We have two books side by side on our shelves at home – one is the British Red Cross Society’s Handbook of First Aid, and beside it a similar but subtly different volume: First Aid for Hypochondriacs: ‘Emergency action for those eager to hear the worst and make the most of it.’ It has chapters which include ‘The importance of panic in any crisis’ and ‘How to tell if your heart has stopped’; ‘Treating shock and disappointment’; ‘Be prepared – keep an iron lung in the garage’; ‘Never use the word ‘bleeding’ when ‘haemorrhaging’ will do’; and, finally, ‘How long before you die?’.
Undoubtedly, some of us make too much of physical problems (if you were thinking I must get the ISBN of that book from Mark at the door at the end of the Service, you’re probably one of them). We make too much of physical problems and, indeed, all sorts of problems: the pains and difficulties in life. And there are others of us who probably make too little: we are never prepared to admit to any weakness or any experience of suffering.
In truth, for all of us, human life is a mixture – a mixture of those things that go well and we enjoy, and those things that go badly and that bring us down. Life has its ups and its downs, and I find that those ups and downs fluctuate pretty rapidly. Some days I bounce out of bed all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to set about the day; and other times I don’t feel like that at all – in fact I’ve been having toothache this past week. I went to the dentist on Thursday, he showed one of my wisdom teeth the yellow card, so at the next incident it is off the pitch, and I think probably it’s going to face a red card this coming week. That, certainly, has made me feel why am I the only person in all the world to have to put up with a trial like this – with an affliction, a difficulty, a burden? My family will tell you how ratty I’ve been.
Well, if Christianity has any claim for relevance at all to human beings, it’s going to have to speak to both those conditions: not just for the sad and the unhappy and the suffering, nor just for those for whom life is a ball and is going really well – it’s got to address the optimist and the pessimist, it’s got to speak to joy and to affliction, the Stoic and the hypochondriac. And, as we’re going to see from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, it certainly does.
It is one of Paul’s most personal letters, to a church that he had himself founded. There were no Christians in Corinth until Paul himself went there. He has already corresponded with the church there more than once. He has already visited it twice, and he is about to visit again. Paul and these Corinthian Christians knew each other well, and there is much shared knowledge behind this letter which we, its 21st Century readers, are not party to – for example, what exactly was the affliction that Paul experienced there: ‘the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia’ (verse 8). Clearly the Corinthians knew what that was, but we don’t. What is clear from later in the letter, is that Paul’s status and reputation as a Christian minister among the Corinthians has come under attack. We would discover if we read right through to the end that he is writing to defend his ministry, to vindicate himself, because his ministry is not characterised by human power and success and popularity, but rather by weakness and suffering: ‘We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death’ (vv. 8, 9a). Paul wasn’t somebody who came with what we might describe as a Prosperity Gospel. He didn’t say, “Look, I am a tremendous success and triumph in life, and if you opt in to Christianity, you, too, will enjoy the blessings of the success which I know from moment to moment.” That was not Paul’s style; and a part of the suffering that he knew, and all Christians know, will always be our identification with something that the world disdains – following Jesus Christ. Perhaps someone invited you along this evening, and you thought, I’m going to see a fairly weak bunch if I come to a church on a Sunday evening. For ‘together’ people are not in church, they are in other places.
Paul lived in a world that was opposed to what he held most dear – just as most of Cambridge tonight would slightly despise, slightly look down, on you and I gathering in this building now. But before he writes of his own sufferings, Paul starts his letter with thanksgiving to the God who is present with us in suffering.
1) God’s presence with us in suffering (verses 3-4a)
‘Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ [writes Paul], the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles …’ When trouble comes to us in life, there is one question which springs straight to our lips, “Why? Why has this happened? Why has this happened to me?” Even atheists ask it, which shows they are much closer to faith in God than they think they are. Because that question “Why?” about suffering should never occur to someone who really believes that the world is governed entirely by chance. If this world is just the result of a chance collision of atoms, why on earth should we have a happy life? Why shouldn’t suffering be the norm? Yet there is a profound intuition in all human beings that suffering does demand an explanation. All the great religions and philosophies of the world have addressed it. The East’s wisdom is to try to see through suffering. They say that’s just the surface, just the appearance of things: that’s just the Maya, the illusion – we must see through that to the world’s soul below. The Muslim, and I guess also the 20th Century Existentialist, try to resign themselves to suffering – inshallah – it is the will of Allah. That’s a sort of Fatalism, bad things happen, there’s no way around it, it’s just going to come to you; sooner or later, it happens.
