Suffering and the Good Life

When we think about suffering in relation to the good life it helps to make some distinctions about the different kinds of suffering we experience as well as the different connotations that attend the word ‘good.’

A major component of what we commonly think of as a good life would be the happy life. The happy life, as we are using it there, is a life of comfort and ease spared of any and all kinds of suffering. In a way, it is a natural longing we all ought to have. We all perceive a kind of innate enmity between our happiness and those things that cause us to suffer. For someone to express that they desire a life full of suffering would be cause for concern. We all want to be happy and part of our quest for happiness involves preventing or minimizing our exposure to suffering.

The tragic irony, however, is that in our pursuit of securing the happy life for ourselves, we often end up increasing the possibility of suffering for others. As Americans, we all know those famous words embedded in our nation’s constitution:

Constitution of the United States

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The problem arises when our unalienable right to pursue our happiness is challenged by someone else’s, or some other nation’s unalienable right to pursue theirs. On the global level, most often what happens is war. Nations war against one another for many reasons, but a constant and enduring one is to protect or acquire those resources that will best ensure happiness in the long run. Human history is, in many ways, simply the long, bloody march of one war after another in the pursuit of happiness.

Of course, this plays out often enough in our personal lives as well. The pursuit of our own individual happiness often comes at the expense of someone’s else happiness, whether we are cognizant of that reality or not. The things that bring us happiness — the food we eat, the clothes we buy, the phones we stare at, the list goes on and on — all come to us on the backs of others who must bear the burden of making those goods and services accessible, convenient and affordable for us.

In the Christian tradition we are taught not to think of happiness as a right, but rather, as a gift. It is not something we pursue, but something that comes to us, that we receive. What is more, what we find in the biblical narrative is that ultimately, the truly happy life is unattainable for us living as we do in the world as it is and not yet as it will be. That is, the horizon of human history is the Second Coming of Christ. It is the day the prophets of old testified about:

Micah 4:1-4

1 In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s temple
shall be established as the highest of the mountains
and shall be raised up above the hills.
Peoples shall stream to it,
2 and many nations shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
3 He shall judge between many peoples
and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war any more;
4 but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid,
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

The prophetic vision of happiness captured in the poignant image of all sitting under their own vine and fig trees is set against the stilling of warring nations. It is difficult to say whether swords are beaten into plowshares because provision has been made such that all can enjoy happiness under their own vine and fig tress, or that all can enjoy happiness because weapons of mass destruction have been turned into tools for fishing. What we can say is that this day that is yet to come is a day made possible through the gracious hand of God. We do not bring this day about by our own ingenuity and achievement. It only comes about through the good and faithful judgment of God.

And until this day comes to pass, the council of Scripture advises us to expect, and in some ways welcome, suffering.

As St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Philippians:

Philippians 1:29

29 For he has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ but of suffering for him as well,

To be clear, suffering for Christ is not about the kind of suffering inflicted on us through circumstance and sheer dumb luck. As if we are to consider it a privilege to have to suffer through cancer or to suffer the loss of a loved one or to have to suffer the calamitous fallout of a natural disaster. The suffering Paul has in mind is a kind of suffering that comes to us because we have chosen to give up our “right” to doggedly maximize our happiness quotient in this life.

This is not to say that happiness does not matter. The Christian ethic does not follow a kind of stoic denial of pleasures. It is not about detaching ourselves from what makes us happy. What the story of Christ reveals to us is that God desires our happiness and yet we must wait — wait for that day in which all of God’s promises foretold in Scripture will absolutely and fully come to pass. Our lives are lived in anticipation now of God being faithful to that promise then.

In the meantime we are given something of a foretaste. The death and resurrection of our Lord is, as the Apostle Paul puts it, the firstfruits pointing to that long awaited harvest (1 Cor. 15) — that what God did for Jesus in raising him up out of the grave is a kind of down payment assuring us that God will one day make good on his word and do the same for us.

So the suffering we are to expect and, as Paul seems to intimate, welcome, is the suffering that comes to us because we live in eager anticipation of a day that the world is yet unable to see. If we see happiness as something that ultimately will be realized fully in the future, we are less anxious about maximizing our own happiness in the present. But in doing so we may often find ourselves on the other side of the happiness equation. As others pursue happiness, we may feel like we are losing out and, in some cases, may suffer precisely because we have been given the short end of the stick due to the determination of others in securing their own happiness.

This suffering is tied to that sinking feeling we are not getting all that we assume we have a right to. That we are being looked over. That our labor and care in keeping with what we believe is good and right is not being recognized. In Paul’s day, this suffering is synonymous with persecution. In its most extreme form this is the suffering of the martyrs, who gave their lives in service to the promise that what was taken from them will one day be restored; thus, enabling them to risk love of enemy even when such love required them to suffer to the point of death. This is the most extreme response of a world unable to envision the good news at the heart of the Christian revelation about Jesus, the world, and the happy end God intends for us all.

Of course, none of this is easy. We may feel we are nowhere near the example given to us by the martyrs. We may not even think that that ought to be our aim. Whatever the case, wherever we find ourselves, we must have the sober outlook that the good life Christ calls us into will not be devoid of some kind of suffering. “In this world,” Jesus reminds us, “you will have trouble.” But we take heart because we know that Jesus has overcome the world (John 16:33). This means that though the good life is not one without its share of suffering, we are, nevertheless, carried along by the hope that in the end our happiness will be made complete when we, along with all creation, “will be set free from [our] enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God,” (Rom 8:21).

Amen.