On Meaningless and Meaningful Suffering and Sacrifice

There is a peculiar moment that happens in nearly every gym across the country sometime around the end of January. The crowds that surged in on New Year’s Day, fueled by resolutions and the conviction that this year, this year, would be different, begin to thin. By February, the parking lot has emptied considerably. By March, only the regulars remain.

Why? Not because suffering is unbearable. People can suffer remarkable things when the suffering means something. The treadmill sits empty because, somewhere along the way, the pain stopped connecting to anything larger than itself.

This small observation about human nature opens onto one of the deepest mysteries of the Christian life. We are a people who speak constantly of sacrifice, of taking up our crosses, of offering up our sufferings. But there is a question we rarely pause to ask, and it is a question worth asking with great care: Does our sacrifice actually mean anything?

The answer, strangely, is both yes and no.

 

The Sacrifice That Means Nothing

Let us begin with an uncomfortable truth: there is nothing inherently redemptive about suffering.

I know this might come as a surprise, because I often talk about how suffering has meaning, I speak of redemptive suffering, how we can "offer it up," and the like. I'm not changing my tune on that. I live this reality out every day. But I am offering a necessary clarification, pointing out a way that this perspective on suffering can be misunderstood.

Pain, by itself, is not holy.

The man who suffers a broken leg is not, by virtue of that broken leg, closer to God. The woman who endures a difficult illness is not automatically a saint. The person who fasts severely is not, simply by fasting, transformed.

Suffering as a brute fact is just suffering. It can embitter as easily as it ennobles. It can harden the heart as quickly as it softens it.

This is a hard truth, but it is one we must hear.

There is a temptation in Christian piety, particularly among those who take their faith seriously, to imagine that we can construct a kind of spiritual ledger. We add up our discomforts, our denials, our daily crosses, and we present this account to God as evidence of our love.

We have suffered, therefore we have loved. We have sacrificed, therefore we have earned something.

But this is precisely backward. Saint Paul tells it like it is: “If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3, NRSV).

Notice what Paul is willing to imagine: a martyrdom without love. A handing over of the body itself, the ultimate sacrifice in human reckoning, that gains nothing.

How can this be? Because sacrifice in itself is not the point.

Sacrifice is not currency. It is not the price we pay to purchase God’s heart.

The God revealed in Jesus Christ is not a divine accountant tallying our pains and weighing them against our blessings.

So why, then, did Christ tell us to take up our cross? Why has the Christian tradition consistently held that suffering, when joined to faith, becomes something profound?

The answer lies in a single word: participation.

 

The One Sacrifice

There has never been a love greater than when Christ took up His cross.

This is not a sentimental claim. It is a metaphysical one.

On Calvary, the infinite love of God for humanity poured itself out in a single, unrepeatable act of self-gift. The Letter to the Hebrews insists on this, telling us that Christ “entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9:12).

Once for all. The Greek phrase here is ephapax, and it carries the weight of finality. There is no second sacrifice. There can be no second sacrifice. What Christ did on the cross is complete, sufficient, and infinite in its merit.

This creates a problem, or what appears to be a problem. If Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient, what role can our sacrifices possibly play? Are they superfluous? Are they merely symbolic gestures of gratitude, with no real spiritual weight?

Here we encounter one of the most extraordinary statements in all of Scripture. Paul writes to the Colossians: “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24).

What is lacking in Christ’s afflictions? On its face, the statement seems almost blasphemous. How can anything be lacking in the perfect sacrifice of the Son of God? Nothing is lacking in its merit, nothing is lacking in its sufficiency, nothing is lacking in its redemptive power.

What is “lacking” is something else entirely: the participation of the members of His Body.

The sacrifice is complete in its source, but it must be received, entered into, lived out in the lives and deaths of those who belong to Christ.

This is the great mystery. Our sufferings do not add to Christ’s sacrifice as if it were insufficient. They do not earn merit as if His merit were not enough. Rather, they are drawn into His sacrifice, incorporated into it, made meaningful by their union with the One who is meaning itself.

 

The Vine and the Branches

Christ gave us the image we need to understand this when He said: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

A branch produces fruit. The fruit is real fruit, genuine fruit, the branch’s own fruit in some real sense. And yet, the branch produces nothing of itself.

Every drop of life in that fruit, every molecule of sweetness, every fiber of substance, has come up from the vine through the branch. The branch is not a passive conduit, nor is it an independent producer.

It is a participant.

The fruit is genuinely the branch’s, and yet entirely the vine’s.

This is what our sufferings become when joined to Christ. They are genuinely ours. They cost us something real. The pain is real, the loss is real, the dying is real. And yet the meaning, the merit, the redemptive power, all of these flow from the Vine.

Apart from Him, our sufferings produce nothing. In Him, they bear eternal fruit.