Actually, I think the West’s wisdom is not quite that. It’s not Fatalism. It is the desperate endeavour to avoid suffering; by medical care, by ignoring the suffering in the world (the Third World, perhaps), and by trying to pretend that death doesn’t happen.
The Christian way is to find God in suffering – because He, too, suffered. So in the New Testament, suffering is not seen as a problem so much as a vocation. When Peter was writing his first letter, he said, ‘To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps’ (1 Peter 2:21). Christian experience is that God is with us in suffering. Pain may test and stretch our faith, but that is not because God is further away from us. You and I have a God who will stand beside us – who will stand beside us when we are dying. On Friday evening I stood beside the bed of a member of the congregation who is very close to death from cancer. Her body is dying, wasting away. It’s hardly there, but her faith grows. God has not deserted her. I felt a sense of being a little closer to Him in that bedroom than I do in most of my life. He is the Lord of heaven and earth, of life and death. He is the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation who consoles us in our affliction. Pain is actually part of His purpose for us in this world, because it is the only way He can separate us from our sins. It is His purpose for us, and it remains constant whether we are in pain or in joy. Let’s just read a little further through: ‘For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort’ (1 Corinthians. 1:5-7). Whatever comes our way in life, God is taking us in the same direction, as Christians. It is not true for those who are not yet Christians. But for the Christian, in everything He works for our good: in consolation, in comfort, and in affliction.
So, point 1: God is present with us in suffering. We find Him there. That’s the experience of the Christian.
2) We also have a solidarity with one another in suffering (vv. 4-6)
‘… who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer’ (vv. 4, 5). God sometimes uses pain to make men and women take Him seriously (it has been called His megaphone to rouse a sleeping world). God often uses pain in the life of the Christian to make us better people. And God also uses pain to bring us closer to one another as Christians. What has that ‘prosperity gospel’ that I was referring to earlier got to say to the two-thirds of the world where much of the population do not have enough food to stay alive? Our pain-free existence in the Western World is probably what most separates us from the rest of the world’s population. I think we found it hard when we heard that there was jubilation in some countries on September 11th last year – as they saw suffering come to the heart of the greatest of the Western nations. They said to themselves, It will do New York no harm to know what we face every day. I think we found that very hard to empathise with. But I think we should find it easier than we do if we pondered it a little more.
I don’t know if you know a rather bitter little satire by Steve Turner, called ‘They Had it Coming’:
The South East Asians,
They were made to cry,
Look at their eyes all
narrowed up and ready to bawl.
Black Africans.
Obesity wouldn’t suit them.
There’s a grace about their slenderness.
Their children would be naked
without a covering of flies.
Indians are perfect for begging
in ragged clothes
and falling dead on the streets
without too much sensation.
There are so many of them
that death is no longer a problem.
Middle Easterners, South Americans,
they were made to look anguished,
the mother crying to God,
the children just crying.
Earthquakes provide opportunity for this.
White Westerners were made to laugh
in fast cars with beautiful friends.
They were made to drink and spend money.
Do not disturb the balance of nature.
(Nice and Nasty, Steve Turner, MMS 1980)
Christianity is not just for the rich and well-fed. We cannot find a world-wide fellowship in material blessing: because a huge number of the world’s Christians do not have material prosperity. What a good thing, I think it is, that we have decided this year to make our Harvest offerings focus on the starving of Southern Africa. They will die today – they are dying as I speak – because you and I hog the world’s resources. And it is to the spiritual poverty of our Western Christianity that we know so little of suffering. Want, illness, physical pain, persecution – we hardly know them, do we? Forgive me a rather elderly remark, but I have noticed how spiritually beneficial a broken heart can be for the young Western Christian. Forgive me for saying that if it’s close to the bone for you at the moment. But I have seen God touch many young lives (some of them here in this building now) through the ending of a romantic relationship – in ways that He could not have touched their hearts without that heartache and agony. Because the rest of life is so pain-free. I know there are those here suffering in ways I have no idea of tonight. But this is not a suffering group. It is a hugely comfortable, prosperous, easy group. If I make as much fuss about toothache as I’ve been making this last week, what perspective have I got of the world in which we live?
