How do you react to this picture of the dead Jesus in his mothers arms?When someone suggested putting the picture in a chapel, I heard one man say No: look at his feet. We dont want to bring that into the church. That is one possible reaction to that aspect of the picture. It expresses one kind of Christianity, a kind that, whether it says so explicitly or not, seeks in religion an escape from the unpleasantness of real life.
I have a problem with this. If a person with feet like that came to your church, would you expect them to leave their feet outside the church? If we go to church or pray in private, to escape from the nasty world we live in, isnt that using our religion as what Lenin called a cheap kind of spiritual vodka?
Jesus did share in real human suffering. He really died, a most painful and shameful death, or he could not have risen from the dead. Wasnt it St. Paul who said Jesus was like us in all things but sin? He didnt do that to help us escape from our real sufferings in the real world. He, who is God, faced the worst of human suffering and won through to rise from the dead. He overcame all that oppresses us by living through it.
We wont win through if we cant live through our real experience and name it by its name. That is very hard for unaided human nature, but Christians believe he is with us. He can help us because he has been through it all himself.
As we say in the Apostles Creed: he suffered, died and was buried.
But then we add on the third day he rose again.
The only way to resurrection is through death. That is hard, but it is possible because he is with us all the way. That is the way God chose.
He could have, by a word, have said pain is not real and it would not be. Some religions, I hear, say this, but we know it is real. Some pains, like the pain of a healing wound or of a broken bone setting, tell us that natures healing is working. Others, like the pain of a septic wound, tell us something is wrong. It is good to feel these. In the first case, it is best to rest, endure it and let nature take its course.
I am not saying dont use medicines to reduce it if it is too great, but it wont do us any good to kill it and go on as if there was nothing going on that causes pain. In the second case, this would be more dangerous than in the first.