The Crucified Brain

It was late Friday morning, and if you'd been in Jerusalem that day, standing on the right street, you would have seen them. Three men, whipped and torn, staggering through the street, urged on by soldiers. Each had their arms bound to a wooden bar. The soldiers called it a patibulum. They were headed for a hill outside town, where three poles – the soldiers call them cruces – had been rooted deeply in cracks in the rock.¹ Once there, you know they'll be nailed to these beams they carry, and those beams will be hoisted up and attached to the poles, suspending them in midair to die in full view, scarcely a loincloth left to cover them, as bit by bit they wrestle for breath. Above the one in the middle is a sign: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” (John 19:19).

Flashback to earlier in his ministry. Jesus and the Twelve are on a retreat north of Galilee. Jesus has unpacked the outline of his suffering and his resurrection, he's faced Peter's befuddlement and anger at the thought, and now Jesus must teach them that it's the only way – and not just for him. “If anyone would come after me,” he shouts to all in earshot, “let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me!” (Luke 9:23). If they really want to be Jesus' students, if they'd learn all he has to teach them, then only one way works: It's to forget themselves, give themselves away; it's to follow Jesus on a road that risks execution. Because that's where Jesus has to be headed. And it's a radical demand of discipleship! It's as if Jesus were saying that to follow him is to sign our own death warrant, and to know we'll be treated lower than dirt as we sink beneath the foundation of the world, to crack it and make it new in him. He promises a burden on our shoulders, a hard and narrow road, a humiliating gauntlet of shame and scorn. But nowhere will he teach us more than on our death march.

The Apostle Paul was one who chased Jesus vigorously on the way of the cross. For the gospel he's beaten and whipped and stoned, risking his neck time and again, all in pursuit of Christ's glory in the salvation of the world (2 Corinthians 11:22-33). From these injuries, he could say, “I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). And in it all, his prayer was to “share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10).

For the most part, when Paul and the apostles speak of sharing Christ's sufferings, they're thinking of the unique pains of the missionary lifestyle they live – of real physical danger from the world's opposition to the gospel. They also see that to their converts it was also granted to “suffer for his sake” (Philippians 1:29). The wounds neighbors inflict on them as Christians are aiming at Jesus in them, so their wounds are an overflow of the crucifixion itself, being played out continually on the Body of Christ below. But fast forward a few centuries, and now many Christians live in lands where, whatever pressures we face, we can go through life with minimal risk of being literally wounded in Christ's name. We don't much expect following Jesus to really lead to our execution. If radical suffering for his name is out of reach, are we cut off from a chance to gain his glory?

Over the centuries, the Church grappled with that question, finding occasion to dig around Jesus' words to hunt for treasure, buried implications for the ordinary Christian whose society thirsts no more for the blood of the saints. Some traveled abroad to the mission field in quest of a chance to confront real risk for Christ. Others sought radical discipleship not as martyrs but as monks. But then some saw that ordinary natural suffering could also become suffering for Christ. Our everyday problems can be hooked up to the cross.

So one medieval mystic spoke of all our sufferings being “conformed to the suffering Christ,” imagined Christ speaking of us having “died with me as I was dying... You should always have the memory of my passion in your heart, and offer to it all the tribulations and adversities that you suffer, and, so far as that is possible, you should clothe yourself in its likeness.”² Martin Luther said that “such evils as sickness and the like are borne, not by us Christians, but by Christ himself”³ – that “the touch of Christ sanctifies all the sufferings and sorrows of those who believe in him,”⁴ that “through the suffering of Christ, the suffering of all his saints has become utterly holy, for it has been touched with Christ's suffering.”⁵ In Christ's cross, “human suffering itself has been redeemed,” so that “each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.”⁶

Put that vision all together, and it means that kind of suffering by a Christian can be experienced as a kind of cross-bearing. It can be made cross-bearing by you, because that's a privilege of the Body of Christ. Because you're a part of Christ's Body, your suffering is a suffering of the Body – and so that suffering naturally belongs on Christ's cross. You can unite your suffering to his. That's a choice, to consider it that way, to create that link. And then your suffering is different. It's not your private, mundane hurt; it's part of the mystery of the passion. Jesus took the suffering of his cross, and he made himself a sacrifice, and he gave it to his Father. And we, in suffering, have the privilege of choosing, instead of resisting or regretting the suffering, to instead lay it on Christ's cross, lay it on the altar, lay it where Christ hangs dying, and offer it with him as a humble gift to God.

