The Way of Suffering

As I meditate on Jesus’ passionate prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, his human agony and suffering on full display, I am reminded how often we followers of Jesus also long for God to provide another way for us as well in the face of our own suffering. We do not want to follow Jesus down the Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering. We seek to follow the victorious entry of the Messiah into Jerusalem to be enthroned and crowned the king. We want that kind of victory borne out in our lives as the absence of difficulty. We want the glory and the grandeur of Palm Sunday as our entry into eternal life with as little pain and suffering as possible. But as author Kim Reisman has noted, “That is not the Jesus way. God doesn’t dispense with death. God resurrects us from it. The truth is that the Jesus way isn’t about God taking pain away from God’s people; it’s about God providing us with strength, courage, and meaning, with abundant life, often in the midst of pain.” The Way of Suffering