Blessing and Suffering
- janetstaines
- Mar 16
- 2 min read
To what extent does faith offer us blessing and protection (Psalm 27), and to what extent is it a call to suffer for the higher cause of God’s justice, peace and liberation? (Luke 13:31-35). Can both of these aspects of faith be true at the same time?
"One of the key tasks of any spiritual practice is to identify, nurture, and integrate our different selves into one cohesive whole. Some of our selves are stronger and dominate how we think, act, and relate. Other selves are less dominant; they still exert an influence but it is more subtle and harder to recognise. Some selves may be silent or completely overlooked. Sometimes our selves are at war with one another—like having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. And, as much as this is true for us, it is also true of every person we will ever encounter. There is a tremendous power in learning to be open to the many selves within us and others." https://sacredise.com/lent-2c/
In much of Western Christianity, we tend to make the same mistake with Jesus that we do with one another—we become fixated on our first impression, our initial experience and understanding, of who Jesus is and what he is like.
In the season of Lent, we are invited to encounter the many faces of Jesus and to expand our ideas about who he is, what he’s like, and what it means to follow him. In the reading from the Gospel of Luke, we see at least three of Jesus’ different selves. The first was revealed in response to the Pharisees who warned him of Herod’s assassination plot. Jesus was often at odds with those who ruled politically and religiously over Israel and it can be easy to believe that Jesus was strongly opposed to them, but this story offers a more nuanced picture of their relationship. On the one hand, these Pharisees were looking out for Jesus and on the other, Jesus seemed happy to receive them.
But it is Jesus’ words about Herod that are most telling here: “Go tell that fox…” Here we see the subversive Jesus, the social critic who challenged the powers that be and refused to be stopped or silenced by threats of violence.
Immediately after saying these words, Jesus revealed a second self. Now, as he described his work and his determination to go to Jerusalem regardless of the consequences, we see Jesus, the confident prophet.
And then, finally, we see a third Jesus, the grieving pastor who could see the inevitable destruction that would come on his homeland and how unable his compatriots were to imagine a different way of being and a different kind of world.
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