Lenten Journey

By Rev. Jirair M. Sogomian

The spiritual journey which the Lenten Season invites us to take, has many similarities to the last journey the disciples took with Jesus to Jerusalem. The evangelist Mark tells us that along that journey there was amazement, fear, inability to understand the suffering, rejection and death that awaited Jesus, total insensitivity to their teacher¹s spiritual agony in their selfish search for personal glory, and finally, jealousy and anger among the disciples. It was a journey that fully describes our daily lives and relationships with their share of suffering, sin and pain. Yet, one which also invites us to humility and suffering, and challenges us to a greatness that could only be achieved through servant hood. It doesn¹t take much imagination for us to see that we are the disciples accompanying Jesus in his final journey to Jerusalem and to the cross. In our anxiety about ourselves - our personal security or validation, we are the disciples who though have heard Jesus speak about suffering, humiliation and a cross, still just don¹t get it. We fail to grasp that before we share the glory of Jesus, obedience to the cause of love is bound to take us to Gethsemane and Golgotha. We fail to grasp that there is no resurrection without first dying, no Easter celebration without going through Christ¹s passion on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday!

Needless to say, suffering has never been popular among people in general, and among Christians in particular. In this day and age, when there is even legislation against failing to alleviate the pain of dying persons, we avoid suffering like the plague. We find it hard to accept that there is no escape from what John Updike calls "the sad human facts." That sooner or later we all suffer, not because of some kind of moral arithmetic which apportions pain according to the number or amount of our misdeeds, but simply because, as Paul sums it up, "We have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

So, if suffering is unavoidable, then where is one to find healing and hope? The apostle Paul tells us that love alone can bear all things and help heal the wounds we experience - whether those wounds are the consequences of our own sinfulness or cruel circumstances beyond our ability to control! This is so, because love has the power to redeem even in the midst of evil, to bring comfort and hope and healing even if it cannot bring remedy or a cure. This love comes to us in the midst of our suffering when someone says (as is often said in Armenia) "Let me carry your pain," even though it is impossible to do so literally! Somehow, by that generous offer of vicarious suffering, one touches the sufferer and thus lessens the pain. There is, indeed, great power in the offering of our love to share the pain of another.

Our Lenten journey with Jesus teaches us that he can offer us healing, only because he was despised and rejected for us, he knew suffering and was acquainted with our infirmity, he was wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. It teaches us that Jesus is the "wounded healer," for the only way God can ever reach us in our suffering is through the loneliness of his own suffering. It is only genuine, selfless love, freely offered to the other, that enables us to help someone carry his cross.

In Magnificent Obsession, Lloyd C. Douglas tells the story of a young man who was living a spoiled, self-indulgent life. One day he wakens to find that he had been in a coma, resulting from an accident in which he had almost drowned and that a great brain surgeon who lived on the nearby lake had himself drowned in the rescue effort that had saved him. Moved by what his life had cost someone, the young man resolves that he would himself become a neurosurgeon and give back to the world what he had taken. He succeeds in doing this, but he discovers that there was much more to the life of the older doctor than medicine alone. He discovers that that man had given himself to hundreds of people in different ways. To some he had given money, to others time, and to others he had donated his skill. And for every good deed he had exacted one promise only ... that the recipient would never reveal the fact of the doctor¹s help. For the young man that example became a magnificent obsession. And he began to find that the more he poured out, the more he found to pour out. And the more he gave himself to others, the more he himself strangely received.

May this season of Lent help us discover what St. Francis of Assisi did when he took Jesus¹ words about servant hood and cross bearing seriously. "O Divine Master, grant that I may not seek so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are born to eternal life." Have a blessed Lenten journey!