But when we do suffer, we find a new level of fellowship with one another. It doesn’t just bring us closer to our brothers and sisters across the world, it also allows us to comfort those close beside us who face the same sufferings that we have faced. Sometimes, as I say, it takes a broken heart for a young Western Christian to bring us face to face with the comfort that God alone can bring: ‘… the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God’ (vv. 3b, 4).
It is a flow – but not like this:
So that the weak Christian is helped up and wants
to say to the strong Christian, “I wish I was like you.”
That is not what Paul is saying at this point.
No, God comforts us so that we can comfort others. God
reaches down into the life of a Christian.
Do you want God’s comfort in some area of your life?
Do I want God’s comfort in my life?
Then we need to look around for whom we can comfort.
I fear from time to time, if you’re like me sometimes we just want that comfort for ourselves, don’t we? We cry out in pain and say, “God, please make me feel better.” I’m afraid that has a way of blocking the channel.
Forgive me a rather coarse illustration: it’s like a blocked toilet. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to free a blocked toilet. It’s a very unpleasant experience. But it doesn’t matter how much fresh water you pour into a blocked loo, it won’t help until the outlet is clear. It will just flood if you go on flushing it.
You and I, in our lives need to unblock the outlet sometimes: to release that blockage of self-pity, and start to recognize that the Christian life is all about reaching out and touching others.
I have a particular thing about confidentiality. I don’t think confidentiality is actually a Christian virtue. We have got to love and respect each other certainly but the concern the medical profession, for example, have got with confidentiality is not, I fear, a Christian concern. As Christians we are being told all the time that we belong to each other and we have to reach out and take hold of one another and remove those barriers between us. And my obsession with my own little world and my own little privacy, my own little secrets, is exactly what the Spirit of God is engaging with and trying to dismantle.
We need to look for whom we can flow out to. We need to mean it when we sing, “Make me a channel of your peace”. There are those in this congregation who have become a great blessing to others through what they have suffered – and have been blessed themselves in helping those others, as they have allowed God’s comfort to flow through them: ‘Who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God’ (v. 4). It is an antidote to self-pity and introspection. I’ve suffered very little, but I know what it is to think: Poor me! Poor little me! And I need to learn that the things I find most painful in life are the things through which I can reach out and help others.
Let’s just glance on to where our passage ends: ‘… as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favour granted us in answer to the prayers of many’ (v. 11). We can join in this work by prayer, too. Especially those who feel that they haven’t had to face very much affliction themselves.
Actually it isn’t even quite as I put it in the first of our little diagrams. It is more like this (those aren’t two different Gods up at the top there, it’s the same God!): He reaches down into Christian lives, not just for your sake and mine, but for the sake of everybody else to whom we can reach out. And actually there is not much distinction to be made between the vertical and the horizontal in that diagram. The normal way we experience the comfort and compassion of God is actually through the agency of other Christians, those who will come and be alongside us, who will pray with us and put their arms around us, and cook meals for us – who will do all the things that you and I so cry out for in our lives.
I’m going to make one more comment on verse 7 and then move into our final point. Just notice this (I’ll read verse 7, but this is really a comment on verses 5, 6 and 7): ‘Our hope for you is firm [says Paul], because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.’ What Paul seems to be saying there, is that he is convinced of the authentic faith of the Corinthians. He is convinced that they are Christians because they had experienced two things: suffering and comfort. They had experienced suffering: the suffering of Christ had flowed out from Christ into their lives too. And comfort had flowed out from Christ. The authentic Christian is the sufferer who lives out the pattern of Christ. (I just added that remark about an hour ago, when it suddenly struck me that there is a lot more here that needs unpacking, but we don’t have time to unpack it tonight.)
So, 1) God is present with us in suffering, and 2) we have fellowship with one another and with Christ in suffering.
