Invincible martyrs of Christ, ye triumphed over falsehood by the power of the Cross and gained as your reward the grace of life eternal. Ye felt no terror at the threats of tyrants, and when ye suffered torment ye rejoiced; and now your blood has become the healing of our souls. Intercede for our salvation.
– First Wednesday of Lent, Matins Aposticha
Suffering Unto Life in this World
As I sit to write this newsletter, I pray that everyone had a fruitful and spiritually nourishing first week of Lent. Now that we have all passed through our first week of this Lenten season together, I wanted to take some time and reflect on suffering, and its relationship to the Christian life.
While attending the Lenten services last week, I became aware that the theme of suffering is mentioned again and again in the hymns of the Church. Interestingly, it is not only mentioned in a negative light, but also as a virtue. The quote above shows the sufferings of the martyrs as salvific and an example we should embrace. For some, this seems strange. In today’s society, suffering is seen as an evil to be overcome, not something to be embraced. To understand the different ways we as Christians are called to embrace suffering, I shall lean on Fr. Thomas Hopko of blessed memory.
Fr. Hopko begins with the four fundamental “S’s” of Christian life: Scriptures, Services, Sacraments, and Saints. In these four “S’s”, we find the fullness of the revelation of the Glory of God. However, there is one more “S” Fr. Hopko says comes as a result of knowing the other four, and that is, of course suffering. Once we see the world as it truly is, we understand that to live in a fallen world is to suffer. Whether you believe in scripture or not, every human being on this earth will suffer in some way, not matter how much we learn and work to eliminate suffering from the world. To the secular world, this seems counterintuitive. The more we learn and understand, the more we should be able to avoid suffering. When germ theory was discovered, it allowed us to create medicines to stop sickness and suffering. Knowledge, according to secular understanding, is the power to overcome all things. In the Christian life however, the more we learn, the more we understand, the more we suffer because our faults are revealed to us, and the gap between our imperfection and the perfection of God seems unbridgeable. To see this gap is to suffer. This understanding of suffering is beautifully illustrated during Forgiveness Sunday, when during Matins, we sing with Adam:
Woe is me, what have I suffered in my misery I transgressed one commandment of the Master, and now I am deprived of every blessing. O most holy Paradise, planted for my sake and shut because of Eve, pray to Him that made thee and fashioned me, that once more I may take pleasure in thy flowers.
Adam did not fully understand the consequences of eating of the tree, and when he mistakenly partook of its fruit, the consequences were only fully revealed to him once he had been exiled from the Garden. In the Old Testament, the nation of Israel was set apart from the nations because they had the Law of Moses, which revealed to them what sin was, and how devastating its consequences were. Without the Law, no one would have understood how fallen the world was. Today’s society is much the same way. If we reject the teaching of Holy Scripture, then the world can be what we make it. Evil things can be good, and good things can be evil. However, once one is confronted with the fullness of Truth, then we have a choice, and that choice, as Fr. Hopko puts it, is to suffer unto life or to suffer unto death as Adam did. This then begs the question; how do we suffer unto life? In the same hymn from the Triodion, Christ gives us the answer:
I desire not the loss of the creature which I fashioned, but that he should be saved and come to knowledge of the truth; and when he comes to me I will not cast him out.
Christ Himself will lift us up out of our sufferings by His suffering on the Cross, giving us the Hope Beyond Hope of the Life of the world to come. This is a peculiar and paradoxical fact to understand. But, as Fr. Hopko was fond of saying, “Orthodoxy is Paradoxy.” The Triodion highlights this paradox during the Wednesday Matins of the First week of Lent:
Beholding Thee, O Christ, stretched dead upon the Tree, Thy Virgin Mother cried aloud with bitter tears: Ό my Son, what is this fearful mystery? How dost Thou who givest life eternal unto all, suffer willingly a shameful death upon the Cross?
We as Christians are commanded to imitate Christ, which means we are to embrace suffering, and in so doing, find our life in God. While this is easy to say, it is not easy to do. Life has a funny habit of introducing hardships at exactly the wrong times. At Chrysostom Academy, when it seems like everything is not going the way we would like them to go, we say that the gremlins have emerged. We can have students acting out, things breaking down, family problems, and financial hardships happening all at once. And yet, something I always notice in this time, is that once these hardships have passed, something more beautiful than before takes its place. Because we suffered unto life and imitated Christ in embracing this suffering, we were led into a more beautiful life than what had come before. So, I’ll leave you with this:
In this Season of Lent, let us all embrace our sufferings and let them lead us to the glorious Resurrection of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ.
Glory to God for All Things!
In Christ,
John W. Heitzenrater, II A.B., M.H.M.
Headmaster
jheitzenrater@chrysostomacademy.org