Suffering and knowledge

[jdobbins]

Originally Posted by carn

While this is a good point, it would still mean a suffering very different from human suffering.
Just to remind i started with these 2 statements:
Jesus always knew He is God.

Jesus suffered like man suffers.

and concluded they contradict each other as far as i understand them.

They are not contradictory. Jesus loves us infinitely, and when we reject His love and reject what He did for us and choose hell instead of His offering of divine love, His suffering is and was immense. Jesus is a Divine Person with a Divine nature and a human nature. Because He has a human nature He experiences everything we do, including pain, and probably more exquisitely than we do because His body was perfect and unblemished.s St. Paul says, He is like us in all things but sin.

[Jcnava15]

I think you're forcing the issue here.

There is no inconsistency here, and here is why;

-Jesus knew he was God.
-Jesus suffered like men.

But,

-JESUS WAS SINLESS
-The wages of Sin are spiritual death.
-Spiritual death is the ultimate suffering a man can experience (hopelessness, doubt, etc).
-Jesus never sinned, so he never experienced the suffering that resulted from sin; spiritual death.

You have to take him for what he is, completely as he is. You may think this is just a clever way around the argument, but the reality is that the Jesus you had in mind is the Jesus of Christianity, and the Jesus preached by Christianity is also Sinless amongst other things.

If you are talking about a Christ who wasnt sinless, than any inconsistencies you find in that Christ do not concern Christians in the least.

Jesus knew he was God, but you can know he is God too, and that enables you to endure all the suffering he endured, give up sin, and avoid the wages of sin.

[eddadonkey]

Originally Posted by carn

As far as i understand the following to statements would be consistent with church teaching, with the first being dogma as far as i know:

Jesus always knew He is God.

Jesus suffered like man suffers.


But they are inconsistent, so please help me understanding.

The problem of course is that the quality of suffering depends a lot on what one knows, especially the knowledge about the purpose or absence of purpose of the suffering and the long and short term outlook of the situation.

E.g. there is a free climber, who had his arm trapped beneath a large rock in a desolate area. After several days waiting in vain, he amputated his arm and walked some 10 miles to the nearest road. In this case the man was able to endure the suffering because he was absoultely certain that it was his only chance to survive. Without this knowledge he would never been able to amputate his arm and then walk 10 miles.

When i once broke my leg the pain immidieately was very intense and i could only scream. Then after half a minute a first helper arrived and the pain was immidieately less intense and far easier to bear. Simply because i knew that things would now improve and someone would take care of me.

And thats the problem with the above two statements. If Jesus always knew He is God, then, while He suffered physically as men suffers, He did not suffer as men suffer, because the deepest and darkest suffering is the one without hope, when there is only painand not the slightest glimmer of hope. If Jesus always knew He is God, he did not suffer from hopelessness as man suffers.

Actually I am a bit lost on your reasoning, for three reasons. One, even though (or because) Jesus is God, He still knows, upon the start of His Passion, that He had no escape from horrible suffering but death. His situation was hopeless, His only hope was death.

Second, yes, maybe the deepest and darkest suffering is to be without hope of any kind...but that is sin. Despair is sin, and Jesus never sinned. In other words, despair is one kind of pain that is forbidden by God.

And thirdly, there is one kind of pain that Jesus knew that we could never have, by the mere fact that Jesus is God: He knew, to most precise detail, when, where, how, and why He was going to die. Just think about it: from the moment He could think during His childhood He knows all the details of His torture and death, and each and every event in His life He knows He is getting closer to His death. Can you understand now why He collapsed in agony at the garden of Gethsemane? Thirty years of carrying this knowledge finally broke His will that night.

This, by the way, is the idea behind the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help:

If you would look closely, the Child Jesus sees the implements of the passion being carried by the angels, and, in fright, clings to her mother Mary. This is symbolized by the undone sandal at His foot: He got so frightened that either He didn't have the chance to finish tying His sandals, or His sandals got undone while He was running towards Mary. Mary then looks at you, the viewer, seemingly to say, "I comforted and helped our Lord throughout His life, through His nightmares and pains. Why do you think I cannot help you?"

[carn]

Originally Posted by eddadonkey

His situation was hopeless, His only hope was death.

No, its not hopeless, if one follows a plan that one knows will work. That is more the opposite of hopeless.

And doubt and uncertainity are not a matter of sin. Assume you walk though life without doubt that you are walking the correct path. Thats hybris.

So you must have doubt and uncertainity to some extent. And in that Christ was not like man.

[AnoopP]

Originally Posted by eddadonkey

And thirdly, there is one kind of pain that Jesus knew that we could never have, by the mere fact that Jesus is God: He knew, to most precise detail, when, where, how, and why He was going to die. Just think about it: from the moment He could think during His childhood He knows all the details of His torture and death, and each and every event in His life He knows He is getting closer to His death. Can you understand now why He collapsed in agony at the garden of Gethsemane? Thirty years of carrying this knowledge finally broke His will that night.

Exactly what I too was thinking. The mere fact that Jesus knew all his sufferings beforehand would make his life really horrible. That for me a real pain.

[Nita]

Originally Posted by carn

As far as i understand the following to statements would be consistent with church teaching, with the first being dogma as far as i know:

Jesus always knew He is God.

Jesus suffered like man suffers.


But they are inconsistent, so please help me understanding.

The problem of course is that the quality of suffering depends a lot on what one knows, especially the knowledge about the purpose or absence of purpose of the suffering and the long and short term outlook of the situation.

.

To say that Jesus suffered as/like man suffers doesn't mean that He had to experience every single physical suffering experienced by humans and experience it in all the varying degrees of intensity. Neither does it mean that He had to experience every single mental and emotional pain that has ever been suffered by a human.
It means that he had a human nature and His humanity was subject to suffering in the same way that all other humans can suffer ---- with one exception. The exception being that because He NEVER sinned, He never suffered the guilt of personal sin or the emotional suffering such guilt would inflict. He never suffered the particular pain that results only when one is actually in the state of that sin. (Eg. greed, lust,.....)

Jesus did suffer/undergo temptation - eg. the temptation to despair. But because He never succumbed to the temptation, He never experienced the emotional horror of being in a state of despair.

[Nita]

Originally Posted by AnoopP

Exactly what I too was thinking. The mere fact that Jesus knew all his sufferings beforehand would make his life really horrible. That for me a real pain.

And not only the knowledge of His physical passion and death, but the knowledge of what was in the minds and hearts of all the people around him. Eg. He would have had the emotional sadness and pain of knowing just how much some hated Him - people whom He loved and was dying for. He would have had the emotional pain of knowing the indifference of many. And not just the hatred and indifference of those alive at the time of His passion and death, but all the hatred and indifference down through the ages.

I don't think we can even fathom how great His suffering was.