Pastoral, Liturgical, Teaching, and Social Justice Moments brought to you by DignityUSA.

Breath of the Spirit is our electronic spiritual and liturgical resource for our members and potential members. Nothing can replace your chapter or other faith community but we hope you will find further support here for integrating your spirituality with your sexuality and all the strands of your life.

How do we acknowledge the redemptive potential of suffering with glorifying it? Today’s reflection grapples with this question and invites us not so much to an answer as to a process. Perhaps it is not the suffering that is redemptive, but rather loving through suffering that saves us.

April 30, 2023: Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

Psalm 23: 1-3a, 3b-4, 5, 6

1 Peter 2:20b-25

John 10:1-10

Healed by Jesus’ Wounds? The Power of Loving Through Our Suffering

A reflection by John Falcone

This week’s first reading tells us that Peter “used many arguments” to persuade the crowd in Jerusalem so that they might accept Jesus’ message (Acts 2:40). It’s clear from our gospel reading that this message centers on Jesus who proclaims, “I am the sheep gate. … The thief comes only to slaughter, steal, and destroy. I came that you might have life … to the full.”

But for me, the second reading troubles these waters with one of the most puzzling lines in Christian Scripture: “By Christ’s wounds you are healed.” (1 Peter 2:24) Glorifying suffering can be very dangerous. As feminist, womanist, and queer theologians have underlined, suffering (exploitation, violence, early death) is not something that we should aspire to. It’s a real brokenness that burdens our world. How can one person’s suffering bring other people salvation? How does following in Jesus’ wounded footsteps bring us to the fullness of life?

The author of 1 Peter is reflecting on Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection by quoting the fourth “Suffering Servant” song from Isaiah (52:13–53:12). “But you were pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins; upon you lies a chastening which brings us wholeness, and through your wounds we are healed.” (53:5) The earliest Christians recognized the addressee of this poem immediately: Isaiah’s prophecy must be about Jesus, whose love, courage, and non-resistance to crucifixion was so remarkable, that it rocked their whole world.

In a way, I find the passage from 1 Peter deeply moving. Here’s a paraphrase of it that I fell in love with; the rendition is by John Michael Talbot, a Catholic musician in the Franciscan tradition. (I’ve adapted the language to be more inclusive; you can find the song, entitled Peter’s Canticle, here.)

Jesus has suffered for you

to comfort your life in Christ’s very dying –

dying so that we all might live,

bearing all our wounds

so that we might be healed.

Let all who seek the true path of peace

simply come to follow in the footsteps of this person:

who laid down their life

when threatened with hatred.

Thus Jesus came to live in the blessings of love.

Thus Jesus came to live forever.

There is a kind of mystical logic in these lyrics: Jesus embraces each of us, in all our woundedness, and in all Christ’s woundedness. Jesus’ embrace is so deep that it blesses us with a new vision and a new power to live. That new life is so full of love that no suffering can ever overcome it.

Jesus was constantly resisting the powers of brokenness – the forces of exploitation and early death in first-century Palestine. Jesus casts out demons (including a demon called ‘Roman Legion’). Jesus overturns banker’s tables in the first-century Jewish Federal Reserve. Jesus blesses the poor, the hungry, and the weeping; but calls ‘woe’ on the rich, satisfied, and indifferent. (Mark 5:1-20; 11:15-18; Luke 6:20-26) But when a government backed lynch-crew arrived, Jesus lifted not a finger in self-defense.

Is there anything you can do when faced with a lynch-mob? Hatred and fear overwhelm people all the time on our planet; and Jesus was no different than anyone else. 

But there’s something about how Jesus faced that inevitable ending. Jesus kept on loving even as the mob swept him up in their hysteria. Jesus connected with family, friends, and fellow sufferers, even while dying. Jesus cried out with emotion, anguish, and grief. Perhaps this is what allows Jesus’ wounds to be healing.

Jesus did not try to skip over the suffering, or try to ignore it, or try to push through as if failure were impossible. Jesus faced it. Evil was victorious on Calvary, but God was victorious in the end.

We also have plenty of wounds; we also experience plenty of failures. Some of them are personal (broken relationships, failed projects, failed dreams). Some of them are social and political (war in so many places, gun violence almost every day). Some of them are ecological and cataclysmic (rampant resource depletion, climate disaster).

For us, following in the footsteps of Jesus certainly means doing everything in our scope and our power to resist and correct what is broken – in our relationships, in our Dignity communities, in our political and economic ways of life.

But I think that following in the footsteps of Jesus, also means letting the failures really hit us. Facing the suffering. Crying. Cursing the universe. Breaking down in the arms of our friends. Feeling the full impact of inevitable failures and continuing to love as the waves drag us down.

If we let the failures hit us, and keep on loving, perhaps we too can experience the fullness of life.