The One Who Suffers-With

“There is something of the deist hidden deep down in all of us: We no longer envision God as a subject who is really active in history—perhaps in the subjective, but even then in nothing but the subjective. When this happens, when we finally stop assuming that God really enters into history and—all the laws of nature and everything we know and everything we can do notwithstanding—stop assuming that God is still the subject of history, acting in history; when we transform God into an indeterminate horizon, which somehow solemnly makes up the whole: then we are the only ones left to act. Then the entire burden of good and of evil rests exclusively on us. That is when moralism—the placement of the moral demands on men and women—takes on a form that cannot but overwhelm us, which we ascribe to God and against which we rebel…This is why it seems so important to me to hear once again that God [Himself] addresses us and says: ‘Your sins are forgiven.’ To hear that there really is something that we call grace. And at this point there are good reasons for us to listen to Luther: Not only are there demands being made on me and my actions, and not only demands on humanity or any subject whatever; but rather, before anything else there is an action on God’s part and it can transform me…I am always moved by this wonderful saying of Origen’s: God cannot suffer, but God can suffer-with. Yet is it not also a part of the memory of suffering that we recognize the God who suffers-with: a God whom we cannot systematize but who nonetheless is moving us in the depths of our hearts? If it is only unresolved suffering that we perceive, then the only thing left is a cry of anger and despair in one’s own existence. The only reason we can expose ourselves to being aware of suffering at all is that, in all suffering, one who suffers-with is present.”

---Joseph Ratzinger, The End of Time, Paulist Press 2004, pgs. 50-52