The Same Kinds of Suffering

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.  If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you. 

Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen. 

1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11; lectionary epistle for Sunday May 24, 2020

It was years ago, now, that I was riding home on the Metro one winter evening, lost and alone in my own bad news, trapped behind a glass wall of grief.  The train driver told a joke, and the mouth of the man opposite twitched in appreciation, and the movement caught my eye, and my gaze his, but I did not smile, only looked through him for a minute till we both turned away.  If I had smiled, I think he would have smiled back.  He would have been a sort of brother.  I would have felt glad of the connection.  Instead I sat there in my own unhappiness, in the Metro car with strangers.  I had the wit to recognize the tension but not the will to break through the wall.

1 Peter’s word hits hard against that glass wall, reminds us that while our griefs may be profoundly unique, there is a unity in suffering.   We confuse the two, I realize, grief and suffering.  As, perhaps, we confuse gladness in all its wildly various forms with its common wellspring of joy.  Grief does constrain and imprison us … unless, until, we are drawn to see past our own particulars to the underlying unity.

‘Your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering,’ Peter reminds us.  ‘All the world’?  The phrase hits close in this time of pandemic.  The losses mount.   Too often they are set against each other.   Save lives but kill the economy.  Individual liberty opposes community welfare.  I learn of a death, ‘non-COVID caused,’ and I wonder at the need to distinguish it for those of us without epidemiological responsibilities.  Is this death somehow separate from the others?  Is there therefore less pain? or more?

Peter writes not only ‘all the world’ but also ‘the same kinds of suffering.’  As if all these pains should not be treated as distinct and opposing.  As if to distinguish my distress from yours is to miss the gospel promise.  ‘Do not be surprised,’ Peter admonishes, ‘as though something strange were happening.’  Yes, the particular suffering Peter describes comes of calling on the name of Christ within an empire that acclaims Caesar.  But the ground of Peter’s claim of Christ is that Christ participated fully in humanity, ‘suffered in the flesh’ (1 Peter 4:1).  This is the sameness that underlies our suffering.  Tap into this wellspring that connects our suffering with God’s own, and the suffering we experience in our flesh becomes what Peter describes:  suffering with and for Christ — so that we ‘may also be glad and shout for joy’ in Christ (1 Peter 4:13).

It feels premature even to imagine being glad and shouting for joy.  This pandemic continues to unfold, and the shape of its process remains murky.  So many losses already — lives, jobs, plans.  We cannot even know how many more losses we will suffer.  But the very universality of this virus invites a recognition that suffering is not a matter of various kinds but of ‘the same kind.’ It can connect us or, more accurately, reveals what has always been true:  we are all connected.  Maybe reading 1 Peter can rewrite our experience of pandemic; or perhaps the current context of global convulsion may allow us to read 1 Peter anew and suddenly, shockingly, plain.  

I imagine myself again on the Metro.  Looking across at the stranger whose mouth had just twitched.  He, too, must know grief and uncertainty and loss and pain.  Each one of us might have true cause to feel ourselves kept separate by the glass walls of our individual experience, rightly divided by the unique peculiarities of our distinct distresses.  Yet together we are — all of us — on the same side of the wall, the side to which Christ in flesh came, on which Christ in flesh suffered.  

I am not alone behind a wall but together with brothers and sisters in all the world.  Nor are we — together, in our same kinds of suffering — alone behind a wall.  God has reached across the wall to ‘himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish’ us.  Let us, then, work to restore, support, strengthen and establish each other.

Beloved, do not be surprised.  Be sustained in unity with Christ.