Kuruvilla Joseph Pandikattu SJ
Innsbruck, Austria

The victims of the war in Ukraine and the thousands who go to bed hungry remind us of the suffering and evil present in our midst. Paul Tillich, the German Protestant theologian, has claimed that original sin is the most verifiable Christian dogma. Yes, we see traces of sin and suffering everywhere. The thousands of people exploited and killed on a regular basis, be it during the wars around the world or on the streets, point to the presence of suffering and death. So it is natural we can agree with the Buddhist insight that “everything is suffering” (sarvam dukham)! This is the first of the four noble truths.

The Role of Suffering in Our Lives
We want to eliminate suffering or at least reduce it. But we do not succeed all the time! So the fundamental insight of another great German thinker makes sense. “Anything that does not kill me makes me stronger.” Friedrich Nietzsche, the humanistic atheistic thinker, is convinced that suffering born with patience can make us more resilient and strong. Yes, we cannot avoid suffering all the time. But suffering has a function in human life. It makes us courageous and thus contributes to life.
At the same time, we also know that sometimes suffering and pain can be deeply crippling and humiliating. They can destabilise or paralyse us. Still worse, they can kill us bodily, psychologically or even spiritually. So it is tragic that the suffering, sometimes, can truly incapacitate us, robbing life of its dignity and grandeur.
As Christians, we are called to experience the suffering of ourselves and those close to us. So Pope Francis tells us: “If you don’t learn how to cry, you cannot be a good Christian. When they posed this question to us – why children suffer, why this or that tragedy occurs in life – our response must be either silence or a word that is born of our tears. Be courageous, don’t be afraid to cry.”

The Meaning of Suffering
It is in this context that we can reflect on the life, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. He lived a genuine and honest life and paid the price for it with his own death. His life and death was an abject failure. He felt abandonment and felt the terrible and painful loss of his own life and everything that he lived for. An innocent man was slaughtered. He felt abandoned and betrayed. His followers deserted him. He felt the agonising pain of not being wanted and being useless.

“It is our faith assertion that in spite of the outward appearances, the power of love and that of goodness is transforming every of today’s lives!”

Here, Nietzsche comes to our aid. He who has found a WHY can cope with any HOW. Once we recognise the meaning and purpose of our terrible suffering, it gives us some means to cope with it. The purpose of our living and dying can help us make sense of our lives, as shown by the many martyrs who gave up their lives for nobler and larger causes.
At this point, we experience the power of resurrection, which is a free gift of the Father. It is the triumph of love over hatred and evil. It is not something that we deserve. It is a gratuitous gift bestowed on us by the all-powerful and all-loving God. We do not deserve it. It affirms that the Father does not abandon us, even when everyone and everything around seems to be really hopeless.

Experience of Love, Goodness and Grace
Resurrection is the deeper experience of the goodness of all that is around us, with all its brokenness and evil. It is the continuation of the creation story, where God found the whole of creation good and repeated this. It is faith that finally, love overcomes all our suffering, transforms our pains and conquers the tragedies of existence.
And when we refer to the memorial of the paschal mystery (that is, life, death and resurrection) of Jesus, we are affirming that this is taking place every day of our life. It is much more than the remembering of the death and resurrection of Christ that took place 2000 years ago. It is our faith assertion that in spite of the outward appearances, the power of love and that of goodness is transforming every of today’s lives!
Yes, sin is real. Suffering is very much there. Evil permeates everything. Human beings are deeply selfish. Innocent children are still slaughtered. The wars around us kill so many people and rob them of their dream and destiny.
Still, love triumphs. Goodness is the final answer to our deepest longings. Because love and goodness are not always noisy or news-making, we may not always recognise that there is so much goodness all around us! Within us!
Thus the resurrection of Jesus is not God’s reward to Jesus for his good and genuine life. It is God’s unconditional and unasked-for gift because everything is graced. God has truly blessed the whole of creation!
So sin and evil is part of our experience. But suffering and death, we can say, is not God’s punishment for sin, as Karl Rahner says. It is also not an expression of God’s unbridgeable distance from us. God is more close and intimate to us than we are to ourselves, as St. Augustine remind us, even when we cry out in pain and despair.
So resurrection implies that death does not have the last word, in the loving scheme of God in creating and maintaining our world. The last and final word regarding our world, we believe, belongs to life, life in its fullness (Jn 3: 16).

Faith in Fellow-Human Beings
The death and resurrection of Jesus further assert the unique roles of human beings. Their freedom, action in history, and relationality among themselves are reaffirmed. Our love and respect for one another in God is rediscovered.
So, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church holds, “Because of Christ, Christian death has a positive meaning. Physical death completes the dying with Christ and so completes our incorporation unto him in his redeeming act.”
So for us Christians, in death, life is not ended but changed. It is changed, along with the whole of God’s creation, into an abundance of love, grace and goodness.
So Christian life is a life of faith in God. Faith in an all-loving God who transforms and completes the whole of creation in love. Faith in our fellow human beings that they are good, despite their shortcomings and failures. Faith in own weakness, vulnerabilities and even evil and the still stronger conviction that love will transform them.

Conclusion
Our Christian faith acknowledges the terrible, painful and tragic situation around us. It realises that so many millions of people had been exploited and murdered. It recognises that our common history is far from being just. And that we are all part of a deeply selfish system that has profited from the unjust exploitation and extermination of the weak and vulnerable. Still, it holds, in all humility, that we can be forgiven.
It recognises that only God, in His absolute goodness and unconditional love, can forgive us of the harm that we have been doing to ourselves. It believes that God does heal us radically, reconcile us with ourselves and with Himself.
Thus the celebration of the paschal mystery is recognition of the evil and sinfulness within and among us. It is a modest and humble acceptance that our selfishness and greed have caused so much pain and harm. At the same time, it recognises that the healing comes not from ourselves but from the Lord, who alone is Absolute Love and Goodness. So, the resurrection is the experience of forgiveness, healing and transformation. It is the transformation of all our tragic pain: physical, mental, spiritual, individual, collective, existential and ecological. It is the realisation that ultimately our life and the world is touched by unconditional love, absolute goodness and unasked for grace.
Thus, the Christian experience of resurrection involves that we acknowledge the terrible pain and useless bloodshed, accept them as inevitable and mysterious parts of our lives and transform them by the absolute power of God’s freely given Grace. It affirms evil in our real world, does not absolutise it; it acknowledge the power of love and absolutises it.