Something as humdrum as a headache can be offered to God on Christ's cross – it's not much, but it's a privilege to put it there, to open the channel and let that headache be an overflow of the passion into your life. Something as dreadful as cancer can be offered to God on Christ's cross – and that may well feel much more cruciform. Arthritis, fibromyalgia, pneumonia, vertigo – none have to be meaningless, none merely endured. You can take them up as a cross, and carry them after Jesus, living out the baptismal gift of being “united to [Christ] in a death like his” (Romans 6:5), “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:10). You can choose to accept these afflictions, choose to embrace them, choose to make them a sacrifice and a gift to God.

Every day you get up and feel that hurt, feel that ache, feel that your body is malfunctioning, you can look in the mirror and declare, “I belong to the Body of Christ, so this suffering is the suffering of the Body of Christ. This suffering belongs with Christ on the cross. Jesus, I put this on your cross, I accept it as my share in your pain, I thank you for the privilege of suffering with you this way, because I believe in you.” And then, in an act of will, you can put it there. You can take your suffering in your hands, and place your hands in Christ's hands, and when you don't have that strength, he can lift up your hands, holding your suffering and your hurt, and present them before the Father and say, “This, too, we give in love for you, O God.”

In this way, your suffering is an occasion to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1). That's what it can mean to take up your cross daily: you lay yourself on the altar as a sacrifice each day, and you trust that, if it please God, you'll wake the next morning to do it again. And this is an act of worship! Suffering this way is a holy action, a gift, the firstfruits of the toil of your endurance. On its own, it wouldn't be much. But tie it to the cross, include it as a bonus gift packaged into Christ's passion, let it be an act of the Body of Christ as such, and it's acceptable to God, a welcome gift. In this way, when that's how you treat your suffering, it still hurts, but there can be joy in it, meaning in it, because it deepens the bond between you and Jesus, when you accept your hurt as a cross like he accepted his for you.

Over five centuries ago, a little monastery asked a German painter named Matthias Grünewald to come paint a new altarpiece they'd commissioned in their church. Now, the monks here, they devoted themselves to the care of the sick, especially those dealing with skin diseases, for generation after generation. Lately, outbreaks of the plague brought many of those sufferers into their care as well. So, over several years, Matthias painted them an altarpiece. And on the middle of the outside, he made a life-sized portrayal of Jesus hanging on the cross. Only Matthias didn't paint it like everybody else. He knew it was for a hospital, to be seen by the sick and suffering. So Matthias painted the body of Jesus contorted with pains, his muscles wasted, his lips blue, thorns so thick on his head to hide his hair. Then Matthias went one step further. He covered the body of Jesus with plague sores. 

 

I've never seen the altarpiece in person (yet!), but I've seen pictures. It's terrifying and repellent. It's also immensely comforting. The image was big enough to be seen from a distance, and patients who were mobile were required to pray in the church several times a day.⁷ Imagine being among them. Imagine being a patient there, suffering ergotism or plague, and seeing the sight of Jesus on the cross, suffering what you suffer.  How, then, will you see your own suffering body when next you glimpse the mirror?

If accepting and offering our physical sufferings can be a way of crucifying our bodies with Christ, then giving the sufferings of our skin crucifies it with Christ, giving our bones or our lungs crucifies them with Christ, and so on. But then that has to include our brains, too. Yes, your brain can be sick. Your brain can suffer. And that suffering is, if you're part of Christ's Body, already ready-made to carry after Christ, to rush that suffering to him and daily put it on his cross with him, as an overflow of his passion.

