Benson posts an excerpt from Colossians 1:24 at the beginning of the chapter: "I fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ." The complete verse, from the Douay-Rheims translation, is "[I, Paul] Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the church".
And the issue in this chapter, in a preview of C.S. Lewis' 1940 book title, as Benson says, is whether or not Friendship with Christ offers a key to understanding "the Problem of Pain" because
It is this problem that stands in the heart of every attempt to solve the riddle of the Universe -- the question as to why pain is, or seems to be, the inseparable accompaniment of life. A thousand attempts have been made to answer it. One answer is that of Monism -- that there is in existence no actual God at all of infinite Love and Power, and that pain is merely another name for the upward effort of the inchoate Divinity to realize Itself. Another answer is that of the Buddhist -- that pain is the inevitable consequence of personal sin, and that the sufferings of each individual are the punishment of his guilt in a previous life. It has been reserved for a sect of our own days to maintain that there is no problem, because there is no pain! -- that the whole thing is an illusion; that "thinking makes it so." But no attempt is made in this system to explain why thinking should take this unhappy form, nor why we should think so at all.
Here then the problem stands.
Monsignor Benson does not think this a solvable problem; it's not math or science, that you can add things up and prove something. That's because pain "is one of those vast fundamental facts that must be scrutinized by the whole of man -- his heart and his will and his experience -- as well as by his head; or not at all." We can't identify the effects of pain and suffering in every life the way we know that 2+2=4 every time we do the sum.
As a Christian would expect, Benson looks to the Cross:
And when we turn to Christ crucified, knowing who and what He is, we see the problem set before us in its most acute form. It is not a man who hangs there, however innocent; it is Man without his guilt. And it is not merely unfallen Man who hangs there, it is Incarnate God. Certainly this does not answer the problem as to how it can be just that one can suffer for the sins of another; but it does unmistakably shew to us that one can so suffer, conscious of the fact, and can acquiesce in it; and, further, that this Law of Atonement is of so vast and fundamental a sweep and effect that the Lawgiver Himself can submit to it. It gives us then, as Christians, exactly the reassurance that we need; since it is demonstrated to us that pain is not an unhappy accident of life, not a piece of heartless carelessness, not a labouring struggle upwards on the part of an embryo God; but a part of life so august and so far-reaching that, since the Creator Himself can submit to it, it must fall under that Divine standard of Justice into which our own ideas of justice must some day be expanded.
That gives Benson the key to seeing Christ in the Sufferer:
Accepting this, then, so far as a working hypothesis -- so far as to believe that the Atonement that Christ wrought is according to this incomprehensible law -- we turn again to those other innocent sufferers -- to the crippled child, the agonized mother, the darkened melancholiac soul.
Now if we isolate these sufferers from the rest of the human race, if we take them out of their context and regard them one by one, again we are baffled. But if, on the other hand, we do that which we have been doing throughout these considerations -- meditate, that is, upon how it may be possible to see Christ in them -- light begins to glimmer at once. . . .
Because we can see how the suffering can echo Saint Paul's words to the Colossians:
"I work out, that is," the sufferer may say, "under terms of my own humanity, that atonement which He offered in His own. I am the minister of Christ, as His priest in one manner, His Saint in another, and his whole Church in a third."
Benson concludes with counsel on how we should respond to the sufferer:
And we, too, looking upon them and seeing in them not merely separate human souls that twist in agony, but souls in whom Christ is set forth evidently crucified, learn one more lesson of the Friendship of Christ -- the last, perhaps, to be learned of all -- that He who in His glorious and mystical Body demands our obedience . . . asks too, in those who are conformed to Him outwardly as well as inwardly -- who bear their pain solely because He bears it for them -- for that which is the most sweet of all the emotions that go to make up friendship, -- our tenderness and our compassion.
Even though Benson does apply this lesson of seeing Christ in the Sufferer in ourselves as he has in the chapters on Christ in the Sinner and Christ in the Average Man, it's clear that we should apply the lesson to ourselves as it helps us bear that pains that come throughout our lives. This seems like a perfect meditation on the Monday before Ash Wednesday as we consider how we should give the alms of Lent to those who suffer.
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