After his arrest and condemnation, Jesus Christ suffered great physical pain from the hands of his Roman tormentors and executioners. From this murderous episode, Christianity somehow deduced a dreadfully false ideas about an alleged beneficial role of physical harm and sacrifice to achieve salvation.
Why would some Christians believe that welcoming physical harm, and even the self-perpetration of such harm, would provide redemption and salvation?
The sacrificial lamb
Paul seems to have been the initiator of this false belief in redemptive suffering. By referring to Jesus Christ as the sacrificial lamb, Paul inferred that the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus on the cross would absolve humans of the so-call original sin.
Well before Constantine, the Roman emperor that made it possible for Christianity to become the official religion of the empire in the fourth century, there were cruel periods of Roman repression against Early Christians.
A Roman form of entertainment for the populace was deadly games of gladiators, as well as witnessing humans being torn apart by wild animals. History tells us of Christians walking willingly into the arenas as victims. They offered their body to the slaughter to emulate the sacrificial lamb with the twisted expectation of pleasing God.
The flagellants and Opus Dei
The Flagellants Brotherhood was created in Europe during the Middle Ages. The participating members would whip themselves in public to atone for their sins and allegedly emulate Jesus. Still nowadays, in some European countries and other predominantly catholic countries, there are groups of Christians who whip themselves during processions that typically take place during Lent.
In 1928, a Spanish priest named Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer y Albás created Opus Dei, an organization of participants who would daily inflict themselves bodily harm as ‘mortification of the flesh.’ Opus Dei means Work of God in Latin. What is amazing is that the Roman Catholic Church celebrated this practice by posthumously canonizing the originator of Opus Dei, thus raising him to the ranks of saints.
Clearly, the message of Paul was taken to an extreme. Nevertheless, the support given by Christianity to this erroneous idea of redemption led too many Christians to the totally wrong conclusion that suffering, somehow, makes us more like Jesus.
The pernicious idea of suffering for salvation is misunderstood by too many churches and their congregations.
The suffering of the mystics
References to suffering in mystical literature refer to the psychological battle experienced by mystics as they shed their ego persona for a recognition of their spiritual identity.
In the Old Testament, we read in Jeremiah 29:11 that God brings “hope, not harm,” and “good, not suffering.” In the New Testament, outside of Paul’s writings, we find no reference to Jesus suggesting any beneficial attribute to suffering.
However, there are Christian religious clerics who (also erroneously) have suggested that God suffers from being rejected by humanity. It is also suggested that God shares our pains. This is another preposterous idea that misleads Christians. It stems from a primitive anthropomorphic idea of God — a god in the image of man with humanlike emotions and motivations.
A more elevated vision of the divine would help us understand that God’s emotion is love — a love that loves loving; a love that expresses joy and peace but never sorrow, sadness, or regrets. To share our pains, as suggested by some, God would have to entertain human negativity and therefore behold duality. But we know from the prophet Habakkuk that “God is too pure to behold inequity.” In God, there is no form of negativity or darkness.
Thou shall not kill!
The fifth commandment of Moses, “Thou shall not kill” is a good starting point for a cogitation on this subject of redemptive suffering. If we must not kill and given that suicide is also considered a sin, why would self-inflicted harm be recommended or even be permissible? None of this is coherent or rational.
Let’s add to this that Paul himself reminds us in Corinthians 6:19 that our body is the “temple of the Spirit of God” and the “gift of God.” If so, how could anyone entertain that cutting into one’s own body is pleasing to God? It is simply a misguided action that could never be condoned by God. An honest assessment of scriptures should convince us of the gross error in the suggestion that suffering leads to salvation!
What is meant by salvation?
Salvation is bound to have different meanings for different people. Fundamentally, it refers to freedom from something or someone. At the time of Jesus, salvation could have been freedom from the Roman invaders. Fifteen centuries before, it could have been freedom from the Egyptians or later from the Babylonians.
A common interpretation throughout the centuries has been that salvation is freedom from sins. And because of the Christian emphasis on “sins of the flesh,” it has been surmised that redemption from sin must include a punishment of the flesh.
What is the original sin?
Christianity views the original sin — the disobedience of Adam and Eve — as the original sin of humanity. A more elevated understanding of the meaning of this allegory is that it has nothing to do with the eating of a forbidden apple but, rather, about an erroneous belief.
The true meaning of the “original sin” is the false sense of separation from God and the forgetting of our original and true nature as Spirit — in the image of God, and forever living in divine oneness.
The departure from oneness came from the acceptance of good and evil on the part of Adam and Eve and, simultaneously, the acceptance of all other forms of duality — all the pairs of opposites that define the human experience.
In short, the existential human condition is one of false belief that has polluted our individual and collective state of consciousness. Salvation requires a correction of our false belief of separation from God. That correction will not occur by punishing our body. However, we may correct our false belief of separation by rising in consciousness to the point of recognizing our true spiritual identity.
Misinterpretation of scriptures
Some Christians find justification in physical suffering from verses, such as John 16:20, “Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy.” But this verse refers to psychological pain and not physical pain.
We have been warned by mystics that an awakening to the spiritual truth shakes our psychological frame of reference and creates internal turmoil in the process. The psychological pain is not something the mystic looks forward to experiencing. He/she only accepts it as a byproduct of their search for truth.
Jesus on the cross
While Jesus greatly suffered on the way to the Crucifixion and while on the cross. The belief that his suffering, or the suffering of anyone else, is desirable in the eyes of God is simply not acceptable or true if we embrace the God of unconditional love that Jesus brought to the world.
Jesus’s extreme suffering and his simultaneous act of forgiveness to those who inflicted that suffering was the highest expression of unconditional love a human being could be capable of. In that moment, Jesus completely embodied God’s unconditional love and infinite forgiveness.
This unconditionally loving God consciousness — the Christ Spirit — is the true spiritual identity of all of us that remains dormant until fully acknowledged. It applies equally to believers of all religions and faiths and to everyone else.
This is why the true Soul of Christianity is found in unconditional, divine love.
An extract from the essay Sacrifice, Suffering, and Salvation from the recently published book, Religion, Politics, and Reclaiming the Soul of Christianity: A Spiritual Imperative for Our Time and Our Nation, by Jon Canas. Available at: https://Reclaimingthesoul.info
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