Too often, we separate the brain from the body. Church cultures might show great grace and kindness to people suffering, let's say, arthritis; but they've sometimes been much less supportive of those suffering, let's say, from clinical depression. “It's all in your head!” people might say – meaning, “Just get over it; you're imagining things; simply will yourself to be better; just have faith.” Well, unless you're John the Baptist after Herod gets to him, your head is part of your body! No one would dismiss arthritis by saying, “Oh, it's all in your joints!” It makes no more sense to wave away mental illness as all in someone's head, or as a deficiency of faith. Mental illnesses have some degree of physical reality in the brain, which is part of the body.⁸ Brain biology might not explain all of what goes into having mental illness, but it consistently explains some. Honest psychologists will tell you they need to “take seriously the biological foundations of nearly all expressions of psychopathology” – that “nearly every major cluster of [mental] disorders has been linked with deficits or vulnerabilities in neuroanatomy, brain chemistry or genetics, or with viral infections,” even if “biological factors alone can rarely account for serious mental illness.”⁹ They'll say that “mental illnesses... have their origins in faulty biological processes,” though they're “complex states that result from an interaction of biology and environment. … An individual's biological vulnerability must interact with stressful life events (e.g., trauma) in order to prompt the onset of the illness.”¹⁰ And so we should treat people suffering mental illnesses accordingly.

But it also means that Christians with mental illness are suffering “mini-reflections of the redeeming suffering of Christ.”¹¹ It means the suffering experienced through mental illness can be “meaningful because of the One in whose suffering we participate, Jesus. … The personal suffering of the Christian finds the correlate in Christ's suffering.”¹² Through mental illness no less than any other, you can present your brain as a living sacrifice.

And the same is true of dementia, which – even more strongly than mental illnesses – is known to be a physical reality, a kind of suffering afflicting the brain. The World Health Organization defined dementia as “a syndrome due to disease of the brain, usually of a chronic and progressive nature, in which there is disturbance of multiple higher cortical functions.”¹³ Various causes can damage brain tissue and the connections between cells there. In Alzheimer's disease, usually starting in the brain's hippocampus and temporal lobe, brain cells degenerate (from causes we don't understand yet), resulting in plaques of amyloid proteins building up between the cells, inhibiting communication, while the tiny tubes connecting the heart of the brain cell to its branches get all tangled up.¹⁴ In frontotemporal dementia, certain proteins build up in the frontal lobe and temporal lobe, so that brain tissue shrivels.¹⁵ In Lewy body dementia, weird protein clumps grow inside the nerve cells, usually in the midbrain or the cerebral cortex, and they crowd out the cell's nucleus, impairing the cell's function.¹⁶ In vascular dementia, blockages form in arteries leading to the basal ganglia, restricting blood flow and causing lesions to develop in the white matter within the brain.¹⁷ All these conditions work by different mechanisms, usually starting in different parts of the brain, so the dementias don't all develop the same way or share all the same symptoms. But in each case, there's an underlying physical change in the brain lurking behind the cognitive changes, the behavioral and psychological symptoms, and the family issues downstream from it all.¹⁸

All of these dementias entail suffering – real physical suffering in a part of the body. So suppose you're in the early stages of dementia. One or more of these diseases is beginning to progressively affect your experience. Your brain – as much part of your body as your skin or bones or lungs – is suffering. Tissues are being harmed, vital cells are hampered or choked or crowded, and the results you experience might already leave your brain feeling often pained and fatigued. You're a Christian. Is there anything you can do with this for God?

Yes! You can make a decision. You can pray that, if God doesn't see fit to withdraw the suffering by healing you, then you tell God that you'll accept the suffering of dementia in Jesus' name – that you'll claim it as a cross and carry it with him on the road to Calvary. You can stretch out your brain on his cross. Imagine that the tangles in your nerve fibers are the twists in his crown of thorns which you wear with him (Mark 15:17). Imagine that the protein clumps or plaques are the tips of his nails, being hammered between your brain cells. Imagine that the narrowing arteries are being distended on the cross. Imagine the lost memories and cognitive functions are washed away by the sour wine and gall (Matthew 27:34,48). When you can't dress yourself, so too did they dress and undress Christ (Mark 15:20). When your old hobbies and interests are stripped away, see there Christ's garments being gambled over by the soldiers (Mark 15:24; John 19:23-24). When you're frustrated, tell yourself – or have a loved one whisper to you – that your brain is crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20). When your brain feels powerless, just so Christ “was crucified in weakness” (2 Corinthians 13:4). When you're confused, your brain cries out with him, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). When you can no longer care for your basic needs, then is Jesus saying, “I thirst” (John 19:28). When your dementia advances all the way, then Jesus cries out for your brain, “It is finished!” (John 19:30). And when all is said and done, and your brain can do no more, then at last his prayer embraces you when you cannot think to know it, and says: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).

