Christianity, suffering and the morality of the victim

Graham Tomlin explores the real reason why Christianity seems fixated on suffering.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A medieval painting of a suffering Christ surrounded by two angels looking concerned.

Andrea Mantegna, Christ as the Suffering Redeemer.

Richard Mortel, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

The Times caused a bit of a stir over the Easter weekend with an article entitled 'I’ll choose heroes rather than martyrs anyday.' The article linked Christianity’s fixation with suffering, climaxing with the crucifixion of Jesus, with the tendency in modern life to accord moral value to victimhood.

The article’s author, Matthew Parris, is a wonderful writer, always interesting and provocative, and often talks a lot of sense. He is absolutely right to resist the urge to elevate an often self-claimed victimhood as in itself giving moral power and authority. Being a victim of bad treatment doesn’t in itself make your moral cause right or wrong. It might simply mean being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The problem with elevating victimhood, is that none of us are solely victims. Most of us can find some area of life where we have felt we have been badly treated, but if we’re honest, we can also find other parts where we have treated others badly too. Although it’s tempting to divide the world into villains and victims, oppressors and oppressed, it’s never quite as neat as that. Of course, some people, and some groups of people are definitely more sinned against than sinning; issues of real injustice matter and need urgent attention, but however true that is, none of us falls solely on one side or the other of that line. We are not all equally guilty or innocent. At the end of the day, we are all part villain and part victim.

Parris is also right that Christian art and literature tends to focus on suffering to an extent that jars with our modern sensibilities. I just don’t think he understands why. Because the more I’ve thought about the article, the more it seems to me to miss something essential about Christianity.

We Christians believe that the passion of Jesus – his death and resurrection – has saved the world. Yet, even though we often focus on the agony of Christ on the cross, or the sacrifices of the saints and martyrs, we don’t believe in the redemptive power of suffering in itself. Suffering was never part of the original plan. It is not suffering or victimhood that saves, but love. Divine love.

It is not the victimhood that conveys moral worth, but the kind of divine love that is so strong that even suffering will not knock it off course.

When Divine Love entered a broken and fallen world, it was always going to be messy. The love of God for the human race meant suffering for Jesus, but only because we humans have become such twisted, confused and blind creatures, that we failed to see that in Jesus, God himself was coming to us and we tried to kill him. Love may or may not lead you to become a victim (more often than not it does in a broken world) but it is not the victimhood that conveys moral worth, but the kind of divine love that is so strong that even suffering will not knock it off course.

Real, gritty, determined love, not the sentimental, starry-eyed kind we often think of, is so strong that it keeps going, even when there are real sacrifices to be made, losses to be endured, pain to be borne. That is divine love. That is the kind of love we saw on the cross of Jesus - the kind that compelled Jesus to take on the sin and suffering of the world to neutralise its power once and for all. It was love so strong that on the first Good Friday it stood alongside the victims of injustice and suffering, the countless, unknown people over the centuries who have been persecuted or executed unjustly. And yet it was also so scandalous that it could also reach out to the villains, the criminal on the cross next to Jesus, the soldiers who tortured him and say ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ It is the kind of love that is so strong that not even death can stand in its way, as we saw on that first Easter Sunday.

That is why we Christians value suffering, especially that which is voluntarily borne. Not because it conveys the spurious moral high ground of victimhood but because it is a sure sign of love. It is why we have always venerated our martyrs – because their love for God was so strong that they would even give up their lives for him. It is why the early Christians chose the cross as the central symbol of their faith – because it was the unmistakeable sign of how deep and strong was the love of God for the human race, despite our thoughtlessness, cruelty and self-centredness. Being a victim meant very little to the early Christians, and they never played that card, because what mattered to them was not victimhood but love.

A recent story highlighted Catholic seminarians in Mexico who were willing to press ahead with getting ordained, even though 50 priests in the region have been murdered since 2006 for speaking out against the violence and damage done by the drug cartels which rule the roost in the local area. As a bishop, I have ordained many priests here in the UK. Not many of them will face that kind of danger, yet the calling is exactly the same – to love people in the name of Christ and to grow the community of people who follow him. Whether you end up getting killed or not, it is not the sacrifice, or the victimhood that gives value, it is the love that inspires the sacrifice.

What our world needs is not so much martyrs or heroes, but people committed to deep, passionate, determined love.

Instead of martyrs, Parris wants heroes. He plumps for Nietzsche’s vision of the powerful assertiveness of the minority, and his despising of weakness, pity and victimhood. Yet be careful what you wish for. If moral authority and rightness become a matter of who has the power to assert their will more strongly than the rest, what we end up with is just the kind will to domination, the competitive, contentious public space, the desire for power and influence for its own sake, the silencing of others, just because social media means you can, that is the blight of so much modern life.

What our world needs is not so much martyrs or heroes, but people committed to deep, passionate, determined love. Seeking the best and the good of your neighbour as much as yourself, whoever your neighbour happens to be, might mean you end up a hero, it might mean you end up a victim, but to love God and to love your neighbour – this is what lies at the heart of things.

That is the kind of love we celebrate every Easter in the story of Good Friday, leading through to Easter Sunday. It is that that lies at the heart of the Christian story, not victimhood. And that is why we need more true, deep Christian faith in our societies, not less.

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Leading

20 May 2024

5 min read

Humility is just plain weird

Can leaders be humble?

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

The Pope, wearing white, kneels, crades a bare foot, and kisses it.

