Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship Part II – Reflections (14)

 

Let’s continue to consider what Bonhoeffer writes about what I’ll term intercessory suffering. I’ll quote Bonhoeffer from our previous reflection:

 

“Even though Jesus Christ has already accomplished all the vicarious suffering necessary for our redemption, his sufferings in the world are not finished yet. In his grace, he has left something unfinished in his suffering, which his church – community is to complete in this last period before his second coming” (page 202, italics mine).

 

We “are permitted to bear what others are spared …There is a specific amount of suffering which has been allocated to the body of Christ” (page 203).

 

In Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free, F. F. Bruce writes, “He [Paul] seems to have held that the more of these sufferings he personally absorbed, the less would remain for his follow-Christians to endure. “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake," he writes to the Colossians, “and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24). To the same effect he tells his friends in Corinth that “if we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation (2 Corinthians 1:6)”” (page 139).

 

Intercessory living and suffering is very much the theme of 2 Corinthians, and it is indeed the theme of Christ Jesus, in His life, His death, His resurrection, and His Presence within His Body, His Church, His Temple. The Suffering Servant of Isaiah, such as we see in 52:13 – 53:12, continues to live within His Body. If we are indeed joined to our Lord Jesus in organic unity, ought we not to expect His Nature of self-sacrifice and self-giving to live within us and through us?

 

“God so loved the world that He gave…” God gave, and God continues to give, and as He gave Jesus, so He gives us. Jesus says, “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you” (John 20:21). What is it about this we don’t understand?

 

The theme of intercessory living is found throughout the New Testament, yet we don’t see it. We read Colossians 1:24 and gloss over it. We read 2 Corinthians 4:12 and gloss over it. We read 1 John 3:16 and promptly ignore it. Galatians 2:20 might as well be written in Martian, it is so alien to us.

 

For you see my dear friends, if these passages are not realities within us and our congregations then we would be better off if they did not exist – for they represent our high calling in Jesus Christ, to know Him in the power of His resurrection and the koinonia of His suffering (Phil. 3:10) – if they did not exist we would not be guilty of rejecting them.

 

To teach a vicarious understanding of the Cross and Atonement, without teaching a corresponding vision of our life in Christ, of living and suffering with Christ, in Christ, and through Christ for the sake of others, is to present a truncated message of the Cross. The Cross is our sacramental portal into the koinonia of the Trinity, as individuals and as God’s People. To confine our teaching of the Cross to Jesus dying vicariously for us, is to teach less than what we see in Scripture. (Consider the dimensions of the Cross in Romans, especially from 5:12 – 8:39.)

 

We cannot understand the mystery of the Cross anymore than we can understand the mystery of the Trinity. We can touch the Cross and be touched by the Cross, we can live in the Cross and the Cross can live in us. As we follow on to know Jesus Christ in His depths, we will all (I do believe) have experiences and moments when we see things and hear things which we may, with Paul, term, “inexpressible words [and images and ideas], which a man is not permitted to speak.”

 

In his sermon, The Wonderful Tree, Geerhardus Vos says concerning the soul and God, “There is an inner sanctuary of communion, where all else disappears from sight, and the believer shut in with God gazes upon his loveliness, and appropriates Him, as though outside of Him nothing mattered or existed. These may be fugitive moments, and they may be rare in our experience, but we surely must know them, if God’s fruit-bearing for us is to be a reality in our lives” (Grace and Glory, page 26, italics mine).  

 

A doctrine of the Cross without the experience of the Cross, without living the Way of the Cross, is dead letter, a tragedy indeed. As Bonhoeffer has written, the Cross frees us to suffer for Christ and others, it gives us the liberty to lose our lives so that others may live.

 

In the American church, we have become so far removed from the Christ of the Cross and the Cross of Christ, we have become so pleasure oriented and self-centered, we have so bought into individualism, that what Bonhoeffer writes, what Paul writes, and what I am writing, seems like a different Christianity, a different Gospel – why we might even say that it goes against our entire way of life of consumerism and pleasure and striving for the self.

 

Yet, I can recall as a lad hearing men and women still talk about these things, still value them, still call others to follow Jesus and respond to Him by losing their lives for His sake and the Gospel’s (Mark 8:34ff).

 

Biblical Christianity is partaking of the Divine Nature through and in Jesus Christ. Biblical Christianity is, in its essence, supernatural – it is Other than we are, or we might say that it is Other than we were, for we are being transformed into Christ’s image and we are new creations in Him. It should not surprise us if we experience things, such as suffering on behalf of others, that we cannot understand – we are learning a new Way of living in Jesus Christ and with one another.

 

We may not understand Colossians 1:24 or 2 Corinthians 4:12, but we can ask God to make them real in our lives, we can ask God to teach us to know the koinonia of the sufferings of Jesus Christ, we can ask God to teach us intercessory living and intercessory prayer, we can ask God to teach us to bear the suffering of others in our hearts and minds and souls and in the depths of our spirits. We can ask God to implant the Cross in the core of our very being. (And in our congregations!)

 

If we do these things, if we desire these things, then let us not be surprised if the Holy Spirit prays and intercedes through us “with groanings too deep for words” (Romans 8:26) for we will have crossed the divide between religion and the Kingdom, between childhood and sonship, and we will be learning to follow the Lamb wherever His goes, including to the sacrificial altar we know as the Cross.