Tuesday Prayer Room – 9am
“He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” – Luke 24:25-26
PRAYER GUIDE
Jesus understood his suffering, not to be an accident or a detour from God’s plan, but at the very heart of his calling. The two on the Emmaus Road are surprised, shocked, disillusioned by Jesus’ suffering…but Jesus himself understood from the beginning that his road to glory would pass through the cross.
This is why Satan’s temptation in the wilderness was a real temptation. The kingdoms of the earth belonged at that point to Satan, having been handed over by Adam and Eve to the serpent in the garden. Satan was offering to give them to Jesus. But the temptation was not becoming king of the world…this was, after all, Jesus’ destiny. It was spoken of in all the Messianic psalms of the Old Testament (Psalm 2, 110, etc). God would install his King in Zion and the nations would come under his rule. The temptation was instead for Jesus to become the world’s true king without suffering, without the cross.
Not only is the cross Jesus’ pathway to glory, in another sense, the cross itself is Jesus’ glory. John the Evangelist consistently refers to Jesus’ destiny as being “glorified,” by being lifted up on the cross. Jesus’ willing sacrifice on the cross is his glory. It is the great act of human obedience and suffering love that reverses all the other failures of humanity, dating all the way back to Adam and Eve. It is Jesus’ victory at the second tree that redeems Adam’s failure at the first tree. And this victory had to come through suffering.
As Isaiah writes of Israel’s calling, which is fulfilled in Israel’s representative, Jesus:
“Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6)
The mystery is deep; God enters into our suffering, suffering with and for us, to redeem it and us. It is hard for the Emmaus Road disciples to understand, as familiar as they are with the Scriptures. It is just as hard for us. We are all foolish and slow of heart to believe. And yet, the mystery remains – Jesus had to enter into the deepest, darkest part of our suffering – to taste and experience all of it – in order to heal us and to enter his glory.
Suffering, as it turns out, is not just for Jesus. It is for us as well. Paul writes to the Philippians: “It has been granted to you for the sake of the Messiah, not just to believe in him but to suffer with him.” To the Colossians, he writes: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” Instead of suffering as an aberration or a mistake, Paul understands it as a central aspect of what it means to follow in Jesus’ footsteps.
We would prefer to avoid suffering. We do not enjoy it and we want nothing to do with it. Like the two on the road to Emmaus, we struggle to make sense of it when it comes. But the reality is, that just as the Messiah had to suffer in order to enter into glory, so do we. Jesus did not suffer instead of us, he suffered ahead of us. Our glory and our suffering are in fact, two sides of the same coin – we cannot have the one without the other. The glory is to our sufferings – as a sunset is to the clouds in the sky. Nobody enjoys a cloudy sky…until the sun sets beneath it and illuminates it from below. When this happens, it literally takes our breath away. So it is with the Messiah and his cross. And so it is with us. The mystery of our faith is that Jesus was most glorified when he was most rejected and abandoned on the cross. It is for his sufferings that Jesus will be worshiped and adored for all eternity by all the Hosts of Heaven and the Church Triumphant.
Paul reassures us, also in Romans, that “our present sufferings will not compare to the glory that will be revealed in us.” We, the Messiah’s people, are glorified as we join our King in his sufferings. Paul puts it this way: “Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.“
PRAYER PROMPTS
Pray for God to give you and all his people a deeper understanding of the meaning and glory of his sufferings, and of our own.
Pray for the ability for you and God’s people to reinterpret present suffering in light of Jesus’ cross and our calling to be like Jesus.
Pray for God to encourage and comfort you and those around you in our sufferings.
Pray for yourself and the whole church to embrace our vocation to pray and groan with all creation at the very places where the world is in pain.
In Our Time 