C.S. Lewis and Vicarious Suffering

On September 12, 1951, Lewis wrote to Mary Van Deusen:

            Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

            It is remarkable (or wd. be if we did not know that God arranges things) that you shd. write about our vicarious sufferings when another correspondent has recently written on the same matter.

            I have not a word to say against the doctrine that Our Lord suffers in all the sufferings of His people (see Acts IX.6) or that when we willingly accept what we suffer for others and offer it to God on their behalf, then it may be united with His sufferings and, in Him, may help to their redemption or even that of others whom we do not dream of. So that it is not in vain: tho’ of course we must not count on seeing it work out exactly as we, in our present ignorance, might think best. The key text for this view is Colossians 1.24. Is it not, after all, one more application of the truth that we are all ‘members of one another’? I wish I had known more when I wrote the Problem of Pain.

            God bless you all. Be sure that Grace flows into you and out of you and through you in all sorts of ways, and no faithful submission to pain in yourself or in another will be wasted.

            Yours ever

            C.S. Lewis

            Another Biblical passage that supports the above is 2 Corinthians 1:1 – 11; in fact, this is a theme of 2 Corinthians.

            In a pain-avoidance society; in a pain-avoidance Western church, Lewis’s counsel is incongruous. We hawk the Gospel as a means to a prosperous life, a happy life, as (to quote a popular book title) Your Best Life Now. The idea of embracing suffering on behalf of others in an intercessory fashion is alien to our thinking. We idealize those “special” people who have embraced suffering; but they are the equivalent of a religious painting with figures beneath halos – we frame them and segregate them apart from our lives and the lives of our congregations lest the virus of intercessory living and suffering spread. Have you ever read a book on church growth that coaches the reader to proclaim a message of suffering to attract people?    

            I have a dear friend with chronic and progressive pain who told me that he is offering it up to God for the blessing of others. He also shared with me that he wants our heavenly Father to accomplish His work in him through the pain; he wants to be shaped into the image of Jesus Christ through the pain. As he shared his heart with me I had a sense of assurance for him; assurance that he is resting in the Presence of the Most High; assurance that his pilgrimage is on the trajectory of glory.

            This is a mystery; this connectedness we have in The Trinity, this “members of one another”, this filling up the sufferings of Christ (Colossians 1:24), this having the “sentence of death in ourselves that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead” in order that we might “comfort those who need comfort with the comfort we receive from God” in our dire circumstances (2 Corinthians 1:1-11). A mystery indeed; but a mystery that we are called to enter into that we might know the “fellowship of His sufferings” (Philippians Chapter 3).