worldview and perspective on Christ's Suffering

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? A Structured Complaint The Psalmist organizes his complaint against God in three sections. The first two sections dramatize the complaint (vv. 1-11 and...

One of the earliest forms of Christian art isn’t a painting, sculpture or even a catacomb fresco. It’s a patch of graffiti on plaster, discovered in the Paedagogium on the Palatine Hill in Rome and da...

We are all of us judged every day. We are judged by the face that looks back at us from the bathroom mirror. We are judged by the faces of the people we love and by the faces and lives of our children...

For he grew up before him like a young plant,     and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,     and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised...

The Lord calls us to examine the wounds of the Risen One and to see there the depth of his love for us. Let us therefore approach the throne of God in confidence as we pray for the people of God in Ch...

Lord and God, you know what we are about to say in prayer, you know what we ought to say, and even what we need to say but cannot. Our sins trouble us, though they don’t trouble us as much as they sho...

The Celebrant and People together, all kneeling Most holy and merciful Father: We confess to you and to one another, and to the whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth, that we have sinne...

‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, Such a dainty, fragile child, But the one we know is bold and strong We can hear that in your dying song, Little boy, little boy. ‘Just a boy of flesh and b...

The early Christian writers used some stunning expressions of delight and gratitude when they mentioned Jesus’s death. Think of Paul saying, “He loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20), or “The ...

Leader: Blessed Lord Jesus, before your cross I kneel and see the heinousness of my sin, my iniquity that caused you to be made a curse, the evil that provokes divine wrath. All: Show me the enormit...

We all know people who have been made much meaner and more irritable and more intolerable to live with by suffering: it is not right to say that all suffering perfects. It only perfects one type of pe...

It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate Son of God, that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life…my reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by h...

He, the Life of all, our Lord and Saviour, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind. No. He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by...

I was invited to visit a friend who was very sick. He was a man about fifty-three years old who had lived a very active, useful, faithful, creative life. Actually, he was a social activist who had car...

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.

A magistrate regards someone as a criminal and punishes him if he catches him among thieves, even though the man has never committed anything evil or worthy of death. Christ was not only found among s...

It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate Son of God, that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life…my reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by h...

An essential part of the teachings and directives of the great religious and philosophical thinkers the world over has been on the meaning of pain and suffering.

Hear the good news: For the joy set before him, Jesus Christ endured the shame of the cross, taking all our weakness and failure. Jesus went to the cross for the joy of having you as part of God’s Kin...

Your torture puts hostility to death Your broken body breaks down every dividing wall Your blood makes us blood What wondrous truth What dazzling grace Bring us near again, Jesus Help us remember an...

Dearest Brothers and Sisters, the One who was rejected by family, friend, and neighbor, is the One who expresses love for sinners like us. He epitomizes the love of which Paul wrote to the Corinthian ...

If a man have Christ in his heart, heaven before his eyes, and only as much of temporal blessing as is just needful to carry him safely through life, then pain and sorrow have little to shoot at.

While summarizing the work of Joel Marcus, professor Lauren Winner describes the irony that in crucifixion, the victim is literally elevated above the rest of the crowd: As Joel Marcus explains, this...

In order to speak of the crucified God we need a theology of abandonment, of dereliction, of an alienation so profound that it can only be expressed in language marked by paradox and by great daring a...

Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in his classic study Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity that the term stigma originated with the ancient Greeks, roughly during Jesus’ tim...

The great temptation of suffering is to let your pain become the whole world and to start believing that all that ever was, is and will be, is your private hell. God’s frontal assault on Job’s egotism...

Written almost a hundred years ago, this excerpt from the Reverend John W. Rilling points out one of the main reasons we continue to observe Lent, a period of repentance and discipline for many who ca...

Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door. …………………………...

How many modern Christians consider dying to be the worst thing that can happen to them? We pray for safety, healing, and protection, and rightly so. However, do we live in the truth that death has tr...

Lord God, we know that you are life, the life which is the light of the world But sometimes we allow the darkness to close in We find ourselves driven apart from you We confess that we do not ...