The following is a modified version of an essay which I submitted for "IN TOUCH", a newsletter for young people published by people in my church fellowship.

June 7, 2004

Dear IN TOUCH,

My grandfather, Aldridge Johnson, died on Friday, May 7th.

My sister Laura (Harrelson), her husband Jeremiah, and their daughter Isabel recently visited from England. I am glad that they were able to visit with my grandfather before he died. This was an answer to prayer -- the prayers of Grandpa, myself, and others whom I asked to pray. My brother Michael, his wife Kim, and their daughter Eleanor also were able to visit Grandpa.

Reflections on Grandpa's farewell message.

At the funeral, Wayne Davis shared the message that Grandpa had given for the assembly before he died:

2 Corinthians 1:3-7. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and God of all comfort, who comforts us in our every distress so that we can comfort those in every distress through the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ abound unto us, so through Christ our comfort also abounds. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort which works in endurance of the same sufferings which we also suffer. And our hope for you is established, knowing that as ye are sharers of the sufferings, thus also of the comfort."

Grandpa: "We need to fully enter into the sufferings of Christ."
John Rowe: "We can't fully enter into Christ's sufferings, can we?"
Grandpa: "No, probably not. It is by entering into the sufferings of Christ that we are able to comfort one another."

[note: By the word "fully", maybe Grandpa meant something like "in a full sense" (as God makes us able). I don't think that we can completely enter into the sufferings of Christ, or even into the unique character of one another's sufferings.]

I suppose that I have hardly begun to grasp the true meaning of Grandpa's message. But it prompted some meditations in me. I won't claim that Grandpa would have agreed with all I write. Grandpa (like his grandson) was not inclined to express uncritical and unqualified agreement with others.

I believe that God created us to be in a communal relationship with Himself. He created us to be His embodied image-bearers, to love God and to share in His love and bear it out in the setting in which He has placed us. For us to share in His love, objects of His love and concern must be objects of our love and concern. Things that touch Him must touch us. God does not insulate Himself from the objects of His love, but suffers when they suffer.[note: see discussion below titled "Does God suffer?".] Love suffers when its object suffers. So if we love God, we will suffer as we see the objects of His love suffer.

To truly love God, we must know him deeply. To know God most deeply, I believe we must enter into His sorrows. This implies sharing the sorrows of His people. We cannot do this if we insulate ourselves from others. We have to allow what touches them to touch us. The apostle Paul writes, "Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn." (Romans 12:14-16). And again: "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." (Galatians 6:2)

Love has been defined as "a decision to value someone." If we value others, we will feel sorrow when they suffer loss. God has this kind of love even toward those who do not love Him or believe in Him, and so should we. "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." (Leviticus 19:18)

I think that there is also a deeper kind of love, a relationship love. This love not only values its object, but identifies with it. It says, "I am yours, and you are mine." It is a covenant love, a love of committed, mutual belonging. Christ suffered and died that He might bring us, His Body and Bride, into this kind of love-relationship.

The apostle Paul shared deeply in the love of Christ for His Church. He truly entered into the sufferings of Christ. He writes:

"I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh, for His body's sake, which is the church..." (Colossians 1:24)

We cannot share the Lord's sorrows if we insulate ourselves from hardship and distress. Am I willing to fast and pray in response to a crisis or need in someone else's life? Am I willing to sacrifice my time margin and ambitions to respond to the needs of others?

Paul was willing:

I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. Who is weak, and I do not feel weak? Who is led into sin, and I do not inwardly burn? (2 Cor. 11:27-29)

Paul's goal was to know God, and this involved sharing in Christ's suffering:

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. (Phil 3:10-11)

Does God suffer?

Scripture indicates that God feels grief, anguish, and sorrow because of sin and its consequences. "The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart." (Genesis 6:6, NASB). "His soul was grieved for the misery of Israel." (Judges 10:16). "How shall I give thee over, Ephraim? ... My heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together." (Hosea 11:8).

Seeking to safeguard the transcendence of God, the early Greek and Latin fathers insisted that God is "impassible". This means that while Christ, as God made man, suffered, God as God does not "suffer". [source: The Orthodox Way: Revised Edition, by Bishop Kallistos Ware, page 63.]

To understand this position, it helps to understand the meaning of the Greek word translated "suffer". The Greek word "pascho" means: "to suffer or be affected by anything whether good or bad, opposed to acting of oneself." [source: Liddell and Scott, Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon]. In other words, when we say that God does not suffer, we are not saying that God does not feel sorrow or anguish, but rather that He does not experience anything apart from his own will. It was only as incarnate man that Christ could pray, "not my will, but thine be done." Conversely, if I write that God suffers or feels "pain" or "hurt", I do not intend to imply that He is being subjected to something because He is not strong enough to have control over it.

Grandpa's prayers.

Grandpa's prayers exhibited a pattern that reflected the accumulated wisdom of his life. I listened to Grandpa pray many times. Before meals. In remembrance meeting. And in prayer meeting. In all three contexts, it seems to me that personal relationships were at the ground and center of his prayers. His words reflected the simplicity of his life.

Before meals I would hold Grandpa's hand and listen to him pray. It seemed that my mind always wandered, but many of the phrases he repeated stuck. Below is my attempt at reconstructing a prayer typical of what he would say, interspersed with comments. 

  "Our God our Father,
   we turn to You with praise and thanksgiving,
   for we know Thy love.
   ... We thank You for Jesus, the expression of Thy love."

It seemed that the manifested love of God was the ground of Grandpa's confidence in his relationship with God as Father. 

  "We thank You for those we love;
   we commit them to Your care."

Mutual love is an expression of the communal relationships God made us to have, and when we commit one another to God, we put Him first, make Him the center of our relationships, and express our trust in Him. 

  "We thank You for the sustenance set before us;
     strengthen us from it.
   Grant us that we might show forth Your love
     toward all with whom we have to do,
   that we might cause them to desire better things."

Receiving our food from God's hand with thanksgiving reminds us that our life is derived from and sustained by a good and gracious God. Food is not an end in itself, merely to gratify our appetite as individuals, but is a means of receiving strength to do God's will. Food rightly plays a central although subordinate role in our lives. Food reminds us regularly that we are embodied creatures, humble, earthy, and dependent -- dependent upon God, one another, and the creation in which He has placed us as stewards. Providing food for ourselves is generally a communal act involving sharing of need and pleasure, of giving and receiving simple but necessary things. Our grateful and generous response to God's gifts is to share those gifts and the love that motivates them with others. Thus the common meal, sanctified by the word of God and by prayer, ultimately prompts us to evangelistic outreach and becomes a sign pointing us to its fulfillment when we partake of the true Bread of Life in the kingdom of God. 

  "Now we look to You for the remainder of this day,
    that we might live unto Him who died for us."
  We ask these things in the name of our Savior, Christ Jesus, Amen.

It is appropriate for us to remind ourselves daily of the cross. Christ calls us to take up our cross daily. And Christ's atonement gives us our purpose for living. Paul writes, "And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again." (2 Corinthians 5:15)

Grandpa exhibited a simple acceptance of all things. Often I heard him pray, "We thank You for this day and for all that it has brought forth." Grandpa was not thanking God for all the wrongs that had been committed in the world that day, I'm sure, but rather, I surmise, he was thanking God for all that He had brought forth, and because all that had happened had happened as permitted by God's good and sovereign will, which causes all things to work together for good to those who love God (Romans 8:28).

Much more could be said about Grandpa's prayers, but I will stop here.

Love in Christ,
Alec