The Fellowship of Suffering

Companion piece: Nikaō, the word study on overcoming that this article leaves aside.

Recently I was in a church service where we sang about the power of the name of Jesus.

The message that followed was about how God helps me in my problems. Much of the opposition we face, it said, comes from the enemy, and God has already overcome Satan. Prayer is how we take hold of that victory and overcome the enemy ourselves.

As I listened, I began to wonder how the apostles would have heard those words. Peter, who tradition says was crucified upside down. James, put to death with the sword by Herod. Paul, writing to the Philippians from prison, not knowing whether he would live or die. They prayed. In the end, they were not spared.

What I had previously held as true, I began to doubt.

What I had been reading

Around the same time, I had been looking at what some of the most influential churches in the world preach. I read a month of their sermons from this September and their Easter sermons from last year: the titles and summaries, and the full text where I could find it.

More than half of those sermons said nothing about suffering at all. They were about identity, vision, marriage, money and work. When suffering did come up, it was usually something God would get you out of.

At Easter, one of the largest churches in America heard this: “Jesus was forsaken so that you would never have to be.”

That is true. I have said it myself. Christ bore what our sin deserved, so that we will not bear it. But the sermon did not stop at sin. A few minutes earlier it had moved from sins to situations: “It’s his battle. It’s his fight… That is his burden to carry.”

Not every church said it. Another told its people that “prayer may or may not change your circumstances, but prayer always changes you.”

Of the sermons I could read in full, none mentioned persecution, or martyrdom, or taking up the cross.

The name

The song we sang in that service was about the name of Jesus. Paul tells the Philippians where that name came from.

“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:5–9).

Therefore. Paul’s word is dio, “for this reason.” The name above every name was given because of the cross.

Jesus had all power, and he chose to be subject to the circumstances. When they came to arrest him, he told Peter that he could ask his Father for more than twelve legions of angels (Matthew 26:53). He did not ask. On the cross, the people passing by said, “Save yourself, and come down from the cross!” The chief priests said, “He saved others; he cannot save himself” (Mark 15:30–31).

The temptation Jesus faced was to use his authority and power to overcome the forces that threatened him. To come down off the cross. He stayed.

Like him in his death

A chapter later, Paul says what he wants for himself. He has counted everything as loss, “because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (3:8). Then he says what that knowing includes:

“that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10–11).

The power of the resurrection comes first, and it leads into his sufferings and his death. The resurrection from the dead comes last. Paul does not say he is sure of it. His words are ei pōs, “if somehow.”

One of the Easter sermons I read used this verse, the only one that did. It put suffering first: “On the other side of suffering is the power of resurrection.” Paul puts it the other way round.

“Share his sufferings” is koinōnia, fellowship, partnership. We were told often enough that Jesus shares our sufferings, and he does: we have a high priest who can “sympathize with our weaknesses” (Hebrews 4:15). Paul asks for the other direction. He wants a share in Christ’s.

“Becoming like him in his death” is one word in Greek, summorphizomenos. It means “being shaped together with.” It is built from the word for “form” in chapter 2, where Jesus was “in the form of God” and took “the form of a servant.” Jesus took the shape of a servant. Paul asks to be given the same shape.

The verse we quote

The best-known verse in Philippians is in chapter 4: “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (4:13). It is often quoted as a promise of success, the strength to win.

Read with the verses before it, it says something else. “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (4:11–12).

The “all things” are hunger and plenty, need and abundance. The strength is to be content in either. Paul wrote this from prison (1:13). “Him who strengthens me” is endunamounti, a word built on dunamis, power. Here the power is what keeps Paul content while he is hungry.

Earlier in the letter Paul tells them: “For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake” (1:29).

The word Paul uses for “granted” means “given as a gift.” It comes from the same root as the word for grace. It is the same word he used in chapter 2 for the name God gave Jesus. Believing in Jesus is a gift. So, Paul says, is suffering for him.

They saw power differently

Peter was told how his road would end. After the resurrection, by the lake, Jesus asked him three times whether he loved him. Then he said: “When you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” John adds: “This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God.” And then Jesus said to him, “Follow me” (John 21:18–19).

The church that came after the apostles heard it the same way. Around AD 96, the church in Rome wrote that Paul had “obtained the reward of patient endurance” (1 Clement 5). About sixty years later, the church at Smyrna wrote of its old bishop Polycarp, who had served Christ for eighty-six years, that he had “through patience overcome the unjust governor” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 19). In AD 177, in Lyons, a slave girl named Blandina was tortured for a whole day. The letter describing it calls her “small and weak and despised, yet clothed with Christ the mighty and conquering Athlete” (Eusebius, Church History 5.1).

They did not stop praying for healing. Writers in the same century tell of the sick being healed and demons driven out in the name of Jesus (Justin, Second Apology 6; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.32.4). Hebrews 11 holds both together. Some “escaped the edge of the sword.” Others “were tortured, refusing to accept release.” And “all these” were “commended through their faith” (11:34–39).

Jesus saw power differently. The disciples saw power differently. The martyrs saw power differently.

Knowing him

Paul does not begin that verse with power. He begins with knowing: “that I may know him.” The power, the sufferings and the death all come with knowing him.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, to know God is more than to hold information about him. Of King Josiah, Jeremiah says: “He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Is not this to know me? declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 22:16). Josiah knew God by what he did for the poor. Paul’s knowing is that kind, and it took him to a prison.

I still believe what I believed before that service. The words are the same, but the meaning is different. I don’t pray the same way. God may deliver me from a difficulty. But he is not limited to deliverance, and it is not always the way he is most glorified. So I ask to be delivered from the evil of believing that a trouble-free life is a godly life.

Paul does not claim to have arrived either. The next thing he writes is this:

“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12).