This is why the Christian life is never properly described as a transaction.

It is always a communion.

We do not pay God in suffering; we are joined to the One who suffered.

We do not earn grace through our crosses; we are drawn into the cross that earned grace for the world.

 

Why All Theology is Mystical Theology

There is a reason that the deepest Christian theology has always tended toward the mystical. It is not because mystics are less rigorous than systematic theologians. Often, they are more rigorous, in the sense that they refuse to stop where rational categories run out.

They press on into the territory where the mind kneels and the heart begins to see.

The mystery of sacrifice belongs to this territory. We can say, precisely, that our sufferings participate in Christ’s.

But what does participate mean? What does it look like, feel like, become, in the actual life of a soul? Here words begin to fail, and the only response is the response of love, which is to enter in. This is the essence of koinonia—a Greek concept that transcends simple "fellowship" to describe a profound, shared intimacy and a common life held in trust. It's the word most often translated as "communion." It's why Paul calls the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ given in the appearance of bread and wine, a true participation, a communion, a koinonia in Christ's suffering and death.

It is the realization that we do not merely observe the divine from a distance, but are woven into a living communion where the boundaries between the self and the Beloved begin to dissolve.

Saint Paul, who had wrestled with this mystery as deeply as anyone, finally gave up trying to explain it and simply confessed it: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:19-20).

Notice the strange grammar of this confession. “I have been crucified” and yet “I live.” “It is no longer I who live” and yet “the life I now live.”

Paul is not being sloppy. He is describing the only way the human language can describe what happens when a soul is joined to Christ in His passion. The “I” both dies and lives, both empties itself and is filled, both gives up everything and receives everything.

 

Taking Up and Following

Now we can understand what Christ meant when He said: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).

There are three movements here, and we tend to focus on only the first two. We hear “deny yourself” and “take up your cross,” and we think we have understood the saying. But the third movement, “follow me,” is not an addendum. It is the entire point.

Taking up one’s cross alone does nothing. Taking up one’s cross and following does everything.

A cross taken up on our "own path" that doesn't follow His path is just a burden. It is dead weight. It crushes without redeeming. But a cross taken up while following Christ becomes something altogether different. It becomes the very means of our union with Him.

The path He walked, we walk. The death He died, we die. The life He lives, we begin to live.

 

Living This Mystery

How, then, do we live this in the ordinary texture of our days? Let me suggest a few practices that might help to turn this theology into life.

First, examine the meaning you assign to your suffering. When difficulty comes, our instinct is either to resent it or to try to extract meaning from it ourselves. Both responses keep us at the center. Try instead to consciously, simply, offer the suffering to Christ and ask to be joined to His. Not “make this worth it, Lord,” but “let this be Yours, Lord.”

The prayer when we suffer isn't, "Lord, bring something good out of this for me" (that's ultimately self-serving, if we're honest about it, even though God does work out all things for good for those who love Him. It's just not the this-worldly "good" we usually think when we talk this way), but "Lord, unite my suffering to Yours, embrace me in your Love, and transform my suffering into a communion in You."

The difference is everything.

Second, beware of spiritual accounting. Notice when you find yourself tallying your sacrifices, mentally presenting them to God, expecting some return. This is the old commerce of pagan religion, and it is exhausting because it is false. You have nothing to offer that He has not first given. Even your suffering is His before it is yours.

Third, cultivate the daily yes. Most of our crosses are not dramatic. They are the small frustrations, the quiet disappointments, the unseen sacrifices of love that fill an ordinary life. Each one is an opportunity to whisper a small fiat, a small “yes,” joining this little death to the great death of Christ. Over time, these small yeses become the substance of a life transformed.

Finally, follow. This is the heart of everything. Do not merely accept your cross. Do not merely endure it. Walk with the One who walks ahead of you, who has already walked this road, who knows every stone, who fell under the weight of the cross but wasn't dissuaded. Keep your eyes on Him. The cross becomes light when He carries it with you, and heavy beyond bearing when you try to carry it alone.

The good news of the Gospel is not that suffering has been abolished. It is that suffering, joined to Christ, has been transfigured. It is no longer a wall but a door. No longer an end but a way. No longer a price we pay but a love we share.

This is the love that took up the cross. This is the love that bids us follow. And when we take up our crosses and follow, when our suffering becomes koinonia, participation, communion, they very thing most of the world avoids the most (suffering) becomes a doorway into the very thing our hearts long for the most: true union with our Maker, our Lord, our Savior.

It is in this kind of violence against our humanity, which all suffering is at some level, that we find full humanity restored in the image of the Creator who took on human flesh, and entered into the depths of suffering, sorrow, and even God-forsakenness, so that when we're in the midst of it, we will not suffer alone. Our suffering becomes meaningful because His suffering meant everything. Our death, even, becomes love, because His death became life.