Creation as a World of Hurt

So now we come to the most profound aspect of our possible comprehensions of John 3:16, the verse that reads, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (KJV).  The pivotal notion is located in the word "gave."

We can say that God gave Jesus over to death.  We can say that Jesus gave himself over to death.  Both of those notions are more profound than we can completely comprehend, but our capacity of reverence for the sacrifice on God's part can only reside in realistic examples for comparison drawn from our species' experiences.  We do not typically want to die.  We regard our species as being strongly averse to death.

And yet some of us not merely accept death, but actually take it up willingly as a burden.  The very Jesus who is so loudly revered as having been willing to die for mankind also inspired a movement in which many have been willing to die.  Many of those willing dead suffered, by any dispassionate analysis, to a far greater extent than Jesus is depicted as suffering in the Gospels.  Mark, a rather straightforward gospel, volunteers that "Pilate marvelled if he were already dead" (15:44)--Jesus having unaccountably been spared the usual span of agonizing days.

So, unsurprisingly, the extent of Jesus' (and God's) sacrifice through the crucifixion has been enlarged in the conceit of the interpreters.  Jesus is said to have suffered for all the sins of mankind, even extending somehow to having endured every eternity of damnation deserved by all of mankind (or all of the elect, if the interpreter so deems.)

I do not wish to minimize Jesus' (and God's) suffering; far from it.  I wonder if the interpreters have gone far enough, inasmuch as they are concentrated on wondering how much Jesus might have endured in the crucifixion.  Did not (or does not) Jesus suffer in all aspects?

John's gospel says of Jesus, "The same was in the beginning with God.  All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made" (1:2-3).  (It is far more the case, in modern translations, that Creation is described as having been made "through" Jesus.)  Was not suffering involved in the creation of the universe through Jesus?  Was not Creation effected through an ineffable relationship between a One God and the One God's distinct persons?  Do we know that suffering was not or is not part of that relationship?

This question of creation-as-suffering has been danced around by the commentators through the ages.  The King James translators have Jesus in Revelation to be described as "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (13:8).  Paul in Romans says that "we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now" (8:22).

Is it such a leap to wonder if the whole phenomenon of the Son's relationship to the Father is a relationship of love, and communion--and suffering?  We cannot, if we are honest, maintain that any relationship we experience does not involve some experience of pain.  While we cannot presume to understand God, yet it is incumbent on us to try to understand those things of God that we are given to understand.  Is it not always the case that God is "giving" Jesus away?  Or at least, would we want to presume otherwise?

I think we would do well to wonder if "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son" is a phrase we are misusing--when we concentrate on the crucifixion.  The very creation that forms the framework of our understandings was given to us by God through his Son whom he has also given. Perhaps that is why God, at the end of the Six Days, is (otherwise) unaccountably described as resting on the Seventh Day.  Surely he was not tired; God does not get tired.  But as far as suffering goes?  Does not the Bible, at least, indicate over and over again that God has been grieved?

Jesus, having suffered as necessity would have it, declared, "It is finished" (John 19:30).  Perhaps God, having sacrificed of himself to lend his Son to creation, said on the seventh day, "It is finished."