suffering – Houghton STAR

One of my favorite crucifixion artworks is the Isenheim Altarpiece that was painted by Matthias Grunewald in 1516 during the Renaissance in (what is today) Germany. An important fact to bear in mind is that this piece was painted expressly for the Monastery of St. Anthony, which was an order that specialized in hospitalization for the plague and also for St. Anthony’s Fire– a particularly painful skin disease that resulted from the digestion of fungi from various cereals such as rye.

Knowing this, it is hard not to see the marks of these diseases in the artwork. The most gruesome aspect of the piece (indeed it is thought to be one of the most horrifying crucifixions ever painted) is the image of the crucified Christ with his body inflicted with plague-like sores and his skin carrying what is unmistakably the marks of St. Anthony’s Fire. Below the center panel there is also a small panel depicting Christ as if his leg has been amputated, another aspect of the disease that many of the sufferers had to face. But why paint Christ as such when, as we know from the Gospels, he was crucified on a cross and not condemned to a death by disease? Well, because the artist is trying to convey to the patients at the monastery that Christ understood their suffering and, as a man, had even experienced suffering on the cross.

This is the image that has haunted me as I look at the photos of the terror attack in Boston this past week. Images of people with scraps of metal and nails flayed into their skin (not unlike Grunewald’s image of the flayed Christ), images of runners and spectators who lost their limbs in the blast, pain and suffering and streams of blood on an American sidewalk in April. Is God here?

After the past year and a half of there have been extremely violent shootings at seemingly innocuous places from a mall to a movie theater, a Sikh temple to an elementary school, and now a marathon. The innocents that have been slaughtered or wounded in these instances are beyond count. The survivors mourn, we vow ‘never again’, we debate about how to prevent these instances of violence, but, all the same, innocents are still killed at the next instance of human-induced deaths. Why does this happen?

There are no easy answers to these questions — which is why, perhaps, the sufferers at Isenheim found their comfort in a crucifixion scene in which their savior identified with their pain. They could not relate to a triumphant and victorious resurrection scene; their doubts and hurts prevented that. It was the suffering of the incarnate innocent that gave them relief.

 Some of you may have had the privilege of attending the campus lecture given by Nicholas Woltersdorff, who has written extensively on the suffering of God, during the semester at Houghton last year. He writes these words: “How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us? You have allowed rivers of blood to flow, mountains of suffering to pile up, sobs to become humanity’s song–all without lifting a finger that we could see. You have allowed bonds of love beyond number to be painfully snapped. If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself.”

“We strain to hear,” Woltersdorff continues, “But instead of hearing an answer we catch sight of God himself scraped and torn. Through our tears we see the tears of God.”

Approaching a text without some sort of cultural, intellectual, or interested bias is most likely an impossibility. However, I mean for this article’s presuppositions to be, for the most part, minimal. Being a Christian, and writing for a Christian audience, I will be making assumptions about Jesus Christ, namely that he is in fact the son of God, and that he does in fact embody the fullness of divinity. But beyond the hypothesis that the Gospels are true, my hope is to read the stories and make commonsensical determinations based upon what they say. Perhaps another way of putting the point is that I intend for this article to be primarily “Biblical.

Courtesy of www.sacred-destinations.com

Following this simple text-centered methodology, I wish to explore an often overlooked character in the Gospel stories. Or if not overlooked, a character who does not receive the attention that I believe she so rightly deserves. The character I am referring to is Mary, the mother of God herself. When I set aside what I would consider my “philosophical truths,” and read the gospels as a true account of God’s most intimate contact with the creation, I am struck with the feeling that Protestantism’s lack of attentiveness to the importance of Mary is something of a theological tragedy. The remainder of this article will be comprised of a few considerations that I find plausible, followed by what I take to be a couple of the necessitated conclusions of said considerations.

First, a few words about what we as Christians believe about the cosmic importance of Jesus Christ. Christianity’s distinctiveness is built upon the belief that Christ is the son of God. Jesus, though being fully human, is also fully divine. The extent to which God is the eternally transcendent creator, our “ground of being,” is contained with Jesus Christ completely and absolutely. Jesus is God.

But as we also believe, Christ, though fully divine, is inextricably bound to his humanity. And as the Gospels tell us, Jesus, or God, has one biological parent- Mary. Although I am a 22 year old male, about as far from being a mother as one can be, I would like to raise some reflections about what it means to be a mother. First, if Mary is the mother of Jesus, and Jesus is God, that means that God Himself (Him insofar as He manifested as a male) grew within the womb of Mary, was fed at the breast of Mary, and was coddled and cared for in all of the ways that a loving mother relates to her child. God was dependent upon Mary. Another fact is that if you ask most any mother, and I am sure some biologists and psychologists, they will tell you that the intimacy found within the relationship of mother and child is most likely the most intense intimacy found in human relations. If Mary is the mother of God, as is claimed in the Gospel narratives, than we are ascribed to the belief that Mary shared an intimate contact with the divine beyond that of any other. She is as spiritually connected to God as a mother is to the child of her womb.

Now let’s move to the Crucifixion, the event in which Jesus atoned for the sins of mankind. Jesus, through suffering on the Cross, carried out the single most historically significant event. Now let’s once again turn our attention to Mary. If you ask any truly loving parent they would tell you that they themselves would rather undergo a crucifixion than see their beloved child be crucified. I am not claiming that Mary suffered more than Jesus, because Jesus is God things are irregular, but one cannot ignore the immense suffering of Mary as Jesus was crucified. And because of her intimacy with the divine, being the divine’s mother, I simply cannot believe that her sufferings find no place within the eternal significance of the event of the crucifixion, as if they were some accidental by product. Mary was bound to Christ through his birth, and remained bound to his sufferings as he hung on the cross.

So taking into consideration what I have stated above, which as I have said, I find to be quite basic truths of the Gospel story, what does this mean about Mary? Well, I believe that first and foremost that we cannot treat Mary as if she relates to God and eternity as just another human being, such as Paul or Peter. Mary is the mother of God; she is intimately connected to Christ in a categorically different way, I mean just go ask a mom about it. After thinking about God having a loving mother, and what that really would mean for Mary, I cannot comprehend why consideration for Mary would rarely arise. I simply cannot believe that Mary is not in some way closer to God than any other human who has existed, she is God’s Mother! The fact that many theologians would deem Mariology as “unbiblical” is, to me, commonsensically wrong. Think about what it means to be a Mother, what it would mean to be God’s mother, and what that would mean for Mary’s place in the big picture.