. Rom. 5:3–5)
Three graphic images are developed in Scripture to illustrate how God uses suffering in pursuance of his purpose to make us holy, in other words, Christlike. They are the father disciplining his children, the metalworker refining silver and gold, and the gardener pruning his vine. The father-children picture is already seen in Deuteronomy, where Moses says: ‘Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the LORD your God disciplines you.’ The metaphor is taken up again in the book of Proverbs, where it is stressed that a father’s discipline is an expression of his love for his children, and the Proverbs verses are quoted in the letter to the Hebrews and echoed in Jesus’ message to the Laodicean church.14 The Hebrews passage is the longest. It teaches that fatherly discipline marks out the true sons from the illegitimate; that God disciplines us only ‘for our good’, namely ‘that we may share in his holiness’; that at the time discipline is painful not pleasant, but that later ‘it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace’, not indeed for everybody (for some rebel against the discipline), but for those who submit to it and so are ‘trained by it’.
The second picture of God as the refiner of silver and gold occurs three times in the Old Testament, where it is made clear that the place of refinement for Israel was ‘the furnace of affliction’, and Peter applies it to the testing of our Christian faith in ‘all kinds of trials’. The process will be distressing, but through it our faith (‘of greater worth than gold’) will both be proved genuine and result in glory to Jesus Christ.15
The third picture Jesus himself developed in his allegory of the vine, in which the fruitfulness of the branches (almost certainly a symbol of Christian character) will depend not only on their abiding in the vine, but also on their being pruned by the vinedresser. Pruning is a drastic process, which often looks cruel, as the bush is cut right back and left jagged and almost naked. But when the spring and summer come round again, there is much fruit.16
All three metaphors describe a negative process, disciplining the child, refining the metal and pruning the vine. But all three also underline the positive result – the child’s good, the metal’s purity, the vine’s fruitfulness. We should not hesitate to say, then, that God intends suffering to be a ‘means of grace’. Many of his children can repeat the psalmist’s statement: ‘Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word’ (Ps. 119:67). For if God’s love is holy love, as it is, then it is concerned not only to act in holiness (as in the cross of Christ), but also to promote holiness (in the people of God). As we have already seen, suffering fosters perseverance and purifies faith. It also develops humility, as when Paul’s thorn in the flesh was to keep him ‘from becoming conceited’. And it deepens insight, as through the pain of Hosea’s unrequited love for Gomer there was revealed to him the faithfulness and patience of Yahweh’s love for Israel.17 Nor should we overlook the benefits which can come into other people’s lives, such as the heroic unselfishness of those who care for the sick, the senile and the handicapped, and the spontaneous upsurge of generosity towards the hungry peoples of sub-Saharan Africa.
The Roman Catholic church has traditionally spoken of ‘redemptive suffering’. Its official teaching is that, even after the guilt of our misdeeds has been forgiven, their due of punishment still has to be completed either in this life or in purgatory (which is ‘the church suffering’). Thus pardon does not remit penance, for punishment has to be added to forgiveness. The best penances, moreover, are not those appointed by the church but those sent from God himself – namely ‘crosses, sicknesses, pains’ – which atone for our sins. There are, in fact, ‘two reasons for suffering for sin: first, atonement to God, and second the re-making of our souls’. For suffering subdues our bodily appetites, cleanses and restores us.18
This kind of teaching, which appears both to underplay the completeness with which God through Christ has redeemed and forgiven us, and to ascribe atoning efficacy to our sufferings, is very offensive to the Protestant mind and conscience. Some Roman Catholics use the term ‘redemptive suffering’, however, simply to indicate that affliction, although it embitters some, transforms others. Mary Craig writes of ‘the redemptive power of suffering’ in this sense. She describes how two of her four sons were born with severe abnormalities, her second son Paul with the disfiguring and incapacitating Höhler’s syndrome, and her fourth Nicholas with Down’s syndrome. She tells the story of her spiritual struggle without self-pity or melodrama. In the final chapter of her book, significantly entitled Blessings, she meditates on the meaning of suffering, and it is now that she introduces the word ‘redemptive’. ‘In the teeth of the evidence’, she writes, ‘I do not believe that any suffering is ultimately absurd or pointless’, although ‘it is often difficult to go on convincing oneself’ of this. At first, we react with incredulity, anger and despair. Yet ‘the value of suffering does not lie in the pain of it,...but in what the sufferer makes of it....It is in sorrow that we discover the things which really matter; in sorrow that we discover ourselves’ (pp.133–144).
Since Jesus Christ is the one and only Redeemer, and the New Testament never uses redemption language of anything we do, we will be wise not to talk of ‘redemptive suffering’. ‘Creative suffering’, a term popularized by Dr Paul Tournier’s book, would be better, so long as it is not imagined that suffering actually creates anything. But it does stimulate ‘creativity’, which is his point. He begins by referring to an article written by Dr Pierre Rentchnick of Geneva in 1975 entitled ‘Orphans Lead the World’. From the life-stories of history’s most influential politicians he had made the astonishing discovery that nearly 300 of them were orphans, from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar through Charles V and Louis XIV to George Washington, Napoleon and (less happily) Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Castro. This naturally struck Dr Tournier, since he had long lectured on the importance for the child’s development of a father and mother performing their roles harmoniously – which is exactly what the most influential politicians never had! Dr Rentchnick developed a theory that ‘the insecurity consequent upon emotional deprivation must have aroused in these children an exceptional will to power’. The same was evidently true of religious leaders, since, for example, Moses, the Buddha, Confucius and Mohammed were also all orphans.19 Professor André Haynal, a psychoanalyst, has worked further on the theory, and suggests that ‘deprivation’ of any kind (not just being orphaned) lies behind ‘creativity’ (which he prefers to ‘will to power’). Finally, Dr Tournier confirms the theory from his own clinical experience. For fifty years his patients have confided in him their pains and conflicts. ‘I have seen them change through suffering’, he says (p.15). Not that suffering (which is an evil) is the cause of growth; but it is its occasion (p.29). Why, then, do some grow through handicap, while others do not? Their reaction depends, he thinks, ‘more on the help they receive from others than on their hereditary disposition’ (p.32), and in particular it depends on love. ‘Deprivations without the aid of love spell catastrophe’, while ‘the decisive factor in making deprivation bear fruit is love’ (p.34). So it is not so much suffering which matures people, as the way they react to suffering (p.37). ‘While suffering may not be creative in itself, we are scarcely ever creative without suffering....One could also say that it is not suffering which makes a person grow, but that one does not grow without suffering’ (p.110).
Biblical teaching and personal experience thus combine to teach that suffering is the path to holiness or maturity. There is always an indefinable something about people who have suffered. They have a fragrance which others lack. They exhibit the meekness and gentleness of Christ. One of the most remarkable statements Peter makes in his first letter is that ‘he who has suffered in his body is done with sin’ (4:1). Physical affliction, he seems to be saying, actually has the effect of making us stop sinning. This being so, I sometimes wonder if the real test of our hunger for holiness is our willingness to experience any degree of suffering if only thereby God will make us holy.