THE SUFFERING OF CHRIST
The Atonement is rightly judged as a continuation of the Incarnation. There is without a doubt truth in this statement if we see it in the light of the cross. If we see it any other way it could lead us into error. If we interpret it any other way we will miss the fact that Jesus' sufferings were crucial and cannot be reduced to mere development. Many of our leading theologians have thought much about the nature and significance of our Saviour's sufferings. Martin Luther spoke of the great burden of His inward suffering due to His sympathy. Thomas Goodwin says "He had a heart soft, and framed to compassion" therefore when any of His elect were sick, and brought up to Him He, by a feeling of pity to their grief's on Him and freed them. Thus in sympathy and pity He bore all our frailties and sickness. Goodwin makes here a fine and difficult distinction between the sickness that Christ bore personally i.e. by reason of the divine human person that He was, and those He bore out of such sympathy. Later Jonathan Edwards speaks and tells us that Christ's lifelong suffering has a wondrous redeeming quality. He claims that even the ordinary human sympathy for others can make their case course, put us in their place, and even teach us to suffer in their place. It therefore follows on that the sufferings of Christ, as the hymn says "He took our sins and our sorrows and made them His very own" especially stood for them and was a substitute in their place, His love and pity fixed the idea of them in His mind as if He had really been they. Though both Goodwin and Edwards on the power of Christ's sympathy to enable Him to take our sufferings to heart, insist that there is a further element in His sufferings - a penal one. This can in no way be accounted for by the natural outgoing of His human soul, Goodwin tells us that the sufferings that came to Christ, especially during His final passion, came from the wrath of God as He took to Himself the sin of the world. From His birth all the great ordinances of God's curses were ready, full of wrath, ready to be hurled against Him. Edwards speaks about the extra element that Christ had to bear in our place on the cross. That Christ experienced the special fruit of the wrath of God in that God let loose upon Christ the devil who has the power of death as God's executioner. The assumption here is that on the cross Christ suffered that which the damned in hell
do not suffer. The wish to understand all the sufferings of Christ and in particular the psychological realm has led to the tendency to assimilate what happened on the cross to what happened during His life.
The uniqueness that we find in the Gospels is not in the death or even what it accomplished, but solely in the one who died. There is without any doubt continuity between His life and death. The one is consistent with the other. We have noted that it was not simply His death in itself that gave great value to His sacrifice, but the obedience in His death. His obedience was such that He lived the cross before He died upon it. Unless we can take the life and death of Christ as one then we will fail to understand the depth of what is involved for us in our ministry and teaching. It is a fact that sometimes the New Testament so emphasizes the death that our minds can fail to grasp the significance of Christ's life as it fades into the background - He died for us. It was that life that led up to the final consummation, and expressed its true meaning and purpose. The incarnation would have been brought to nothing if Jesus had refused to drink the cup. His death on the cross forever sealed the incarnation and made it effective. Instead of regarding His death as a part of His life, perhaps we are nearer the truth when with Denney, we regard His life as part of His death. On this matter our interpretation has to be decisive, what was it that Jesus shrank from in the garden of Gethsemane, what caused Him to utter that awful cry of dereliction? This as John Owen points out took place, where there was no hand or instrument outwardly appearing to put Him to any suffering or deadly torment. It was as if He was suffering by the hand of God Himself or at least an area and manner that we cannot appreciate or understand. This is most likely the reason why both Luther and Calvin called these sufferings His descent into hell. We have to be aware that even at this period in His life the cross was an awful prospect that He had to suffer in human form. As the God-man Jesus suffered in a unique way to be crucified for sins not His own, but to be rejected by God, deserted by His disciples, alone to face the deep rootedness of fallen human nature, its malevolence, and hostility to goodness. In this His sufferings are completely beyond our comprehension, for who of us could gauge, grasp or measure the dreadful perdition of humanity. "He was despised and rejected of men a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from Him, He was despised and we esteemed Him not,. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet did esteem Him stricken and smitten of God and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities" (Is. 53:3-5a).