Few phrases are as provocative as the one we hear today in the Gospel: «Unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest». Jesus' thinking is clear. You can't engender life without giving your own life. You can't help others to live if one isn't willing to «give of one's life» for others. Life is the fruit of love, and sprouts forth to the measure we know how to give of ourselves.

In Christianity we haven't always clearly distinguished between the suffering that is in our power to overcome and the suffering that we can't eliminate. There is an inevitable suffering, the reflection of our creaturely condition, and one that reveals the distance that still exists between what we are and what we are called to be. But there's also a suffering that's the fruit of our selfishness and injustice. A suffering with which we wound each other mutually.

It's natural to separate ourselves from the pain that we always seek to avoid if at all possible, that we struggle to suppress in ourselves. But that's precisely why there is a suffering that it's necessary to take on in life: the suffering accepted as the price of our struggle to make xsuffering disappear from among us all. «Pain is only good if it moves forward the process of its suppression» (Dorothee Solle).

It's clear that in life we could avoid many sufferings, bitterness, and troubles. It would be enough to close our eyes in the face of other's suffering and close ourselves in to the selfish pursuit of our own happiness. But there would always be a price way too high: simply letting go of love.

When one loves and lives life intensely, you can't live indifferently to the great and small suffering of people. The one who loves becomes vulnerable. To love others includes suffering, «compassion», solidarity in the pain. «There doesn't exist any suffering that can be outside us» (K. Simonow). This sorrowful solidarity causes salvation and liberation to arise for the human being. It's what we discover in the Crucified One: the one who saves is the one who shares the pain and keeps self in solidarity with the one who suffer.

José Antonio Pagola

Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf

Publicado en www.gruposdejesus.com