I agree that Our Lord, Jesus, didn’t physically go through or experience the great sufferings of His Passion and death “until He came in the flesh.” However, being God, as well as man, He not only knew everything He was to suffer, He knew it from all eternity. As He prayed to His Father before His great sacrifice, His sweat became like drops of blood in the Garden of Olives. With God everything is in the present tense. When He sees us at the merest glance, He sees not only ourselves as we exist this present moment, but every moment of our lives all at once, from the moment of conception to the moment of our deaths.
I think the concepts of “sympathy” and “empathy” regarding God’s understanding of our nature do not apply because they are human expressions for human emotions. We use those words and others to help us understand God’s actions in our lives. It’s like saying God is enraged as in the sense of human anger. However, He is a pure Spirit so all is conceptualized. At least that’s how I understand it. The Bible was inspired by the Holy Spirit and written by human beings who expressed God’s dealings with His people in ways that humans would understand. Yet, God is above all emotive expressions.
God knows our sufferings and experiences our pain, but, like I said above, He need not cry tears or be emotive even though He understands perfectly and to a much greater extent than we, ourselves, can understand or even experience. He understands and experiences all the reasons for our sufferings and unites them to His own if we are willing, so they would become for us meritorious.
I hope I have added something to the discussion. I’m sure a theologian would be of help here. It’s a great question as PAboy57 said. I hope more people add to this thread. The Cathechism may have more on this as well.
Great answer! I can tell you the background of this. When I was a missionary (protestant) in China, I worked with a lot of Muslims who would often want to know why God had to come in the flesh and suffer for us. My simple answer was because He loves us and that He became our Paschal lamb, meriting for us salvation through His sacrifice on the cross. To die on our behalf, He had to take on flesh. But more than that I would explain the need for the incarnation, in that as a perfect Man, He was able to conquer our temptations, bear our sufferings, and fulfill the Law. I would also say that He can sympathize with our sufferings as He has gone through them Himself.
Now in that language there is sometimes a blur between “knowing” and “experiencing.” To truly know, is to truly experience. This became a problem for me, when answering this question to a Muslim, I used the word “jingguo” which is “went through” or “experienced” but then turned around and translated it to my American fundamentalist friend as “understand.” He didn’t like this, and assumed that I was a heretic. At the end we finally reconciled by me stating that yes I believed that God has always known everything, but that the Son, chose to know (experience) our sufferings by coming in flesh because of His great love. And anyways, it becomes one of those issues where God didn’t
have to do anything, because He’s God (He knows all, has seen all, and can do all), but He
chose to do certain things out of His great love for us.
What ever the case, I dropped the issue, realizing that I used my words wrong and because I had a hard time getting my head around it, especially in light of the book of Hebrews. But then I heard a priest say something very similar in his homily - that He (Christ) understands our sufferings because He came in the flesh and it’s been bothering me ever since.
But now that I’m thinking of it (and of course all my thoughts on this stand to be corrected) it’s not a matter of whether God had to know or experience, it’s a matter of us having to know or experience. He became one of us, to show us the way to God, to die and suffer for our sakes. I’m not sure if a lot people, even Israelites knew that, or know it today. But because He came in the flesh - we now
know and
understand that we have a perfect High Priest and Savior who is Christ the Lord. He has always been qualified, but we had to understand that He is qualified. In this way we now know for certain that He understands our sufferings, because He’s experienced them Himself - their is no room for doubt.
As the Church always says, the Son of God became Man, so that a man can become a son of God!
Peace
P.S. You’re right, this would be a great topic to discuss with a theologian, as it involves the nature of God.
