Only the sufferings of Christ are valuable in
the sight of God, who hates evil, and to Him they are valuable chiefly as a
sign. The death of Jesus on the Cross has an infinite meaning and value not
because it is a death, but because it is the death of the Son of God. The Cross
of Christ says nothing of the power of suffering or of death. It speaks only of
the power of Him who overcame both suffering and death by rising from the
grave.
The wounds that evil stamped upon the flesh
of Christ are to be worshipped as holy not because they are wounds, but because
they are His wounds. Nor would we
worship them if He had merely died of them, without rising again. For Jesus is
not merely someone who once loved men enough to die for them. He is a man whose
human nature subsists in God, so that He is a divine person. His love for us is
the infinite love of God, which is stronger than all evil and cannot be touched
by death.
Suffering, therefore, can only be consecrated
to God by one who believes that Jesus is not dead. And it is of the very
essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good,
not because they have meaning, but because the Resurrection of Jesus has robbed
them of their meaning. (Thomas Merton, No
Man is an Island [London: Burns and Oates, 1955], 68-69)
