Christianity, suffering and the morality of the victim

Graham Tomlin explores the real reason why Christianity seems fixated on suffering.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A medieval painting of a suffering Christ surrounded by two angels looking concerned.

Andrea Mantegna, Christ as the Suffering Redeemer.

Richard Mortel, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

The Times caused a bit of a stir over the Easter weekend with an article entitled 'I’ll choose heroes rather than martyrs anyday.' The article linked Christianity’s fixation with suffering, climaxing with the crucifixion of Jesus, with the tendency in modern life to accord moral value to victimhood.

The article’s author, Matthew Parris, is a wonderful writer, always interesting and provocative, and often talks a lot of sense. He is absolutely right to resist the urge to elevate an often self-claimed victimhood as in itself giving moral power and authority. Being a victim of bad treatment doesn’t in itself make your moral cause right or wrong. It might simply mean being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The problem with elevating victimhood, is that none of us are solely victims. Most of us can find some area of life where we have felt we have been badly treated, but if we’re honest, we can also find other parts where we have treated others badly too. Although it’s tempting to divide the world into villains and victims, oppressors and oppressed, it’s never quite as neat as that. Of course, some people, and some groups of people are definitely more sinned against than sinning; issues of real injustice matter and need urgent attention, but however true that is, none of us falls solely on one side or the other of that line. We are not all equally guilty or innocent. At the end of the day, we are all part villain and part victim.

Parris is also right that Christian art and literature tends to focus on suffering to an extent that jars with our modern sensibilities. I just don’t think he understands why. Because the more I’ve thought about the article, the more it seems to me to miss something essential about Christianity.

We Christians believe that the passion of Jesus – his death and resurrection – has saved the world. Yet, even though we often focus on the agony of Christ on the cross, or the sacrifices of the saints and martyrs, we don’t believe in the redemptive power of suffering in itself. Suffering was never part of the original plan. It is not suffering or victimhood that saves, but love. Divine love.

It is not the victimhood that conveys moral worth, but the kind of divine love that is so strong that even suffering will not knock it off course.

When Divine Love entered a broken and fallen world, it was always going to be messy. The love of God for the human race meant suffering for Jesus, but only because we humans have become such twisted, confused and blind creatures, that we failed to see that in Jesus, God himself was coming to us and we tried to kill him. Love may or may not lead you to become a victim (more often than not it does in a broken world) but it is not the victimhood that conveys moral worth, but the kind of divine love that is so strong that even suffering will not knock it off course.

Real, gritty, determined love, not the sentimental, starry-eyed kind we often think of, is so strong that it keeps going, even when there are real sacrifices to be made, losses to be endured, pain to be borne. That is divine love. That is the kind of love we saw on the cross of Jesus - the kind that compelled Jesus to take on the sin and suffering of the world to neutralise its power once and for all. It was love so strong that on the first Good Friday it stood alongside the victims of injustice and suffering, the countless, unknown people over the centuries who have been persecuted or executed unjustly. And yet it was also so scandalous that it could also reach out to the villains, the criminal on the cross next to Jesus, the soldiers who tortured him and say ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ It is the kind of love that is so strong that not even death can stand in its way, as we saw on that first Easter Sunday.

That is why we Christians value suffering, especially that which is voluntarily borne. Not because it conveys the spurious moral high ground of victimhood but because it is a sure sign of love. It is why we have always venerated our martyrs – because their love for God was so strong that they would even give up their lives for him. It is why the early Christians chose the cross as the central symbol of their faith – because it was the unmistakeable sign of how deep and strong was the love of God for the human race, despite our thoughtlessness, cruelty and self-centredness. Being a victim meant very little to the early Christians, and they never played that card, because what mattered to them was not victimhood but love.

A recent story highlighted Catholic seminarians in Mexico who were willing to press ahead with getting ordained, even though 50 priests in the region have been murdered since 2006 for speaking out against the violence and damage done by the drug cartels which rule the roost in the local area. As a bishop, I have ordained many priests here in the UK. Not many of them will face that kind of danger, yet the calling is exactly the same – to love people in the name of Christ and to grow the community of people who follow him. Whether you end up getting killed or not, it is not the sacrifice, or the victimhood that gives value, it is the love that inspires the sacrifice.

What our world needs is not so much martyrs or heroes, but people committed to deep, passionate, determined love.

Instead of martyrs, Parris wants heroes. He plumps for Nietzsche’s vision of the powerful assertiveness of the minority, and his despising of weakness, pity and victimhood. Yet be careful what you wish for. If moral authority and rightness become a matter of who has the power to assert their will more strongly than the rest, what we end up with is just the kind will to domination, the competitive, contentious public space, the desire for power and influence for its own sake, the silencing of others, just because social media means you can, that is the blight of so much modern life.

What our world needs is not so much martyrs or heroes, but people committed to deep, passionate, determined love. Seeking the best and the good of your neighbour as much as yourself, whoever your neighbour happens to be, might mean you end up a hero, it might mean you end up a victim, but to love God and to love your neighbour – this is what lies at the heart of things.