3) Suffering teaches us to rely on God (vv. 8-10)
‘We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers’ (vv. 8-11a). You and I live in the overlap of the ages, which is why there is this surprising coincidence of suffering and comfort in the Christian life. God has laid hold of us, if we’re Christians, in this present age, and He’s brought us into the age to come. Whether life is pleasant or unpleasant now, God is always trying to do the same thing with us: to teach us to stop relying on ourselves and to start relying on Him – to stop being self-centred and to become Christ-centred: ‘…in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead’ (v. 9). Paul sensed that through what he was suffering God had pronounced the death sentence on Paul’s own efforts. Paul’s own achievements had to die so that God could begin to work – the God who works by raising the dead.
In verses 8 and 9, Paul is not saying, “I had a terrible time with opponents and difficult circumstances in Asia, but by the grace of God I conquered, I came through it all.” I think he is saying something more like: “God had a real battle with me in Asia. He had to give me a really tough time to get me to learn to rely on Him.” Paul saw his rough times as from God, as part of God’s purposes for him, so he (Paul) might learn how to do things God’s way.
I remember being at a Christian camp in the summer once, and we were all given a talk by the lifeguard on what we had to do, and in particular the great danger of getting drowned by somebody you’re going to rescue and the importance sometimes of waiting. Particularly if you’re a small person trying to rescue a big person – you might have to wait until they are unconscious (there was actually a pole beside the pool in the school that we were in, and somebody suggested that perhaps we could use it to beat the drowning person unconscious so that we could get on with the rescue!). But you can understand in the Christian life that there are moments (in fact it is frequently the case) when God is not able to do with us what He wants to do, because we are like a drowning person, determined to keep afloat by our own efforts. And we will not allow Him to step in and take over, because we rely still on ourselves.
In human terms we tend to think of joy and pain as lying at the opposite ends of the spectrum of human experience.
We find it hard to think how we move so quickly from one end of the spectrum to the other in our own experience.
But in spiritual terms, they actually lie like this: side by side.
It is hard to tell them apart sometimes in spiritual experience as a Christian. We learn many of the most important spiritual lessons only through pain. And as we look back on our lives sometimes we think, At that moment when I was lowest, God was nearest. The deepest experience of His presence came through to me then.
Above all, the lesson is to stop relying on ourselves, but to rely wholly on God. If you are somebody who is troubled by doubt (and I know there are folks in the congregation who from time to time tell me how difficult they find believing), remember this: the opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith in the Christian life is self-reliance. And the people who are farthest from faith are not those who are troubled by doubt, but those who are too sure of themselves. It often takes pain to remove that self-assurance and self-sufficiency. But until they are removed, you and I will never fully avail ourselves of the limitless resources of God, the rescuer, ultimately, from all perils: ‘But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, …’ (vv. 9b, 10). Some of us may want to ask, “How much worse can it get?” (and again, I know that there may be those here tonight who are suffering very greatly). Well, the answer is, “We might die”. That’s how much worse it might get. They might die, our closest and most beloved in life. They might die, that son, that daughter, that fiancée/fiancé, that person you’ve set your heart on, that husband or wife – that’s how bad it might get. They might die. But God raises the dead. And there is no comfort for us, as Christians, short of that truth.
Imagine a conversation between a man with a cold and a doctor: Man: “Are you saying there is nothing I can do?” Doctor: “No, not really – you could try running around the garden in a pair of boxer shorts, first thing in the morning.” “What? I would catch pneumonia!” “Well, we’ve got a cure for pneumonia.”
The doctor may not have a cure for the common cold, but God has a cure for the death – and that is the worst that can happen to us or our loved ones.
How crazy not to realise what is available to us! But it may take suffering to open our eyes to our own inadequacy and God’s omnipotence; to rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.
How then are you and I to cope with suffering? Well, according to Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter 1, we are not to resent it, nor be embarrassed by it. We’re not to wallow in it, like the hypochondriac, nor are we to shrug it off like the Stoic. Nor are we to try to rise above it like the Hindu or the Buddhist, nor simply to resign ourselves to it like the Muslim, nor try to insulate ourselves from it like the materialist.
No: we must accept it as normal, purposeful and powerful in teaching us to experience the presence of God, to deepen our fellowship with one another and to rely more and more on God and less and less on self.