Pope Francis kisses the foot of a woman inmate of the Rebibbia prison.

Vatican Media.

Last week I met the Pope. You don’t often get to write a sentence like that but despite the shameless name-dropping, I mention it because it got me thinking about something that shed light on our political and social life.

It wasn’t just me and him. I was with a group of Anglican bishops and Archbishops and we had an hour with Pope Francis in one of the grand reception rooms in the Vatican. When you enter the Vatican, you can’t but be impressed by the sheer grandeur and size of the place. Long corridors with statues and huge windows, large reception rooms with elaborate frescoes of biblical scenes, Swiss guards with their brightly coloured uniforms saluting as you walk past.

The grandeur is perhaps not surprising, and perhaps even modest for an institution that that has 1.4 billion followers – that’s about the population of China – and one of the greatest patrons of the arts in western history.

We filed into a long elaborately painted room with marble floor, and decorated ceiling, took our seats and waited. Finally, a frail, white-robed figure hobbled in, aided by attendants in suits and white bowties. Pope Francis was a bit unsteady on his legs, but sharp, mentally alert, and with a smile that broke out over his face from time to time.

If the Vatican felt like the palace of an ancient city state, the headquarters of a global network, like the Kremlin or the headquarters of Google, something else felt very different. The difference was brought to mind by a picture I saw a few weeks ago.

... but Rishi Sunak or Donald Trump kissing blistered, calloused, guilty feet? Hardly. This was a display of humility that stood out as plainly weird.

Just before Easter, the Pope went to prison. In case you are wondering how you missed this extraordinary story, it wasn't of course that he had been convicted of some terrible crime, but on this occasion, he went to visit the Rebibbia prison in Rome. While there, the 87-year-old, increasingly frail pontiff, stepped out of his wheelchair, and bent down to wash the bare feet of twelve women prisoners, many of whom were in tears as he did so. There is an extraordinary picture of him with his eyes closed, kissing the right foot of one of the women, clothed in her grey prison tracksuit trousers, as if it was him who had the privilege in the encounter and not her.

When I saw this picture, it struck me how truly extraordinary this action was. Here is the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, performing an act of such staggering…. well, meekness, is the only word I can find for it - kissing the sweaty feet of criminal women, feet that had presumably led them into decidedly questionable places in the past, while doing so not reluctantly but gladly, thinking this was the most wonderful thing he could ever do.

I tried to imagine the residents of other grand buildings - the American president, the UK's Prime Minister, the leader of the European Union, the President of China, or the CEO of Google doing something similar. And couldn't. I could imagine politicians visiting a homeless centre to dole out food for the social media coverage, but Rishi Sunak or Donald Trump kissing blistered, calloused, guilty feet? Hardly. This was a display of humility that stood out as plainly weird.

If I had been the Creator of all that exists, I would have made sure that the credit went where it deserved. Yet the world around us has precious few explicit reminders of God.

Yet was not entirely surprising, because humility is a distinctly Christian virtue. The Greeks were decidedly lukewarm about it. Aristotle wrote: “With regard to honour and dishonour the mean is proper pride, the excess is known as a sort of ‘empty vanity’, and the deficiency is undue humility…” Humility was appropriate for slaves but not for noble-born people, certainly not for political leaders, leaders of multinational giants – or popes for that matter.

Yet Christians have always valued humility. One of the New Testament writers says: “Clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because, God opposes the proud but shows favour to the humble.” So why does God show favour to the humble?

The answer is, I think, surprising. It is not that God is majestic and demands humility from us measly creatures. It is that, in the Christian understanding, God is humble. Even though he appears to have not that much to be humble about. If the phrase that captures the understanding of Allah in Islam is ‘God is Great’, the main claim of Christianity is that ’God is Love’. And love cannot be proud or arrogant. It has to be humble.

The God Christians believe in doesn’t draw attention to himself, and doesn’t shout about his own qualities. Instead, he leaves it to others to do that for him. That fits with the way the world is made. If I had been the Creator of all that exists, I would have made sure that the credit went where it deserved. Yet the world around us has precious few explicit reminders of God. There is no signature written in the sky, billboards or flashing neon lights saying ‘Made by God, just for YOU!’. In fact it is quite possible to go through life and completely miss God altogether.

If there is a God, he seems oddly reticent, unwilling to advertise his existence, or as the prophet Isaiah put it, perhaps in a moment of frustration many centuries ago, “Truly, you are a God who hides himself.” This theme, of the ‘hidden God’ has fascinated theologians and philosophers from St Paul to Martin Luther, from Blaise Pascal to Søren Kierkegaard.

Even when God does reveal himself, in the arrival on the human scene of Jesus Christ, even then he is oddly hidden. Jesus was perplexingly reluctant to identify himself as God. He didn’t by and large go around saying “Look at me, I am divine!” It was possible to meet Jesus of Nazareth face to face and go away thinking he was just another Jewish rabbi or teacher. In fact, he was more likely to be found acting out the role of a servant, washing the feet of his friends, providing them with food, living a wandering homeless existence, dying on a criminal’s cross, than doing important things like wearing robes, exerting political power or living in palaces. Nowhere does God appear to us unmistakably. He is not an in-your-face kind of God. He seems, odd though it is to say it, quite shy. Or perhaps the best word is simply: humble.

So what the Pope did in that Italian prison may have been unlike any other ruler. Yet on another level it was just like the ultimate ruler of all things.