Lenten Devotional: Suffering in Solidarity

It must be clear to us that most people learn only through personal experience occurring to their own bodies. First, this explains why most people are remarkably incapable of any sort of preventative action. We keep thinking that we ourselves will be spared when disaster strikes—until it is too late. Second, it explains our insensitivity toward the suffering of others; solidarity with suffering arises in proportion to our own increasing fear of imminent doom.

Much can be said to justify this attitude. Ethically, we wish to avoid meddling with fate. We draw the inner calling and strength for action only from an actual and present crisis. We are not responsible for all the injustice and suffering in the world, nor do we wish to judge the whole world. Psychologically, our lack of imagination, sensitivity, and inner readiness is balanced by a kind of unwavering calmness, an undisturbed ability to work, and a great capacity for suffering.

From a Christian perspective, though, none of these justifications can conceal that the real issue here is our hearts' lack of magnanimity. Christ avoided suffering until his hour had come; then, however, he went to it in freedom, seized it, and overcame it. Christ—so scripture tells us—experienced all the suffering of all human beings on his own body and as his own suffering (an incomprehensibly lofty notion!), and took it upon himself in freedom.

We are certainly not Christ ourselves, nor are we called to redeem the world through our own actions and our own suffering, nor should we burden ourselves with the impossible and then castigate our own inability to bear it. No, we are not lords, we are instruments in the hand of the Lord of history. Only to an extremely limited degree are we really able to join with other human beings in suffering. Although we are not Christ, if we want to be Christians we must participate in Christ's own magnanimous heart by engaging in responsible action that seizes the hour in complete freedom, facing the danger. And we should do so in genuine solidarity with suffering flowing forth, not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ toward all who suffer. Inactive "waiting-and-seeing" or impassive "standing-by" are not Christian attitudes.

Christians are prompted to action and suffering in solidarity not just by personal bodily experience, but by the experience incurred by their fellows for whose sake Christ himself suffered.

Excerpted from: Meditations on the Cross by Dietrich Bonhoeffer