THE SUFFERING

[Posted on FB on February 10, 2016 at 5:40pm]

After watching a bootleg copy of “The Revenant,” a great film by Alejandro González Iñárritu starring the greater Leonardo DiCaprio, I could not help but in awe of human resilience considering that the acclaimed movie is based on a true-to-life story. Of course, we have reasons to suspect there is little if not full exaggeration in the presentation of the story but Hugh Glass, the main character, was just one of so many in this world of sin and misery who had experienced that similar kind of agony.

Try watching every sensitive film, past and present, which subject matter is dealing about the holocaust, for even a comedy like “Life is Beautiful” depicts how man would fight for his life, and for his loved ones, at all cost. 

And I could not avoid too to seriously ask, how far can a man bear the most searing pain he would ever have before he finally snaps? Well, it was the same curiosity perhaps that drove Adolf Hitler to experiment the Jews that he would know first-hand all the needed facts.

Some people are seriously certain that to them the most devastating of all is no other than the physical pain, while others insist it’s a matter of the heart instead as it could shatter reality as well as their dream. 

Me too, I used to believe and to tell everybody with full confidence that the most painful experience in human life is having two successive love rejections. But wait till one of your kids was confined to an infirmary and you just beg for caution as he swallows the pain in held-back tears for eight-times daily injections.

And when we speak matter-of-factly of emotional, mental, and physical torture ever applied to a human being, no way there could be worse than what had been experienced by Jesus Himself, God and man all the same:

He was slapped with trumped-up charges, struck with human fists, spat on His entire face as He was dragged brutally despite His bruises and a blister. This while He was carrying a heavy cross on where He would be nailed later, and stripped naked that all shame in the world would He totally bear. 

He was insulted with blunt words at their worst and harshest, chastised with spiked iron whip, crowned with thorns and impaled by a spear. He thirsted but was given a vinegar rather than water, yeah, He took all those things in total submission like a dumb lamb being led to his slaughter (Isa.53:7).

Only then we completely realize that no affliction nor travail in this life, at present and in the past, would be more painful and agonizing than what had been through by Jesus. And what’s more comforting is Paul’s exhortation for the just that “the sufferings of this present time, are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Rom.8:18).