Jesus Tells the Story: The Suffering God (Telling the Story of God IV)

The way in which Jesus told the story actually reveals what the Gospel is. If we turn back to Luke 24, the encounter on the Emmaus Road, we read about Jesus explaining the Gospel story to crestfallen disciples who have been disappointed by his death. We read:

Then Jesus said to them, “You foolish people! You find it so hard to believe all that the prophets wrote in the Scriptures. Wasn’t it clearly predicted that the Messiah would have to suffer all these things before entering his glory?” Then Jesus took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.[1]

Jesus then sits for a meal with these men, which is when they realize that the man they’re speaking to is, in fact, Jesus. After the encounter, the men say, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us as he talked with us on the road and explained the Scriptures to us?”[2] There was something about how Jesus was with people which caused hearts to burn.[3] This is the box that holds the story, without which the story itself is often missed.

Story is an operative word. Storytelling is always at the heart of hospitality, since telling stories is how we share our lives with one another. We tell stories over food, as Jesus ultimately does with these disciples. Eating together and telling stories is the biblical way to honor another person, to humanize them as creatures made in the image of God.

And what’s inside Jesus’ box of hospitality? What is the story that Jesus tells? It’s a story that none of the men could conceive, something entirely outside their field of possibility: God suffers for you, to save you. At the heart of Jesus’ hospitality is the story of a crucified God.[4]

It’s hard to put into words how strange this concept was to first-century Jewish minds. The idea that the Messiah—the one anointed and sent by God—was God, and further that this Messiah suffered, was not on anyone’s radar. It’s there in Scripture, of course. Jesus might have referenced Isaiah 53 in his on-the-road Bible study.[5] But in first-century Judaism, the popular conception of the Messiah was largely of a warrior-priest who would reign triumphantly after a great military victory.[6] A Messiah who was actually God embodied just wasn’t anywhere in the picture. So: “Wasn’t it clear, you guys, that the Messiah had to suffer in order to be glorified?” “Well, actually…no.” The story was a scandal to their understanding.

It often remains so. I have friends right now who are suffering from great tragedy, the loss of a family member at a young age. There are no words for their pain, no easy assuagement of their grief. I shake my head with them as they groan and cry. Their present struggle is great anger with God, and it’s hard to blame them. We need life to make sense and we need to put our pain somewhere, even if it’s on God. The biblical record makes plenty of space for lament and questioning, and even Jesus himself said, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”[7] My friends are wondering if God is capricious. After all, why would He let this happen? They feel that they’ve done everything right, or at least as best they could, and still they are touched by tragedy.[8]

The problem is, we always end up angry and resentful of God if we think He’s out there, looking down passively on us or, worse, pulling levers, sending blessing or tragedy our way. And yet, this is often how we think of God on a sub-rational level. We have a harder time believing, seeing, and knowing the God who is with us in our suffering. When you do see this God, it doesn’t make the suffering go away, but it makes it bearable in an entirely different way. It infuses the pain with tangible hope.

Indeed, this is why the God that Jesus reveals—reveals in his own self, hanging on a tree—is so important. Only the suffering God, present in all human suffering, can redeem reality. The God whom Jesus reveals is not an angry or ambivalent or absent Creator, not a detached or distant Deity, not a God so transcendent as to be beyond reach; the God whom Jesus reveals is instead a God who is imminent, right here, in the pain and mire of life.[9] Emmanuel, God with us.[10] The God who emptied himself to take on all human experience.[11]

Ultimately, only the suffering God can conquer death on our behalf, for our salvation. And death, after all, is the great human problem. We are all going to die, no matter how much money we have or how clever we are or how good a person we become. We experience this death long before we die physically, through the pain of things done to us, or in the world around us, or as the consequence of the bad choices that we make along our way.[12] Since only what is touched can be transformed and redeemed, God throws Himself into the heart of human suffering, even death itself, taking it onto and into Himself, liberating us into eternal life.[13] As much as I love Dead Poets Society, Jesus doesn’t say to those men on the Emmaus Road, “Well shoot, boys, we all die,” or “Carpe diem,” or “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” or “Eat drink and be merry.”[14] He instead presents the story of a crucified God. When we present the Gospel story, we are to tell the same story, of the God who confronts death on our behalf, to save us.

Good news, indeed.

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[1] Luke 24:25-27, emphasis mine.

[2] Luke 24:32.

[3] See “The Container Matters” in ‘Chapter 10, The Slow Life: Hospitality.’

[4] See Greg Boyd’s work on the beauty of the crucified God and the cross as the central revelation of how beautiful God is. The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Vols. 1 and 2 by Gregory Boyd. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN. 2017.

[5] Cf. Acts 8:26-40.

[6] See, for example, John Collin’s The Scepter and the Star. Anchor Bible Reference, New Haven, CT. 1995. Collins illuminates the understanding of the Messiah in the Qumran community, contemporary with Jesus.

[7] Matthew 27:46.

[8] Theologians note that even if tragedy lies outside of God’s desired will, he still allows it within his passive will—i.e., that which he does not prevent. We all know that in the moment of suffering, it’s hard to make these distinctions between what God causes and what He allows, but it’s crucial to understand that God does not cause suffering and, far from it, is actually with us in it. Paul’s theology of a suffering creation groaning to be redeemed in Romans 8 surely implies a God groaning with the suffering world. Again, if Jesus is the revelation of God, God is not only the All-Powerful but also the All-Vulnerable one. If you don’t know this reality of God, “God” will ultimately make no sense.

[9] As the Bible often points to. See, for example, Isaiah 63:9: “In all [His people’s] suffering, He also suffered.”

[10] Matthew 1:23.

[11] See Philippians 2:5-11.

[12] See “What is the Story of Scripture?” in ‘Chapter 11, The Grounded Life, Scripture.’

[13] See John 3:16, 17:3.

[14] Dr. Keating in Dead Poets Society. Film, directed by Peter Weir. Touchstone Pictures. 1989. “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick. And a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 8:15.