Exegesis, Love, and Suffering

[Vice president and tutor Dr. Eliot Grasso presented this address at the Gutenberg College Commencement on June 14, 2024.]

The seniors have invited me to speak to them on this occasion, their graduation from Gutenberg College. It has been a great joy and a tremendous privilege to be able to participate in their education and in their lives. I want to take this time to draw some connections between three important aspects of their time at Gutenberg: exegesis, love, and suffering.

What is exegesis?

Exegesis is the art of interpretation. Interpretation is a skill whose aim is to make sense of things and figure out what is true. As such, interpretation is fundamental to how we live. All of our words and actions flow out of our interpretation of the world—what we think is true about it and why.

The world is a complex place full of complex people. Many pieces must be assessed in our process of figuring out what is true. Interpretation is a skill that requires a tremendous amount of practice. Every situation may involve patterns that are familiar to us, but ultimately each situation and person is slightly different. We use the skill of interpretation to figure out how to proceed in complex situations.

Ultimately, one’s interpretation rests on one’s assumptions and moral commitments. If God is a fact, I will interpret reality one way. If He is a fiction, I will interpret it another. If man is merely an animal, I will proceed in one fashion. If man bears the image of God, I will proceed in another. If pleasure is the standard of goodness, I will proceed thusly. If goodness is something higher than mere pleasure, I will proceed otherwise. Without secure existential moorings, we can drift in a sea of propaganda, lies, and other forms of nonsense. With secure moorings, we can use the art of interpretation to help us see who we are, why we are here, and how to live. If we accept that the Bible is true and that Jesus is the Christ, this framework will be essential in grounding us in our interpretational endeavor.

What does exegesis have to do with love?

Jesus speaks much about love in the New Testament. To Him, love is not an emotion, a sign of affection, or a passing notion. To Jesus, love is an existential commitment. He says that there is no greater love than to pour out one’s life for one’s friend. He says that if you love Him, you will do as He says. He says that the world will know His disciples by how they love one another. When Jesus says that the greatest commandments are that we should love the Lord our God and love our neighbor as ourselves, He is saying that love is a choice—a commitment that we make to God and to one another.

Loving is not a casual commitment. It takes everything we have. To love is to pour out your life for the ultimate good of someone else. It is a totalizing mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual action. It is daily and perpetual. And if we commit well to doing as Jesus asks, we will be transformed in the process.

If love is sacrificial, then love is also difficult. Imagine how a soldier in the trenches of World War I might throw himself on a grenade to save a beloved comrade. Imagine how a mother rises night after night to care for her child. Love will take everything you have and then some.

So what does exegesis have to do with love? To truly love another person takes thoughtful engagement. It requires interpretation—exegesis. Because every situation and every person is different, one must become skilled at reading people and situations in order to decide how to proceed in a loving way. In one instance, love might demand a three-hour conversation. In another, total silence. In one instance, rebuke. In another, encouragement.

What complicates our interpretation as we endeavor to love is suffering, which I will now address.

What does love have to do with suffering?

Suffering is inevitable in life. Every human person is assigned to this reality involuntarily. Likewise, every human person undergoes suffering involuntarily—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pain that is out of our control. It is often more than we want and occasionally more than we can stand.

The Jesus who asks us to love our neighbor is the same Jesus who asks us to take up our cross and follow Him. Jesus tells us that following Him will be hard and that this life will be difficult. In asking us to love our neighbor, Jesus is aware that life is going to be hard and that we will encounter suffering. He knows that we will struggle with our sinfulness and limitations. He knows that He is asking us to do an incredibly difficult thing. But the truth is that life was never going to be a choice between hard and easy. No. Life, as it turns out, is really only a choice between hard and hard-and-good. To love in the midst of our suffering is difficult. To love others often creates suffering. To sacrifice one’s life for the ultimate good of another—an ultimate good that is unobtainable in this life—creates its own form of suffering. To watch a loved one struggle and suffer creates suffering within ourselves.

