Jesus suffered in His human body when it was on earth. Because His spiritual body, the Church, is still on earth, its members continue to suffer. This affliction arises partly because these members are unglorified humans in an unglorified world. It also arises partly because the kind of people who hated Jesus and rejected Him in His human body now hate Him and reject Him in His spiritual body, the Church. For both these reasons, Christians must expect affliction, hardship, privation, and suffering in the present order.

For all humans, believers and unbelievers alike, life in this world and in this present body is filled with pain. Mortality takes its toll both in us and around us. Children experience diseases and mishaps. Growing up entails meeting new forms of distress, and while we are still young we discover that not all anguish is physical. The more that we age, the more we discover the truth of Louisa May Alcott’s observation that a life of beauty is only a dream.

When we think of the sufferings of Christ, our minds turn first to His passion—His death on the cross for our sins. Yet Christ’s sufferings began at the moment of His nativity. He was born into a world and into a race for which suffering is a condition of fallen existence. To be human is to suffer, and the incarnate Christ was fully and completely human.

Consequently, we need to distinguish two senses of the sufferings of Christ. In the first (His passion) our guilt was imputed to Him as He propitiated God’s justice with respect to our sins. In the second (His afflictions) He, while personally unfallen and sinless, “was made in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom 8:3) and entered fully and genuinely into the experience of humanity in a fallen world.

Quite apart from His redemptive work on the cross, Jesus could and did experience human afflictions. After forty days of fasting He felt the pangs of hunger (Matt 4:2). After extended exertion He grew weary (John 4:6). His own people misunderstood Him so badly that they thought He was crazy (Mark 3:21). Even His brothers did not believe Him (John 7:5). He shed tears and experienced grief (John 11:35; Isa 53:3). He knew what it felt like to have his closest friends betray and deny Him (Matt 26:16; Luk 22:54-62).

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