suffering and forgiveness

"Jesus' cup is the cup of sorrow, not just his own sorrow but the sorrow of the whole human race.  it is a cup full of physical, mental, and spiritual anguish.  It is the cup of starvation, torture, loneliness, rejection, abandonment...It is the cup full of bitterness.  Who wants to drink it?  It is the cup Isaiah calls 'the cup of God's wrath' (Isa51.17)"  

In his writing, Henri JM Nouwen takes us to places we hadn't considered, to depths we would probably prefer to avoid, to realities that we doubt we can endure.  In his book, Can you Drink the Cup?  Nouwen leads us to consider the enormity of Jesus' task as Savior.  Too often in our tradition we focus on the great gift of Jesus for us individually.  Nouwen asks us to consider the enormity of the gift of Jesus for the whole of creation....which of course, leads us to consider what it might mean to follow this Jesus.

Why are we talking about suffering when I said we were talking about forgiveness?  Consider this: that in order to forgive, we need to drink deeply of the cup of suffering of others, for suffering is at the center of all things which need forgiving.  We know this when it is we who have been wounded.

Nouwen presses us to consider that the suffering we experience is but a glimpse of the suffering of others.  Sometimes we have inflicted that suffering and are need of absolution.  But many times, when we hold our suffering up to the light and compare it to the suffering of all creation, we see how faded is our pain and are more able to offer forgiveness.

Forgiveness is connected to suffering, but not solely in some self-righteous, egocentric version of our own suffering.  Forgiveness is our response to suffering, our own, but more importantly, the suffering of the world.  Jesus asks James and John, "Can you drink the cup that I will drink?"

Are we ever able to drink that cup which contains the suffering of all creation, suffering we have received and suffering we have caused, with the sole intent of forgiving the other?  This forgiveness business is hard.