The question isn’t “How do we avoid suffering?” for suffering is unavoidable. Rather, the question is “How will we respond to our suffering?” How we respond to our suffering will be a result of how we interpret it; what we think our suffering means will profoundly impact how we interact with it. Kierkegaard has a few things to say about suffering in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses and Practice in Christianity:

Now existence has turned the screws as tight as it can tighten the screws on a human being; to live under or to endure life under this pressure is what we call with emphasis: to exist as a human being.^[1] To be a human being, to live in this world, is to be tested…^[2] [H]e who believes God contrary to the understanding is strengthened in the inner being. For him the spiritual trial served as a strengthening in the inner being; he learned that most beautiful thing of all, the most blessed—that God loves him, because the one God tests He loves.^[3] The person who learned what he learned from what he suffered, and learned the good from what he suffered, gained not only the best learning but what is much more—the best instructor—and the person who learns from God is strengthened in the inner being.^[4] [T]he person who loved God and in this love learned to love people was strengthened in the inner being.^[5]

The world says that your suffering is meaningless. This will only be true if you refuse to learn what your suffering was designed to teach you.

One thing our suffering can teach us is how to love. In our suffering, we face pain, uncertainty, and profound questions. If we are willing to face into these difficulties and search for God, we can learn a lot about how to love. If we are willing to reflect, we can learn that our neighbor and our enemy suffer as we do; that they are worthy of care, kindness, and charity. We can learn in practicing love that we, too, are worthy of love.

It was through suffering that Jesus demonstrated His great love for us on the cross. “Pick up your cross and follow me,” He says. He knows what He is asking. He is asking us to pick up an instrument that is designed to destroy the body so that we may put to death what is dead in us and come to life in Him. Jesus does not promise that in following Him we shall escape suffering. Jesus promises that in following Him we shall not be destroyed.

When we pick up our cross and follow Jesus, we are trekking through the barren wilds of this mad world and following Him into the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of God where every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. And under His good and merciful Lordship, Jesus promises to wipe the tear from every eye.

In a sense, the Kingdom of God blooms in every heart that wants to belong to it, and even now the Holy Spirit comforts us in our frailty as we wearily but faithfully move toward God. Yet in another sense, the Kingdom of God is not yet here upon the earth, and until it is, the people of God have good work to do as we strive and love as best we can. Our suffering, though it will be difficult, is essential to our transformation as human beings, to our becoming what we are designed to become. Father Zosima in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov puts it like this:

Brothers, do not be afraid of men’s sin, love man also in his sin, for this likeness of God’s love is the height of love on earth. Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. […] If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love. […] Brothers, love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time.^[6]

What does exegesis have to do with love and suffering?

Exegesis can do more than help us to understand difficult books. Exegesis is a skill we can use to learn how to love, how to suffer, and how to live.

For the past four years you have practiced this skill intensively. A Gutenberg degree means that you are ready to practice on your own. By studying the course of Western Civilization and the ideas that have shaped it, you can now see how human nature impacts the world. There are patterns. The impact is not random, and it is not haphazard. Though interpretation is hard work, done often in hard circumstances, you can discover the truth if you have a humble heart and draw near to God.

Life is a test, but we can draw encouragement from Kierkegaard when he says, “The one God loves He tests.” God tests you, therefore He loves you. How you respond to the tests of life will depend on your exegesis—how you make sense of reality, how you interpret it.

Love your neighbor as you love yourself, for you are worthy of love and so is everyone else. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, for He is good and true and faithful beyond measure. Love your enemies whether or not you understand them. Seek their good, and honor their God-given humanity. This path will be incredibly difficult, but it is what we are designed for.

End Notes:

^¹Kierkegaard, Søren. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 191.
^²Kierkegaard, Søren, Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 183.
^³Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, 98;
^⁴Ibid, 95.
^⁵Ibid, 94.
^⁶Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002), 318-19.