The hope of glory
The hope of glory
Fourthly, the cross of Christ is the hope of final glory. Jesus clearly looked beyond his death to his resurrection, beyond his sufferings to his glory, and indeed was sustained in his trials by ‘the joy set before him’ (Heb. 12:2). It is equally clear that he expected his followers to share this perspective. The inevitability of suffering is a regular theme in his teaching and that of the apostles. If the world had hated and persecuted him, it would hate and persecute his disciples also. Suffering was, in fact, a ‘gift’ of God to all his people, and part of their calling. They should not therefore be surprised by it, as if something strange were happening to them. It was only to be expected. Nothing could be more forthright than Paul’s assertion that ‘everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted’.21 Further, in suffering like Christ they were suffering with Christ. They were more than spectators of his sufferings now, more than witnesses, more even than imitators; they were actually participants in his sufferings, sharing his ‘cup’ and his ‘baptism’.22 So, as they share in his sufferings, they would also share in his glory. The indispensability of suffering was to be seen not only as due to the antagonism of the world but as a necessary preparation. ‘Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God’, the apostles warned the new converts in Galatia. It is understandable, therefore, that the countless multitude of the redeemed whom John saw before God’s throne were described both as having ‘come out of the great tribulation’ (in the context surely a synonym for the Christian life) and as having ‘washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’.23
It is, then, the hope of glory which makes suffering bearable. The essential perspective to develop is that of the eternal purpose of God, which is to make us holy or Christlike. We ought frequently to meditate on the great New Testament texts which bring together the past and future eternities within a single horizon. For ‘God chose us in Christ before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.’ His purpose is to present us ‘before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy’. It is when these horizons are in our view that we ‘consider...our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us’, because ‘our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all’. And what is this ‘glory’, this ultimate destiny, towards which God is working everything together for good, including our sufferings? It is that we may ‘be conformed to the likeness of his Son’. The future prospect which makes suffering endurable, then, is not a reward in the form of a ‘prize’, which might lead us to say ‘no pain, no palm’ or ‘no cross, no crown’, but the only reward of priceless value, namely the glory of Christ, his own image perfectly recreated within us. ‘We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’24
This is the dominant theme of the book Destined For Glory by Margaret Clarkson, the Canadian hymn-writer and authoress. Born into a ‘loveless and unhappy’ home, and afflicted from childhood with painful headaches and crippling arthritis, suffering has been her lifelong companion. In earlier days she experienced the full range of human responses to pain, including ‘rage, frustration, despair’ and even temptation to suicide (pp.vii ff.). But gradually she came to believe in the sovereignty of God, namely that God ‘displays his sovereignty over evil by using the very suffering that is inherent in evil to assist in the working out of his eternal purpose’ (p.37). In this process he has developed an alchemy greater than that sought by the early chemists who tried to turn base metals into gold. For ‘the only true alchemist is God’. He succeeds even in the ‘transmutation of evil into good’ (p.103). We are ‘destined for glory’, the ‘glory for which he created us – to make us like his Son’ (p.125). It is summed up in a verse of one of Margaret Clarkson’s hymns (p.xii):
O Father, you are sovereign,
The Lord of human pain,
Transmuting earthly sorrows
To gold of heavenly gain.
All evil overruling,
As none but Conqueror could,
Your love pursues its purpose –
Our souls’ eternal good.
