Hello all -
I tried looking for another thread with this question (or something similar) but couldn’t find. I apologize if this is a duplicate thread. My question is does God hurt with us or feel sorrow/sadness? I’ve listened to some sermons where it is expressed that “God hurts for you” or that “He suffers with you” or that “He is sad when you turn away”, etc…
Just want to be clear whether this is consistent with Catholic understanding. I am thinking that the Incarnation and Passion of Christ may have something to with how God can relate to us in this way, but just want to know y’alls thoughts. Thanks.
Peace and all good.
It is not in the nature (the properties) of God to sympathize with the experience of pain and suffering in the same way that we do: God’s impassible nature is such that there is no existence of passions (desires) that a human would have.
God however has emotions (not passions) such as joy and love.
God’s omniscience and omni benevolence provide him a way to understand the “badness” of pain and suffering without recourse to experiencing the pain and suffering - it is not necessary for God to empathize with our pains and sufferings by way of his own nature. The effects of sin (of the angels and men) made it possible for man to suffer, but His divine nature is incompatible with the experience of sin and the effects of the human states of grief, pain, suffering, etc.
Now, that being said, something trascendent took place in Creation, something beyond all that the human mind or even the angelic mind could possibly graps:
God the Son was born in the flesh.
God the Son, the Second Divine Person, incarnated, took flesh, was constrained in a human body with nerves and a beating heart.
God the Son, our Lord Jesus, the Christ, experienced what men experienced, personally, truly, concretely, in time and space. He experienced joy and sorrow. He laughed and He cried. He felt hopeful and He experienced discouragement. He felt hungry, thirsty, tired. He sweat under the heat as He carried wood working as a carpenter. He loved of the kind of love that makes our heart rush, the child’s love for his parents, the husband’s love for his bride the Church, the father’s love for his children.
In Christ Crucified we have the assurance that a wholly marvelous act of humility was accomplished, one that forever changed the way in which mankind saw God. This is to fulfill what was said: “
When I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to Myself”. The omniscent, impassible God, the
motor immobilis of Creation, suffered and loved with a human heart. He empatized with our sufferings, He suffered with us, for us. This is a mystery even for the angels, as it is written:
He said, “Surely they are my people, children who will be true to me”; and so He became their Savior.
In all their affliction he was afflicted, and it was no messenger or angel but His own Presence that saved them: in His love and mercy He redeemed them
This is why Paul uttered: “We preach Christ Crucified!”, and why in all the private revelations of Christ to the saints He has manifested Himself with images of the Passion, and why in the visions of the Sacred Heart the Lord revealed to His Church that His glorified body lives outside of space and time but with a living, beating human heart, which He always displays ablaze with fire and surrounded with thorns.
Does God suffer? In Christ Jesus, yes. How this happens is beyond our ability to comprehend, for it trascends our limitations, our constrictions in the flesh, in space and time.
