ood news for the world: "It is finished."
It would be a denial of this final word from the cross to say that the suffering of the redeemed is punishment for their sins. "The punishments that brought us peace were upon him, and by his wounds, we are healed" (Isa. 53:5). Our suffering and even our death are not God's punishment, but his discipline (paideia). Our heavenly Father is not our permissive parent in heaven. He disciplines the children he loves (see Heb. 12:7-11).
Certain members of the Corinthian congregation, failing to discern the Body of the Lord by communing drunk and neglecting the needs of their fellow communicants, incurred a temporal judgment in their becoming sick and dying (see 1 Cor. 11:27-32). This judgment (krino) was God's "discipline" (paideia) in order that they might not be condemned (katakrino), along with the world, by refusing Christ's gifts. Their suffering and death were instruction, not punishment; a preemptive warning serving the goal of their salvation.
Suffering and death are also gospel. "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his children" (Psa. 116:15). "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on" (Rev. 14:13). The Apostle Paul declares that we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces patient endurance, and patient endurance character, and character hope that doesn't disappoint (see Rom. 5:3-5). He adds that our present sufferings do not compare with the glory that will be revealed in us, and he likens the suffering of the cosmos to the labor pains of a woman about to give birth (see Rom. 8:18-25). Confident in God's will to save through suffering, the faithful in Christ bear patiently with suffering and death, enduring and even embracing them, because Christ by his suffering and death has embraced us. "To live is Christ, and to die is gain" (Phil. 1:21).
In the cross of Jesus, we see the God who hides life in death, victory in defeat, power in weakness. He buries his divinity deeply in our humanity and then suffers, dies, and rises to save the world. He is most God for us when he is most forsaken and afflicted in his suffering. Faith in Jesus does not seek displays of power and glory, nor does it demand a blessing God has not promised, as though Jesus' death were not sufficient. Faith in the crucified and risen Jesus is content to have him present in suffering, silently embracing us as the Man of Sorrows who is acquainted with our grief.
In the parable of the wheat field (see Matt. 13:24-30), Jesus reveals God's way of dealing with the problem of evil. The enemy has sown evil weeds among God's good wheat. The interventionist farmhands demand immediate action-pull the weeds in order to save the wheat. But God's course of action is summarized in the words: "Let be!" (The Greek word is aphete, usually translated "forgive.") Forgive the weeds, let them be, lest you destroy the wheat. The "problem" of evil turns out to be no problem at all. The weeds will be sorted from the wheat soon enough, at harvest time. God neither abandons the world in its suffering nor does he intervene all that much-except to die on a cross and forgive!
This is not the "Watchmaker God" of Newtonian Deism, who stands completely outside the cosmos and rarely, if ever, intervenes. Nor is he the divine vending machine whose buttons are pushed by our prayer and praise. This is the God who is intimately present yet hidden in, with, and under the created order as the creative and redemptive Word through whom all things were made and in whom all things hold together, who fills all in all, and who embraces the suffering and death of the cosmos in his own divine-human death on the cross. God's Word and the Sacraments reveal this hidden God who suffers for us and with us. In baptism we are buried with Christ in his death (see Rom. 6:4). In the Lord's Supper, Christ's Body and Blood, the fruits of his own suffering and death, are given as food and drink (see 1 Cor. 10:16). We live off his suffering and death. "By his wounds, we are healed" (Isa. 53:5).
When we pray for and with sufferin