Patripassionism

Songs tend to color my seasons, and I play specific ones over and over again. Recently NEEDTOBREATHE released a new album, and there is a track sung with Jon Foreman of Switchfoot.

The lyrics bring up a scriptural feel that reminds me of my childhood, the awe I feel in nature, the zeal I feel when studying old manuscripts and their magnum mysterium, and the haunting beauty of a reverb in an aging cathedral. The song speaks of intimacy of relationship- for me the comfort that can be found in spirituality in times of exhaustion and undoing. I’ve always felt deep affection for imagery of God as a protective refuge that is all the things we lack in our lives.

Yet there is a line that sticks out to me that my theologian brain says wait. “All the ashes and scars they fail/ they pale in comparison to yours”. In conservative christianities, evangelicalism especially, we are taught that the crucifixion of Christ is the ultimate sacrifice, that Jesus was executed and humiliated for our sins because we are inherently fleshly and sinful, and without him, we would have never been made right with God. We uphold the pain of the cross as exceptional, almost sensationalizing it in our praise of Jesus bearing the ultimate pain.

But Jesus did not become incarnate to create a hierarchy of pain.

Jesus came to understand it.

God, being all-knowing (omniscient) had book knowledge of what it was like to be human. In essence, God could “read” about human experiences like mental and physical pain like anguish or what it’s like to have a puncture wound, because God created the world and the humans in it and was privy to all the experiences of those things as God’s creation continued to unfold and evolve. But God did not have the first-hand experience of enfleshment, or being in a body and experiencing pain. This is the incarnatus est. God felt that knowledge of was not enough, and so God came to acquire knowledge by being.

This is where the theology of patripassionism comes from. Not only knowledge by being, but a God that becomes infinitely empathetic because of the incarnation. God knows exactly what it is like to be you, to feel like you, because of the beauty of being fully human and fully divine and fully incarnate. God’s pain was not more important than our pain. God’s pain united God with us.

In his book Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff talks about a God who does not have a plan in the macro and the micro, but a God who mourns with us when things go terribly awry. When pain is senseless, where meaning cannot be found, when pain does not have a cause, this God sits with us on the mourning bench. This is the God who proffers his wounds for us to touch, who weeps at Lazarus’ grave, who knows humiliation, pain, and disability on the cross.

Jesus saw and knew suffering and desired to be present for it- not to be recognized as the one who suffered most. Not even to be the one recognized as ending suffering in his work. Jesus was focused on teaching and restoring people back into the community, and challenging notions that were creating outliers. When we create hierarchy in pain, and compare wounds amongst each other, making some more worthy than others, not only do we gatekeep, we mimic the practices Jesus tried to end during his time earthside.

Jesus saw pain as a point of connection. Not an opportunity to try to “fix” but merely to sit with. And when it came time for his moments of greatest pain, Jesus was as vulnerable as anybody with a body not in control. It’s because of Christian tradition and ritual we hold up this moment of pain. We don’t hold up birthing people bringing children into this world. We don’t hold up chronic pain havers for making it one more day. We don’t hold up firefighters for making it through the heat of another wildfire, or the residential patients of a mental health facility for getting the care they need. We appropriate pain.

And it’s time we stop.

Pain is pain. Jesus’ too.