The human Body of God died on Good Friday. All baptized Christians are members of that Body – of that society of living organisms which together participate a living organism – more or less. All of them that remain in it on through to their own deaths shall die as integral thereto, and so be raised with the Body of Jesus to everlasting bliss.
It’s really that simple. To understand how Jesus rescues us, we need not spell out how he knits up and repairs the devastation of the Fall – our own, and that of the whole cosmos – so that we can (our cosmos in train) follow him through the strait and narrow portal that leads to life. We don’t need to understand how the Atonement works. All we need do is remember always that as members of his Body, we are at one with him.
Thus his agony is ours … and ours is his.
I was confused for a long time at all the talk one hears amongst Christians about laying our suffering at the foot of the Cross, about offering up our suffering as a sacrifice, about the redemptive power of suffering, and so on. How exactly, I wondered, could I offload my suffering in any way, whether to Christ or to some other? But again, it is quite simple: I don’t need to do anything to lay my suffering at the foot of the Cross, or offer it up to God as a sacrifice; nor is there something extra that needs to happen in order for the suffering of a Christian to exert redemptive power. Rather, because I am a member of the Body of the Logos, my suffering *just is* the suffering of Jesus, and vice versa. Also, my suffering is of every other member of the Body, and vice versa. Of such is compassion – literally, suffering together – and indeed charity.
How could our suffering fix anything? How, that is, could it be redemptive?
Again, simple: if as members of his Body our suffering is the suffering of Jesus the God man, and vice versa, why then our suffering *just is* part of what he in his Body endures and pays to repair the ontological wound inflicted upon the whole creation by the Fall.
We don’t need to do anything special to offer up our suffering as a sacrifice. All we need do is remember that our suffering is already taken up in the suffering of Jesus, and so is in part constitutive thereof.
It’s a change of perspective, no more. And yet, it makes all the difference.
We’ll all suffer horribly and die. Everyone must be crucified, or something like. What matters in the end then is only whether in so doing we *take* the Cross, and dying upon it, follow Jesus.
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Those who decide not to follow Jesus in his death will likewise rise to everlasting life. But they shall rise as alien to the Body – as they wish – and to the communion of heaven. They shall rise to life utterly alone, immured incorrigibly within the bounds of the selves they prefer to worship.
The Orthosphere 