Called to the fullness of joy

Just recently, on 7th April 2025, the  McGrath Institute for Church Life generously shared a presentation by the Erik Varden, the Bishop of Trondheim, Norway, on “Living with Wounds: The Passion in Theology and in Our Lives”.*

In the course of his talk, Bishop Erik said:

As Christians we are called to freedom, and to the fullness of joy, and that is non-negotiable as a Christian.  But to be a Christian is also to recognise that the fullness of God’s joy, the perfection of freedom, the thriving of human existence and the truth of love is found, not in spite of, but through the mystery of suffering.

In this presentation Bishop Erik  mentioned the importance of asking, talking about and writing about such questions in our times.  You can watch the recording of this presentation at the YouTube link below, as well as access further resources  on Bishop Erik’s life and work.

About the presentation

This profound and inspiring presentation, is one that is apt for our relationship with suffering within and outside ourselves in today’s world, as well as offering a means to explore the transformative nature of suffering for ourselves and others.

In this piece I am sharing a brief glimpse into this journey,  and I invite you to explore and delve further using the links provided. Much of the text shared here is available in the transcript of the presentation itself.

Being wounded

The consciousness of being wounded permeates our anxious times like a mist of sadness, a mist of often embittered sadness.  How striking then to make our way through Lent in such a cultural and societal context.  How striking at this time to be fixing our gaze on a wounded body, distended on a cross, and then to affirm shockingly, when you think about it, that this is where the wellspring of hope is founded, in and through this wounded body.

Bishop Erik in his presentation outlines how it took centuries for the church to describe and display that wounding visually in Art.  Why is this?

He shares that in the first five centuries of the Christian era the Church was busy framing into words, and trying to get used to keeping together in thought, the Christian paradox ‘that in Christ divinity and humanity are both integrally present without compromise – fully God, fully human’.  [The emphasis is mine].

The paradox that this man, this human being, born of the Virgin Mary, is, as we say in the creed, ‘God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God’.

The story of how the Church was able to equilibrate that paradox of Christ being fully God, and fully man, is an extremely exciting one intellectually, culturally and even politically.  The Council of Chalcedon held in 455, and in 451 refined the conceptual framework required to safeguard this equilibrium. The language found, is that which we still depend on, to express the mystery of faith with precision and integrity.

Only then was the Christian spirit free to envisage not only in Word, but also to depict through Art, the freely assumed humiliation of God made man, and this supreme scandal of the woundedness of God in Christ.

Slowly the crucifix emerged as the Christian emblem par excellence.  Now we take it for granted, but it took five centuries for the church to dare to depict that motif.

Christ as fully God, and fully Human

In our own day, we too, like our predecessors in the faith in the 4^th Century, find it difficult to maintain these extreme opposites together i.e. believing in Christ as fully God and fully man.

We ask ourselves do we really believe now that in Christ, and through Christ’s wounds, human pain has been touched by divine omnipotence, for a salvific and a transfiguring purpose?

It is an important question to ask ourselves, and to take a second look at?

We find it difficult to speak with conviction about the purposefulness of wounds, if we don’t believe that the woundedness of humanity has been touched symbolically, and sacramentally in totality, through the incarnation of the Son of God.  If we don’t believe, then the only thing we see in the wounds is scandal – where it becomes scandalous to us to see a suffering body, or a suffering mind.  We don’t like to see suffering, because at best we want to do something about it, or at worst we just want it to go away or at least be made invisible.

We tend to sideline the cross.

The significance of Christ’s wounds

The significance of Christ’s wounds is rooted in a great respect for the tremendous mystery of suffering, a mystery which is constitutive of the human condition.

Meditation on Christ’s wounds is more than a devout exercise, it is rather a constructive revolt against serial fallacies  e.g.  the psychological fallacy of cultivating hopelessness, of yielding to despair, yielding to that insidious voice whispering in our ear regarding our own intimate wounds – ‘it will always be like this’!  That voice is a lie.

Christ’s wounds open a different dimension, enabling us to lament without suffocating in our own lamentation, to lament without yielding to rage, but being opened instead to that crucially Christian condition which is compassion.  Compassion, which is not a feeling, which is not a sentiment, but rather a category of epistemology, a way of understanding the world, and understanding self and what is more, which is an ecstatic movement that draws me out of myself, to weep before, and to hope before the woundedness of another.

The gospel account of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection is profoundly subversive, not only in proclaiming the real possibility of healing.  The gospel account shows the wounds not just done away with, but rendered glorious.

The gospel account of Christ’s appearances after the resurrection show him still carrying the wounds, but show us in the encounter with Thomas, how his woundedness becomes an enlightenment and healing for others. And so we find in the Christian tradition, not least in the Middle Ages (so adept at engaging sensibility  with intellect, and of finding expressions in all the human areas of creativity) we find this wonderful correspondence of the cross to the tree of life.

We must not forget that the symbol of Christ’s passion is not a symbol that we engender, it is a symbol that we receive.  It is that symbol that interprets us – it is not we who interpret it.  

The question is ‘will I submit to its interpretation’? Christian symbolism is determinedly real and realistic.  It is focussed on an historically wounded body.  It insists on frank self-appraisal and the owning of responsibility, and it aspires to be changed by the object it contemplates, to be transformed by the symbol it considers.

The source of Christian hope is not wishful thinking, is not pleasant pious platitudes.  The source of Christian hope is the conviction that a transforming benevolence has saturated human suffering, even in its most extreme manifestations is saturating it now, reaching right into the depths of hell, and that no desolation therefore is final, and that even before extremes of desolation, we can and must nurture hope.

By his wounds declared the prophet Isaiah millennia ago, in words the Church and the liturgy applies to Christ’s crucifixion, ‘by his wounds we are healed’.

In as much as we establish our lives in him, our wounds too can become sources of healing, and even death will culminate in Life (through passion and patience) such as the Christian gospel, and our time is literally crying out for.

*This event was sponsored by the McGrath Institute for Church Life, the de Nicola Centre for Ethics and eCulture, and the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

See  About the Council-of-Chalcedon

Other useful links to Bishop Varden: check out some of his other talks: His blog: https://www.coramfratribus.com

His author page with Bloomsbury Publishing: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/author/…

A talk on prayer: https://vimeo.com/904452498