Does God suffer?

 

March 22, 2026

In today’s Gospel we have Jesus showing us his feelings - his love for Mary and Martha, his grief at Lazarus’ death.  Seems normal for a human being!  But this was a theological conundrum for the early Church which held the belief that God is ‘impassable’ i.e. God cannot suffer.  So how were they to explain Jesus’ emotions, especially feelings of pain and suffering, if he was also God?  

There was, of course, no gainsaying the fact that in the Gospels, Jesus is shown as experiencinga range of emotions.  He felt  compassion and mercy before he fed the crowds (Mark 6:34);  and he is “moved with pity,’’ when he sees somebody suffering (Mark 1:41),  or when he sees the widow of Naim mourning the death of her only son  (Luke 7:13). He even experiences helplessness when he laments that he could not do anything for Jerusalem (Luke 19:41-44).  He shows anger when  he drives the money-changers out of the temple  (Matthew 21:12–13), and we are told he is filled with anger at the blindness of the religious establishment (Mark 3:5). In the Garden of Gethsemane he experiences deep distress, even desperation, as he cries out “My soul is sorrowful unto death” (Matthew 26:38), and deep sadness when he complains to his three closest disciples, Could you not watch one hour with me? (Mathew 26:40) And wasn’t it profound anguish that he experienced as he lay dying  on the cross, crying out, My God why have you forsaken me?  (Mathew 27:46 and Mark 15:34). He even seems to love some people more than others, like in the special love he shows Martha and Mary, and the special love Jesus had for the one who is called the beloved disciple (John 13:23-25) - though that last is a phrase found only in John’s Gospel.  He also experiences frustration and exasperation with his disciples’ total lack of understanding  (Matthew 17:17).  He shows tenderness and gentleness when he invites little children to come to him  (Mark 10:14), and it would seem even to the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1–11).

The range of deep feelings that we see Jesus experience through his lifetime, forced the early church to accept that Jesus was very really human. Jesus was not pretending to be human, or play-acting being human. He was not just God-in-a-disguise.  His humanity wasn’t just an illusion, as Docetism, an early Church heresy taught. He was truly human, for he was ‘one who became like us in all things but sin’ (Hebrews 4:15).

But if this was undeniable, and the dogma was that Jesus was fully God and fully Man, then would that mean  that GOD in Jesus experienced, felt, suffering too?  This issue was solved by early Church theologians who proposed that the God-part of Jesus was impassable and the human-part was able to feel and suffer. 

This seemed like an easy solution, but many modern theologians from many mainline Churches, including Jürgen Moltmann, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Liberation theologians and even many Indian theologians, gradually began suggesting that this kind of division meant that Jesus was not fully God and fully man, but part God and part man. They also suggested that if Jesus’ salvation was to heal the human condition, and suffering was an essential part of the human condition, then a God who assumed the form of a slave (Philippians 2:7), had to assume the suffering of the slave too. For as a fourth century Church Father, Gregory of Naziansus, argued, “that which is not assumed, is not healed”. So, modern theologians began to suggest that if Jesus really was the one in whom we see the face of God, (‘no one has seen GOD… it is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known’’ (John 1:14-17), then maybe suffering is central to who God is. God does indeed suffer with us. This idea is reflected in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian who suffered in the concentration camps of Hitler,  that “only a suffering God can help”. And in our world today, where modern means of communication bring into our very homes the trauma of wars, oppression, and hatred,  Bonhoeffer’s words hit home, as more and more Christians feel that it is only a God who feels, who understands suffering, who can help them go through their pain.

So does God experience suffering?   In this context, it is interesting to me, coming from a geographical eastern milieu (that spreads from India to the Far East) where Buddhism holds a great and central place,  to see how different Jesus is from the Buddha - a Jesus whose  most common image is a man struggling with pain on a cross, and a Buddha whose predominant image is that of a serene man in a meditative pose, one who is beyond all suffering.  Have they both experienced Ultimate Reality ???

The Catholic Church teaches us, particularly since Vatican II,  that there is truth in other religions, and that we have to learn to draw on their insights and teachings. And while I ask each of my readers to find their own respective resolutions to this startling contrast of two very very powerfully religious men who have changed the world through their respective and unique religious pilgrimmages, I can share here where I am in my obviously not-completed pilgrimmage.  

And where I am is at a stage where it seems to me that the Jesus who became the Christ, the Annointed one, the one whom Christians recognized as both God and Man, and Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha, the Enlightened one, the one who achieved Nirvana, - both have given us different experiences of that Ultimate Reality that we call God. If we can accept that both these men, struggling through the pain and suffering that each experienced, truly experienced God, then we may learn to accept that the serene and impassable Buddha, and the suffering hanging-on-the-cross Jesus, are both giving us different insights into the Ultimate Reality, a Reality who is always far beyond what any one human life can encompass.

Perhaps, then, God is both the impassable one like the Buddha, and also at the very same time, the suffering one like Jesus. We have to give up neither, for God is the ‘coincidence of opposites’ (Nicholas of Cusa). Thus in the Hindu tradition, God is both the Preserver (Vishnu) and the Destroyer (Shiva), while in Taoism, God is both the Yin and the Yang. Interestingly, this demand to overcome such contradictions  is also found in science, where today in quantum physics we are taught that our normal  "either-or" way of thinking has to be replaced with a "both-and" approach, as quantum states exist in a superposition of contradictory possibilities until observed.  Thus light, for instance, is both wave and particle, simultaneously, and not either wave or particle, until it is observed or measured. This seems to mirror exactly how human beings experience God, where it is the human experience (observation???) of this Ultimate Reality that actually decides who God is for us - an impassable Reality to the Buddha, or a suffering God to Jesus.

In any case, it is only  by placing all these contrasting images or possibilities simultaneously in our hearts that we can wean ourselves away from the ever-present danger and arrogance of us claiming that we know who or what or how God is - for as Paul writes, in this life we can only experience God ‘’as through a glass darkly’’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). 

First Reading: Ezekiel 37: 12-14

Therefore prophesy and say to them: Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel.  And you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people.  I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.”

Second Reading: Romans 8: 8-11

Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.  But if Christ is in you, then the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.  If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

Gospel: John 11: 1-45

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.  Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill.  So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”  Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus,  after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.”  The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble because they see the light of this world.  But those who walk at night stumble because the light is not in them.”  After saying this, he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.”  The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.”  Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep.  Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead.  For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.”  Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away,  and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother.  When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home.  Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.  But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”  Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again. ‘’ Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”  Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live,  and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”  She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.”  And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him.  Now Jesus had not yet come to the village but was still at the place where Martha had met him.  The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there.  When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.  He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.”  Jesus began to weep.  So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”  But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it.  Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.”  Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”  So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me.  I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.”  When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”  The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

Many of the Jews, therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did believed in him.