As Sorrowful Yet Always Rejoicing

A Meditation on Suffering and Joy in Paul and Luther

Part 2 – The Strange Partnership of Sorrow and Joy in Our Lives and Ministries

In part 1 of this article we looked at the sub contrario dynamic working out in the apostolic ministry of Paul, in which God brought the joy of the gospel in and through Paul’s hardships and sorrows, as an apostle of Christ. He writes powerfully about this, in 2 Corinthians 4:8-12: 

We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair;⁹ persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. ¹⁰ We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. ¹¹ For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. ¹² So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.

As a young Christian in my late teens reading this and similar passages (especially in 2 Corinthians), I thought these words were little more than emotional and grandiose hyperbole. “Who is this guy?” I thought. What world is he living in?

Little did I realise he was living in this world, my world, and that he was actually talking about real life in spiritually realistic terms. Little did I realise he was talking about a world that would, in time, also leave me perplexed and hard pressed and struck down too. Being very young, I had not had the chance to suffer enough at that point and so gain deeper wisdom, and so I had not had the benefit of the Spirit’s forging and moulding, that Paul describes in Romans 5:3-5:

“We rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and that character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us…”.

In these words, Paul touches not only on objective spiritual truth, but on very tender points in our own experience.

Our Lives of Sorrow and Rejoicing

And so we move from considering Paul’s experience of Christ’s sub contrario works to exploring what he teaches the church, that is us, about the intersection of suffering and joy in our lived experience with Christ Jesus. As we do so, we are joined by another familiar conversation partner, Luther.

Luther, who in some ways, walked a similar spiritual journey to St Paul[1], strongly identifies with and testifies to this transformation through difficult experience under the hand of God. He says we must “suffer divine things”.[2]  Also like Paul, although strangely little is said of it by contemporary scholars, Luther knew the joy that accompanies this kind of suffering, and observes how mysterious it is that the two live cheek-by-jowl together so often. In 1518 he reflected on the words of Paul in 2 Cor 6:10, the title of this article: Sorrowful yet always rejoicing. He says:

In the Lord we are always to rejoice, in ourselves we are always to lament. In God we have cause to rejoice; in ourselves we have good cause for sadness. There must then be rejoicing when there is sorrow, and there will always be sorrow even as we rejoice.[3]

Here Luther picks up, with his characteristically keen experiential eye, a distinction we must take a moment to make clear. In the Christian spiritual life, as we see it lived and taught by Paul and by Luther, joy accompanies suffering. But it does not replace or supplant suffering. This is not some thinly disguised theology of glory, but a true reception of the cross. And in fact this reality is what gives Paul’s rhetoric in these passages both its strangeness and its profound ring of truth.

The sufferings he enumerates are not exaggerated or inflated, but carefully recorded. They are real, and they were painful and personally costly. It’s an inescapable fact of life in this world that we Christians will truly know agony and sorrow. As Luther says in his Sermon on Cross and Suffering in 1530:

‘Very well, if I want to be Christian, I too must wear colours of the court. Our dear Lord Jesus Christ issues no other colours in his court; suffering there must be…The way (of suffering) is at hand, but if you refuse to suffer, you will not become Christ’s courtier’.[4] 

What enables us to know joy in the midst of this is that Christ is one with us in it, so that as Luther says, we are “conformed”[5] – “cruci-formed” (if you will) to Christ himself. Therefore, sub contrario, we share completely in his eternal glory, peace, joy and freedom here and now by faith. As Paul, echoing Jesus’ own teaching, says, we are not like a person dying in agony, but like a woman suffering in labour – in hope of a new life (Matthew 24:8, John 16:1, Romans 8:22).  Or as Luther memorably puts it, again his Sermon on Cross and Suffering, with which I will conclude:

If you are willing to suffer, then the treasure and consolation which is promised and given to you is so great that you ought to suffer willingly and joyfully because Christ and his suffering are being bestowed upon you and made your own. And if you can belief this, then in time of great fear and trouble, you will be able to say: Even though I suffer long, very well then, what is that compared to that great treasure which my God has given to me – that I shall live eternally with him?[6]

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[1] Luther often noted himself the parallels of Paul’s ministry to his own, though he certainly did not see himself as in any way an “apostle”.

[2] WA 9, 97:12-14. From Luther’s marginal notes on Johann Tauler’s Sermons.

[3] WA 1, 652:9-15. Luther is writing to his catholic opponent Prierias in regard to the Christian life, in his Dialogue on the Power of the Pope, 1518.

[4] WA 32, 30.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Sermon on Cross and Suffering, WA 32, 31.