The Suffering and Victorious Christ by Richard J. Mouw

Author:Richard J. Mouw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL067040, REL067000, Jesus Christ—Servanthood, Jesus Christ—Person and offices
ISBN: 9781441242174
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

Jesus and the Suffering of God

Like Franz Pieper, these preachers, writers, and singers affirm that in Christ God suffered with compassion for the slaves. The suffering Savior had a compassionate Father. The meek and lowly Jesus empathized with the plight of black slaves and cared for them from heaven, and, as one of them remembered decades after manumission, “God lived close to them, too.” Another manumitted slave recalled the kindness of the Lord in this way during his boyhood lived in bondage: “When the heart begins to bleed on the inside,” he related, “and a child begins to plead with the Master [i.e., the divine Master], I can tell you that something is going to happen. The old slaves didn’t know nothing about books, but they did know God. And knowing him they called on him in their trouble and distress, and I can testify that he heard them.” Countless slave songs confirmed that God was near in Christ:

He have been wid us, Jesus,

He still wid us, Jesus,

He will be wid us, Jesus,

Be wid us to the end.25

James Cone has put this starkly: “When the black slave suffered,” he has claimed, “God suffered.” Jesus himself “was God’s Black Slave,” in fact, “who had come to put an end to human bondage.” But other black Americans have made such claims as well. In the words of Mary Loucks, a nineteenth-century black Methodist, on Calvary “hangs the Deity,” the “Godhead” itself “in human flesh.”26

Professor Howard Thurman often stressed what he described as the “striking similarity between the social position of Jesus . . . and that of the vast majority of American negroes.” He employed this similarity in several different ways, both to strengthen black Christians and to criticize conventional, white, Western Christianity. “To those who need profound succor and strength,” he suggested, “to enable them to live in the present with dignity,”

Christianity often has been sterile and of little avail. The conventional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague. Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak. This is a matter of tremendous significance, for it reveals to what extent a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless peoples.27

In a later piece titled “Suffering,” Thurman furthered this suggestion. “For many Christians,” he explained, “the sense of the presence of the suffering Christ, who in their thought is also the suffering God, makes it possible through his fellowship to abide their own suffering. . . . In his name they can stand anything that life can do to them.” Martin Luther King Jr. claimed to be just such a Christian, encouraged by the Lord to stand fast through every hardship. “My personal trials,” he wrote, “have .

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