Love and Suffering

Last week, when I was preparing to teach a bible study lesson on the crucifixion, I posted on Facebook that I would rather teach a lesson on the Nativity.  "That's part of the point, isn't it, though, that crucifixion is too horrible to contemplate."

When our Associate Pastor, Joe, read that, he suggested a reading out of Julian of Norwich, and last night he brought the book with him to church and loaned it to me.  It is in the Short Text of Showings - Chapters x, xi and xii.

She is speaking of watching Christ's death on the cross, and says:

This long torment seemed to me as if he had been dead for a week and had still gone on suffering pain, and it seemed to me as if the greatest and last pain of his Passion was when his flesh dried up.

That's just a piece of a paragraph describing the pain that she saw in Christ during her vision of his death.

One of the things I learned as I prepared for the Crucifixion lesson is that we should open our eyes and hearts to the suffering and death of Christ, for in it, we see the extent to which he would go.  In his dying and death, we see love personified for us.  In this we see the nature of God.