The Communion of Christ's Sufferings
In Philippians 3:10-11, St. Paul says that the goal of his faith in Jesus Christ is, "That I may know [Christ] and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead." The word for fellowship is the same Greek word “koinonia” that is used to describe Holy Communion (1 Cor. 10:16). It could be translated as "the communion of Christ's sufferings." What does this mean?
Legitimate and False Suffering
We try to avoid pain. We buy products to relieve the pain of unfulfilled appetites. We buy medicines to relieve bodily pain. We turn to faith for comfort—to relieve our pain. None of these are inherently bad. My pain has been relieved by all three. The problem arises when we assume that all suffering can or should be avoided and life becomes a flight from pain.
Carl Jung famously said that “neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” This implies that some forms of suffering must be faced, endured, and worked through rather than avoided. This is biblical (cf. Rom. 8:17, Phil. 1:29, 2 Tim. 3:12, 1 Pet. 2:19-21). When legitimate suffering is avoided, the result is another kind of pain—a false pain.
What is legitimate suffering? For example, if someone I love dies I must face the necessary pain of loss, which naturally leads to a season of grieving. This is painful, but it is necessary to emotional and spiritual health. If I avoid my sadness and grief I will experience another kind of pain; the psychological pain of unresolved loss. The grief will still be there, but I will experience, instead, the pain of denial, of pretending it is not so. Our contemporary tendency to turn all funerals into “celebrations” without space for mourning contributes to the avoidance of this necessary pain.
Or, say I am struggling against temptation. To resist the temptation, I must be willing to endure the pain of saying no to something that looks attractive but will not be pleasing to God or good for me. See Jesus in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-11) and in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:36-46); he embraced the legitimate pain of obedience as the pathway to the resurrection. And see Adam and Eve in Genesis 3; they avoided the legitimate pain of resisting temptation and, instead, experienced the deeper and longer lasting pain of guilt, shame, fear, and separation from God.
Or, say I have a conflict with someone who has violated our relational trust. There will be a struggle as I wrestle with how to express myself clearly and truthfully while not acting in anger or from a desire for revenge. It will require that I face and work through my own legitimate emotions in prayer and spiritual conversations. This is the legitimate pain of trying to love in the tensioned spaces of life. I can try to avoid this legitimate pain by pretending the offense was no big deal or by running away from the conflict. However, this will result in the false pain of lingering resentment, anger, and anxiety about seeing the person again.
Underlying the avoidance of legitimate suffering is the fear of death. We are afraid of losing things. Therefore, we try to avoid discomfort and loss because they remind us that everything we have is temporary. We try to avoid the temporary losses in the hope that we can somehow avoid, or at least continue to put off, the permanent ones. Hebrews identifies this as a root human fear when it says that Jesus became like us and shared in our human experience so that “through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Heb. 2:14-15).
The Goal of Legitimate Suffering
In his suffering and death for us, Christ redeemed our suffering and turned it into the pathway to life (cf. 2 Cor. 4:10). In Christ, the legitimate pain of life becomes our share of the Cross that leads to our share of the Resurrection. However, participation in the cross and the life the flows from it requires surrender—giving up control. It means accepting God’s will, facing the reality of things as they are, and letting go of our need for things to be different.
The prayer of Jesus in the Garden of the Gethsemane teaches us this surrender. Jesus prayed, “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will" (Matt. 26:39). This is the attitude we bring to our pain “in Christ.” We ask our heavenly Father to relieve our pain in various ways—and he frequently does. However, through faith in Jesus Christ we will embrace the necessary pain of faithfulness and obedience as the pathway to resurrection and life.
Fasting helps us to practice surrender. When we fast we let go of things. The things we let go of are things we use to manage and control our pain; or they are things we do to keep busy so that we do not have to stop and face ourselves and the pain we feel. When we take away the coping mechanisms, we must face our interior pain head on. This is the space created by a good Lent. We detach from things, face our legitimate pain, and turn our pain into prayer, asking Christ to heal the wounds and fill the empty spaces with himself.
As we practice this pattern for the season of Lent, our legitimate pain becomes the doorway through which we enter into communion with the crucified Christ. On the cross Jesus said, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:24, Ps. 22:1). In taking upon himself our sin, he experienced for us and with us what it feels like to be alienated from God and other people—the basic human pain of rejection, loneliness, and abandonment. When our legitimate pain becomes the ground of our prayer, our loneliness and alienation become spaces of communion with the Crucified Christ and a gateway to a renewed experience of the power of his resurrection.
As Philippians says, "That I may know [Christ] and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead."