Sympathetic Pains

I’m not a big fan of sympathetic pain. I suffer from it. If you tell me you have a tooth ache, I will feel pain in my own mouth. Stomach, head ache, any other ache, I suffer the same thing. This may make me more compassionate and caring but it can be a real pain, literally. When my wife was pregnant with our son I had real issues with her morning sickness. Maybe that is why we didn’t have any more children. At this time of year my malady becomes acute when I think back on all that Jesus went through for me on Good Friday.

I love Holy Week. I am thankful – grateful – for all that Jesus endured on my behalf. His suffering was my gain. When we read the biblical accounts of the Passions Narrative, they seem to be sanitized. They do not adequately portray what Jesus actually underwent at the hands of his tormentors. With the release of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” the actual brutality of Jesus’ suffering jumps out of the screen with such force it knocks you over, if not out. I do not know how anyone cannot suffer some form of sympathetic pain watching those scenes. It is gory and grotesque. When I viewed the film – and mind you, I could only stand to see it once – I was graciously spared from the full impact of the whipping part. I was summoned to answer the phone at the portion where Jesus was flogged. I returned at the point where Mary was wiping up the blood. Even that was too much for my fragile constitution. That movie indelibly etched the true nature of the Passion in my mind and the minds of millions of viewers. Then, each year those images are reawakened in my mind as I remember our Lord’s Passion.

The question remains, though, will the events that are portrayed in that movie have any impact on your Good Friday? For me, suffering from sympathetic pain, it does. Even writing this I am getting prickly feelings on my back just thinking about Jesus being scourged. If I take the time – which I probably will not – I could feel sensations in other areas of my body too. But these little sympathetic pains bear little resemblance to what Jesus truly suffered and endured. His pain was real. Mine is only a figment of my imagination. His blood was real. His torn flesh was real. Jesus can sympathize with the pains and our true condition we have in life because he has suffered real true pain too. These are not sympathetic pains but actual true suffering. And on the cross, when he took on all of our sins as the sacrificial Lamb of God, for the first time in his life, he knew what it meant to be cut off from intimate fellowship with God. We are used to it, he was not. For us it is normal, for him it was rude awakening. He came to return the possibility of that full relationship with God for us, and to us. It was at this point that Jesus exclaimed, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” The closeness of their relationship was ripped away from him just as brutally as the skin on his back.

 

While Jesus Christ can sympathize with us, we can never sympathize with him. Even in our most pathetic efforts to understand what he went through we come up short. The implications of what he did echo through eternity, praise God! We tend to minimize or sanitize what Jesus endured. We seldom try to fill in the details in the biblical account left out by the gospel writers. We rarely engage our imaginations to even partially enter into his suffering and pain. I was overwhelmed several years ago when I came across a medical doctor’s diagnosis of what Jesus’ body was going through during all of this. He explored all of the possible ramifications of the brutal beating, the crown of thorns, the cross bar of the execution cross, in addition to the hunger, thirst and myriad other physical ailments that were occurring. After perusing the medical record I was astounded at how Jesus even lived long enough to make it to the cross. Needless to say, for the faint-hearted like me, this was somber reading. But Jesus had a mission to complete and nothing short of the cross would accomplish the purpose for which he came.

To enter fully into Easter, we must go through Good Friday. We need to understand what Jesus accomplished on Good Friday. That is where we find its meaning, not in sympathy but in actuality. We don’t stay on Good Friday because we are resurrection people. We cannot minimize what was accomplished on that fateful day Friday 2000 years ago. With my sympathetic pain, all I can say is that I would not have survived. I am eternally grateful. I am also eternally grateful that the cross wasn’t the last word! The empty tomb is the last word. As St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death is your victory? Where O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:54-55) Or as Tony Campolo wrote about, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s comin!” Alleluia. Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.