Read: Romans 8:18-27 - STEP Bible, Bible Gateway
Those who suffer long-term illness often come to the conclusion that what is happening to them, spiritually speaking, is that the brokenness of the universe is somehow writing itself into their bodies. They bear, as it were, the scars of the world’s pain and anguish within their very selves, almost as if they themselves are the canvas on which the cosmos paints its cry of pain at its separation from God. The most remarkable of those who suffer identify that (somehow) they suffer on behalf of all of us. They realize that (somehow) they are suffering on behalf of the whole created order. Of those remarkable few, the truly holy find some way of offering that whole experience back to God as a gift and an offering.
In our passage today, St Paul suggests that, in truth, the whole of creation suffers in this same way. (It’s just that not all of us feel it so acutely as those who suffer debilitating illnesses.) Paul also wants us to understand that we should suffer like this. Not as some kind of punishment – but rather as a response of deep honesty. The cosmos is broken, and not to feel its brokenness within ourselves would be deeply inauthentic.
Indeed, Paul thinks that the very act of feeling the cosmos’ brokenness is a gift from God. He thinks that when we ‘feel’ the agony of the universe within ourselves, it is not actually us who are really doing the feeling. He thinks it is actually the Holy Spirit, feeling it through us.
But suffer it we do, nonetheless – and this sensation he describes as being like a woman in labour pains. That’s a good image for us to hold. A woman in the pains of labour knows that the pain won’t go on forever – she knows that at some point soon she will be delivered of her child. But try telling that to any woman mid-way through a contraction! It has no pain-dulling effect whatsoever. She knows what joy the future will bring when she holds her newborn baby, and yet she is caught up completely in the agony of the moment and can’t feel the coming joy one bit.
You and I live like that. We know what joy the future holds for us – but we can’t feel it yet. All we feel is the pain of now. Still, the Holy Spirit, St Paul says, does not simply leave us there. Paul says that the Spirit, feeling the pain of the world through us, moves us to hope for something better; and in moving us to hope for something better, propels us into prayer for the world whose pain he (and we) are feeling within ourselves.
All that means that the Christian has a special job. In the first place, the Christian is supposed to feel the pain of the world, to admit and to feel the brokenness that has come about in the universe through sin and evil. Then, the Christian is supposed to offer that experience to God as a gift. And finally, the Christian is supposed to allow the Holy Spirit to propel us into prayer for a better world.
This Lent, let us be realistic about the world we live in. We mustn’t pretend to ourselves the world is better than it is, or that things are less painful than they are. But we equally mustn’t stop there and get caught up in self-pity, either. We must give all our pain over to God, and in so doing, ask the Holy Spirit to pray through us, to open up in us such a yawning hope for a better future, that our very lives become petitions for a renewed creation to God our Father.
These devotions were originally written for the parish of All Saints, Ascot and we are grateful for permission to republish them on Fulcrum.
Patrick is curate of All Saints’, Ascot in Berkshire. A musicologist by training, he is married to Lydia, a university lecturer, and dad to Madeleine. He writes (sporadically) at benedixisti.wordpress.com and tweets (even more sporadically) as @patrickgilday.