The action of God is the Cross, the Passion…Participation in suffering means to suffer with Christ, to encounter God, as Jeremiah and Job encountered Him; to see Him in the tempest, to apprehend Him as Light in the darkness, to love Him when we are aware only of the roughness of His hand…Our present human existence–itself not eternity, yet bearing within it eternity unborn–is overshadowed by suffering, as by a dark mantle, by a drawn sword, by an overhanging wall. As such, our life is wholly debatable; there is in it no repose, because, as finite, it is defined and constituted by ambiguity. Our experiences of the temporal limitations of our existence, of the narrow emptiness of our natural powers, of the great and petty tribulations which, as fragments of earth, we must ‘endure in pain’, are but the shadows of our essential finiteness. That sooner or later we must encounter the final barrier is the Pain of our pains…In the Spirit, we are enabled to know the meaning of our life, as it is manifested in suffering. In the Spirit, suffering, endured and apprehended, can become our advance to the glory of God. This revelation of the secret, this apprehension of God in suffering, is God’s action in us.
- Barth on Romans 8.17