That is the kind of love we celebrate every Easter in the story of Good Friday, leading through to Easter Sunday. It is that that lies at the heart of the Christian story, not victimhood. And that is why we need more true, deep Christian faith in our societies, not less.

Explainer

Creed

Easter

5 April 2023

4 min read

Life before death

Embracing death, parading it down streets, and even downplaying their egos, Julie Canlis contemplates why Christians do death.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

A Good Friday procession of people and priests hold a cross horizontal above their heads.

Good Friday procession in Bielsko-Biała, Poland.

Silar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Easter is not about the Easter Bunny. Easter is about the paradox that we all try to skirt: only in death is there life.

But Easter is not just about metaphorical death and rebirth, at least not for Christians. Christians don’t believe that Jesus died for our self-esteem. Nor that he raised an Idea of himself. As Thomas Lynch, undertaker and poet in Midwest America reminds us,

“Do you think they would have changed the calendar for that? Done the Crusades? Burned witches? Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures.”

Christians believe that Jesus’ body died. Ceased breathing. Flatlined for three days. And then (in myth-like fashion of the dying and rising god) this human being who lived at certain GPS coordinates, and had DNA from his mother, was given his life back. Not resuscitated. But resurrected. Yes, reader, Christians believe this.

Our culture is body-obsessed when we are living, and body-denying when we die.

Who are we without our bodies? When people die, Christians insist that their body isn’t just a “shell” of the real person. No, their body still is the person. That’s why cremation didn’t catch on in the Christian west until recently, and even so, your local priest might turn up their nose if you want to distribute the ashes into jars to be divided between the grandkids. Often, as soon as a person dies, our impulse is to insist, “she’s not there.” This is because our culture is body-obsessed when we are living, and body-denying when we die. As Prof John Behr, a University of Aberdeen specialist in thinking about death, observes, we want to live like hedonists and to die like Platonists. Easter presents a counter-narrative here. Our bodies have meaning. Jesus’ body has meaning.

In re-living the events of Holy Week, all eyes are on Jesus’ body. And Jesus’ body is doing some very physical actions – like healing bodies, raising bodies, touching unclean bodies, washing feet. And then it is his turn to have his body ravaged by arrest, torture, sleeplessness, betrayal, and execution. All eyes are not on the idea but on the body of Jesus. So much so, that they put guards at the tomb so that there could be no more monkey business about this man’s body.

It might seem peculiar to us that Christianity, infamous for its historically mixed relationship to the body, is centered on one man’s body. Ancient Christians spoke poetically that the tomb that held Jesus’ body became a womb. In his death, in the absolute silence of death, Jesus chose to share dead-ness with us. That this was the essence of his “work.” That his work could only be accomplished by surrendering, doing nothing – and that in doing nothing, he undoes the great “nothing” that threatens each one of us. Almost everything we fear, big and small, is somehow connected to a fear of death in one form or another. It is not death, per se, but the “fear of death” that enslaves us (says an early Christian preacher in Rome. And so, Easter stands at that pivot point between fear of death and life. Christians celebrate Easter as the day the world tilted. Where death no longer has the final say, but is something we can now use to our advantage. In fact, life begins to break in precisely through death. This is only because, as James Alison once said in an Easter sermon, “He entered into death and made it untoxic.”

The question is not “is there life after death” but is there life before death?

And so, strangely, Christians embrace death. We parade it on crosses through the streets. We paint it on our tombs, over our meeting houses, wear it on our chests. Because in embracing death (and the even more enslaving fear-of-death), we defeat it. Because of this belief, ancient Christians flung themselves at lions. They endured the agony of torture. They sanctified suffering. They also practiced small unnoticed “little deaths” of that great overlord, the ego. Not because suffering or death is good, or to be sought. But because death and suffering have been transformed into portals. Even in baptism, with oblivious babies being christened in frilly white dresses, we are dipping them defiantly into the waters of death and waging war on death. This is the mystery of Easter. This is why every Sunday is called a “little Easter” because even as we shuffle into that old stone church, something outlandish is being proclaimed. Death is not a friend, but neither is it to be feared. The worst has already happened. Now we can get on with living. The question is not “is there life after death” but is there life before death?

And here is the final kicker: Christian orthodoxy proclaims that Jesus still has his body. (Not every Christian would insist on this, but it has been central to the tradition for two millennia). Easter isn’t just a mythical story of the paradigmatic victory of life over death. Paul talked about it as a complete reversal: that instead of death swallowing life, Jesus’ embodied life swallows up all death. Christians believe that he is alive and well, in some kind of body (“transfigured” in Christian slang), pouring out blessing on all embodiment. This isn’t a body that is somewhere floating above us in the clouds, but is an embodied person raised as their whole life narrative into eternity – as one recognizable life. Resurrection is not the hope of our joining Jesus in the clouds, but of this same raising of our whole lives into Life itself. This is called “putting on immortality” like a coat – where everything from our past (even scars, like Jesus still had) is integrated into one recognizable life.

This is the Christian hope of Easter, as we live in the interim, no longer fearing but using death for dear life.