The disciples received the Holy Spirit and started their new life with the Risen Lord. And how did they behave? One might expect them to keep their heads down and avoid getting into trouble. That’s certainly what they’d been doing up until then. But in fact they immediately went out and started speaking out with the people who had been responsible for Jesus’ execution.
What’s especially notable is the the way in which they did this. They didn’t pull their punches and were very straight about how they thought their compatriots were responsible for Jesus’ death. But they didn’t attach any blame to this. For those who recognized their mistake the answer was simply “OK, ‘fess up, and then you too can receive the Holy Spirit, this new life we have”. There was no hint of revenge, retribution, even penance – it was straight into, join with us, become one with us, we are all followers of the Risen Lord.
This openness was characteristic of Jesus’ own openness to anyone, really anyone, who would see Him for what he was and accept Him. And before Him the prophets, notably Isiah, had said the same. But this is a hard message to hold on to. By the time of Jesus, the Jewish leaders, Scribes and Pharisees, were more concerned with purity and excluding the “unworthy”. This was one of the things that brought them into conflict with Jesus.
Since the time of Jesus the Church has also fallen frequently into this trap. But in its origin it’s very clear that the disciples, the first ones to see the Risen Lord, were completely inclusive. We should also note that almost immediately problems of division between groups and classes emerged, as discussed by Paul and others very soon after. So our challenges with inclusiveness and the deep-seated need we feel for protective boundaries are nothing new.
The other big challenge that the new community of Jesus’ followers faced almost immediately was that life didn’t suddenly become a bed of roses. Yes it was a new life, with confidence in the love of God, and freedom from fear, but suffering didn’t disappear. From the outside life hadn’t really changed at all – people still died, suffered, had accidents, illness, lost jobs, and so on. The Holy Spirit didn’t come with a magic wand and make everything better, like a fairy godmother. And that of course is what we’d like. We might prefer to try to slide past it, but if we were offered a world with no pain and no suffering then of course we’d take it. But that isn’t what Jesus offered. He didn’t change the world, he offered to change us. So that we could deal with the world in a better way, with an abundance of life, a life lived in its fulness, a life free from fear.
So the early followers of Jesus still had to grapple with the fact that suffering hadn’t gone away in the new life they were leading. And the way in which Jesus had brought them this new life was very significant in dealing with this fact. Jesus hadn’t refused suffering, the Father had not spared him from suffering. His followers recognized that they could identify with Jesus’ suffering. Their suffering was His suffering, His suffering was their suffering. And the way He conquered was not by rejecting or repulsing the suffering but by accepting it, and coming out the other side. And the early disciples came to understand their path was the same. As Peter noted his letter, written some time later, Jesus’ willing acceptance of suffering was an example, which they could follow.
This identification with the suffering of Jesus is a common feature in the lives of many of the great saints through the ages. And it’s not a glorification of suffering, that would be perverse, but a recognition that suffering is not something that we can escape, but in our new life of the Spirit it doesn’t crush us.
But maybe we feel that if we had a grand suffering, like the martyrs or those imprisoned or tortured, then that would somehow be on a par with Jesus’ suffering and we could make a claim on that grace. Our suffering seems perhaps trivial, we are locked at home, we are anxious, we suffer ill-health. How can we equate this with the suffering of Jesus’ crucifixion? But He doesn’t care about that, this isn’t a competition. Like the widow offering her little coin, we can offer our suffering in patience, however little or great it may be. He doesn’t promise to take it away, but He does tell us He is with us, a shepherd looking after us, and we will emerge with Him on the other side of this.