“When we focus on the cross, we see the trials of dementia in a totally different light.”¹⁹ To approach dementia that way, to help a loved one approach dementia that way – that is the gift of the crucified brain. That's a brain stretched out on his cross, the brain presented as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God (Romans 12:1). In the white matter and gray matter of your flesh, you're choosing to “fill up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, the church” (Colossians 1:24). And now dementia is not meaningless. Now dementia is not mere tragedy. Now dementia is changed from coercion into challenge – a challenging call to suffer it with Christ, to live it as an overflow of his passion into your brain. Now dementia is an altar from which you hand your afflicted brain to God, in the hands of Christ lifting up his infinite self-giving at Calvary. And the God who could hardly refuse to be glorified in his Son's cross-shaped love will most certainly be glorified by your afflictions – be they dementia, mental illness, or your other pains and diseases – when they're made to fill up and flesh out the crucifixion of Christ in you, and you in him.

And so in the crucified brain, dementia can become holy. In the crucified brain, mental illnesses can become holy. And in your flesh, the same can be true for arthritis, for cancer, for carpal tunnel, for coronavirus, for fibromyalgia, for gout, for pneumonia, for vertigo – the list goes on and on – provided only that you choose to suffer it with Christ, choose to suffer it as a cross, choose to make it an occasion of joining him at Calvary, and so embrace it out of love. For then, in the experience of the body itself, we're blessed to say with Paul: “I have been crucified with Christ! It is no longer I who live” with cancer, no longer I who live with chronic illness, no longer I who live with dementia; “but Christ who lives” with these things “in me” (Galatians 2:20). Hallelujah from the hurt! Praise the God who, on the cross, redeems suffering and sanctifies it with his bleeding touch. Blessed be the Lord who calls us to carry our crosses and follow him. “Rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:13). Amen.

1  On the distinction between patibulum and crux, see John Granger Cook, Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World (Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 28-34, 375-376, 423.

2  Henry Suso, Horologium sapientiae, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation – Medieval Continuation 4:207-215

3  Martin Luther, Fourteen Consolations (1530), in Luther's Works 42:122

4  Martin Luther, That a Christian Should Bear His Cross with Patience (1530), in Luther's Works 43:184

5  Martin Luther, Sermon in Coburg on Cross and Suffering (16 April 1530), in Luther's Works 51:208

6  Pope John Paul II, Salvifici doloris §19 (11 February 1984)

7  Andrée Hayum, “The Meaning and Function of the Isenheim Altarpiece: The Hospital Context Revisited,” The Art Bulletin 59/4 (December 1977): 505-506.

8  Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness (Brazos Press, 2006), 101, 114: “The seat of sickness in the mentally ill... is the brain … Mental illness is a biological disease. It is an event in the brain.”

9  Barrett W. McRay, Mark A. Yarhouse, and Richard E. Butman, Modern Psychopathologies: A Comprehensive Christian Appraisal, 2^nd ed. (IVP Academic, 2016), 67, 69, 71.

10  Matthew S. Stanford, Grace for the Afflicted: A Clinical and Biblical Perspective on Mental Illness, 2^nd ed. (InterVarsity Press, 2017), 29, 35, 56.

11  Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness (Brazos Press, 2006), 131.

12  Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness (Brazos Press, 2006), 37.

13  World Health Organization, International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10^th Revision, section on dementia.

14  Benjamin T. Mast and Brian P. Yochim, Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia (Hogrefe, 2018), 17-18.

15  Benjamin T. Mast and Brian P. Yochim, Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia (Hogrefe, 2018), 27-28.

16  Benjamin T. Mast and Brian P. Yochim, Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia (Hogrefe, 2018), 23-25.

17  Benjamin T. Mast and Brian P. Yochim, Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia (Hogrefe, 2018), 26.

18  Benjamin T. Mast and Brian P. Yochim, Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia (Hogrefe, 2018), 31-34.

19  John Dunlop, Finding Grace in the Face of Dementia (Crossway, 2017), 145.