What Is Lacking

To love with the love by which Christ loves

“In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body.”

— Colossians 1:24

There are sentences in Scripture before which one should become silent.

This is one of them.

“I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.”

Nothing is lacking in the Cross. Nothing can be added to the sacrifice of Christ as though His offering were incomplete. “It is finished.” The Fathers never tire of returning us to this: salvation is the work of God, the gift of God, the descent of a Love we could neither produce nor deserve.

And yet Paul dares to say that something remains.

What remains is our participation.

Perhaps this is among the most beautiful and frightening calls in all of Scripture. Christ does not merely ask us to believe that He loves the world. He draws us into His own loving. He permits His life to become ours so completely that His compassion begins to take flesh in our flesh, His prayer in our prayer, His patience in our endurance, His self-emptying in our surrender.

The Cross is complete.

But Love desires to become incarnate again in us.

This is the mystery the Fathers understood as theosis. We are not saved merely by standing at a distance and admiring what Christ has done. Grace draws the human person into communion with the very life of God. “God became man,” St. Athanasius tells us, so that man might become god—not by nature, but by participation.

And if God is Love, then participation in God must finally mean participation in Love.

Not sentiment.

Not religious enthusiasm.

Not even principally consolation.

Love crucified.

This is why the call is frightening.

We often imagine divine love as something that will protect us from suffering. But in Christ we discover something far more terrible and beautiful: divine love enters suffering because the beloved is there.

God does not love humanity from a safe distance.

He enters the wound.

And those who draw near to Him eventually discover that they too are being asked to enter the wound—not because suffering possesses some value in itself, but because love refuses to abandon the beloved there.

The Desert Fathers knew this. Their withdrawal from the world was never finally a rejection of the world. In the purified heart, the whole world returned. The elder sitting alone in his cell discovered that he carried Adam within himself. He wept for sins that were not merely “his.” He prayed for strangers. He bore the weakness of brothers. He refused to judge because the suffering and fall of another had somehow become his own.

The deeper the solitude, the wider the heart.

This reaches extraordinary clarity in the modern elders. St. Silouan could say that the grace of the Holy Spirit teaches the soul to love the whole world. For him, the surest sign of the Spirit was not extraordinary experience but the impossible enlargement of the heart: to suffer because another suffers, to pray even for enemies, to desire that not one human being be lost.

This is Christ continuing His Passion in His members.

Not another Calvary.

Calvary entering us.

And perhaps nowhere is this mystery revealed more quietly than in the Theotokos.

She does not preach beneath the Cross.

She does not explain.

She remains.

The sword foretold by Simeon has passed through her soul, and there is nothing she can do to prevent what unfolds before her. She cannot take Christ down. She cannot silence the mockery. She cannot remove the nails.

She can love Him.

And she can remain.

Perhaps we underestimate how profound a form of love this is because we are so accustomed to imagining love as doing something. We want to repair, rescue, arrange, intervene, solve.

But there comes a suffering before which love has no technique.

Then love becomes presence.

The Mother of God stands beneath the Cross and receives into herself what she cannot change.

Stabat Mater.

The Mother stood.

There is an entire theology of love in those words.

And sooner or later, every Christian who follows Christ deeply enough is brought to such a place.

There will be someone we cannot save.

A suffering we cannot remove.

A history we cannot rewrite.

A body we cannot keep from growing frail.

A relationship we cannot restore by force.

An injustice whose consequences cannot simply be undone.

A future we cannot secure.

Perhaps even an identity, work, vocation, reputation, home, or way of life that we must finally place into the hands of God.

The temptation is to believe that if we cannot fix these things, we have failed.

The Gospel says otherwise.

Sometimes the most complete participation in divine love is simply to remain.

To remain beside the suffering person.

To remain before God.

To remain without explanation.

To remain when prayer has been reduced to a name.

Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

And perhaps then another name.

The name of the one entrusted to us.

This changes the meaning of suffering. Christianity does not teach us to seek suffering. The Cross is not an idol. Pain does not become holy merely because it hurts.

Love makes the difference.

Suffering enclosed within the self can become bitterness, despair, or resentment. But suffering surrendered to Christ can become intercession.

For your sake, Paul says.

That is the secret.

He does not rejoice because suffering is pleasant. He rejoices because even this can be given.

Nothing need be wasted.

The sleepless night can be given.

The exhaustion can be given.

The unanswered question can be given.

The waiting can be given.

The misunderstanding can be given.

The hidden sacrifice no one sees can be given.

The years that seem to have disappeared can be given.

Even the stripping away of what we once believed necessary can be placed quietly upon the altar.

Not because we understand what God is doing.

Because we love.

And perhaps this is where the mystery becomes almost unbearable in its beauty.

Christ allows us to give Him what He first gave us.

His love descends into us, becomes ours by grace, and then rises from us again as offering.

Everything begins with Him.

Everything returns to Him.

We stand empty-handed before God only to discover that even our empty hands can become eucharistic.

The Theotokos understood this before any of us.

“Let it be to me according to your word.”

Bethlehem is already hidden within that fiat.

So is Egypt.

So is Nazareth.

So is Calvary.

Her yes was not consent to a single moment. It became the form of an entire life.

And perhaps ours must become the same.

Not a heroic promise about what we will accomplish for God.

Something much smaller.

And much more absolute.

Let it be to me according to Your word.

If You give consolation, let me love You.

If You give silence, let me love You.

If I am useful, let me love You.

If I become hidden, let me love You.

If I can act, let me act in love.

If I can do nothing, let me remain in love.

If everything familiar is stripped away, let what remains be love.

For in the end, perhaps this is what is “lacking” in the afflictions of Christ:

not another sacrifice,

but a human heart willing to receive His sacrifice so completely that His love becomes flesh there.

Christ still desires to love His Body through human hearts.

Through hands that care for another when no one is watching.

Through eyes that refuse to turn away.

Through mouths that cease judging.

Through bodies that grow tired in service.

Through lives that may become smaller in the eyes of the world while becoming immeasurably larger within the hidden economy of grace.

And perhaps, finally, through a person who no longer asks what will become of his life, but only:

Lord, how may I love You here?

Then suffering ceases to be merely something that has happened to us.

It becomes something placed into His hands.

An offering.

An intercession.

A participation.

And beneath every Cross stands the Mother, teaching us the final grammar of divine love:

Do not flee.

Do not grasp.

Do not despair.

Remain.

Love.

And let Christ complete in you what Love desires still to give to the world.