We may well respond, of course, that we do not want God to change us, especially if the necessary means he uses is pain. ‘We may wish, indeed,’ wrote C. S. Lewis, ‘that we were of so little account to God that he left us alone to follow our natural impulses – that he would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not for more love, but for less....To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God....’25
This vision of suffering as the path to glory for the people of God is undoubtedly biblical. One cannot say the same, however, for attempts to universalize the principle and apply it to all suffering without exception. Consider, for example, one of the official books published in preparation for the sixth assembly of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver (1983), whose advertised title was ‘Jesus Christ, the Life of the World’. This book, although written by John Poulton, arose out of a meeting of twenty-five representative theologians, whose views he therefore incorporates. One of its main themes is that there is a parallel between the death and resurrection of Jesus on the one hand and the suffering and triumphs of the contemporary world on the other. In this way the whole of human life is represented as a eucharistic celebration. ‘Might we not say’, John Poulton asks, ‘that wherever there is the conjunction of suffering and joy, of death and life, there is eucharist?’26 The basis for this interpretation is the fact that ‘the pattern of self-sacrifice and new beginnings is not one that only members of the Christian church experience and live by. Outside their circle, others too seem to reflect it, sometimes quite remarkably’ (p.66). Indeed, John Poulton continues, the crisscrossing of pain and joy, suffering and security, betrayal and love is discernible in everyday life everywhere. It reflects winter and spring, and Good Friday and Easter. Old-style evangelism is no longer needed, therefore. The new evangelism will be the Holy Spirit’s work in ‘bringing into focus in Jesus Christ a shape already glimpsed in human experience’ (p.66).
This is not the gospel of the New Testament, however. Scripture gives us no liberty to assert that all human suffering leads to glory. True, Jesus referred to wars, earthquakes and famines as ‘the beginning of birth pains’ heralding the emergence of the new world, and Paul similarly likened nature’s frustration, bondage to decay and groans to ‘the pains of childbirth’.27 But these are references to the promise of cosmic renewal for both society and nature; they are not applied in the Bible to the salvation of individuals or peoples.
Another example is the moving attempt made by Dr Ulrich Simon, a German Jewish Christian who fled to England in 1933, and whose father, brother and other relatives perished in Nazi concentration camps, to apply the death-resurrection, sufferings-glory principle to the holocaust. In his A Theology of Auschwitz (1967) he tried to ‘show the pattern of Christ’s sacrifice, which summarizes all agonies, as the reality behind Auschwitz’ (pp.13–14). For the holocaust (which of course means ‘burnt offering’) ‘is no less a sacrifice than that prefigured in the Scriptures’, that is to say, in the suffering servant of the Lord (pp.83–84). In this way, ‘the mechanics of murder were turned into a Godward oblation’, and those who gave their lives in the gas chambers became identified with ‘the supreme sacrifice by way of a sharing analogy’ (p.84); they were even scapegoats, bearing the sins of the German people (p.86). But now ‘the dead of Auschwitz have risen from the dust’ (p.91), and their resurrection is seen in Israel’s return to the land, in the conquest of anti-Semitism which ‘both led to Auschwitz and was redeemed there’ (p.93), and in the contemporary Jewish witness to the world concerning the sacred-ness of human life and the loving brotherhood of all men (p.95). The corn of wheat, having fallen into the ground, has borne this fruit. Thus the sufferings of Auschwitz, Ulrich Simon claims, are ‘within the pattern of creation and redemption’ (p.102). In particular, by interpreting the holocaust ‘in the light of the suffering Christ’ and by seeing its aftermath as ‘reflected in the triumph of the Crucified One’, it has been possible to give ‘spiritual meaning to the meaningless’ (p.104). ‘We venture to attribute the glory of the ascended Christ to the gassed millions’ (p.105).
One cannot fail to be touched by this attempted reconstruction, and one fully appreciates Dr Simon’s reasons for wanting to develop a ‘timeless, universal and cosmic conception of Christ’s work’ (p.110). But I fear this kind of ‘theology of Auschwitz’ is speculative rather than scriptural. I believe there is a better and more biblical way to relate the cross to Auschwitz, and I will come to it shortly. Meanwhile, within the community of those whom God in mercy has redeemed, it should be possible for us to echo Paul’s affirmations that ‘we also rejoice in our sufferings’ because ‘we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God’ (Rom. 5:2–3).
So far, in seeking to discern the relationships between Christ’s sufferings and ours, apart from the inspiration of his example, we have seen that suffering (for us as for Jesus) is God’s appointed path to sanctification (mature holiness), multiplication (fruitful service) and glorification (our final destiny). I hope it does not sound glib. It is easy to theorize, I know. But things look different when the horizon closes in upon us, a horror of great darkness engulfs us, and no glimmer of light shines to assure us that suffering can yet be productive. At such times we can only cling to the cross, where Christ himself demonstrated that blessing comes through suffering.