2 Corinthians 1:5, ‘For just as the sufferings of Christ abound for [or ‘unto’, ‘εἰς’] us, so through Christ also abounds our comfort.’
Because the one and indivisible Jesus Christ is irreducibly the Crucified and Risen One, in Him, suffering and comfort are “hypostatically” (i.e., rooted in personhood) united. Just as there is no Crucified Jesus apart from the Risen Jesus, so too, in Him, there is no suffering that is not bound irrevocably to its appointed comfort.
Further, in the fundamentally Anastasiform (i.e., ‘resurrection-shaped’) Lord, it is not only necessary that all suffering is united to comfort, but that it is united to comfort as the acorn is to the oak, there is a hypostatically determined *directionality* to this union: suffering *leads to* comfort, suffering *secures* comfort, suffering *ends with* and is finally *defined by* comfort. In Christ, just as surely—and precisely because—Resurrection follows and interprets Crucifixion, so too the kernel of suffering invariably flowers into the wheat of comfort.
And since we, Christian, are united to this one and indivisible Jesus Christ, since we—not merely by analogy, but in spiritual and mystical reality—are His Body (the very same Body that suffered on the cross and rose from the grave), this same dynamic plays itself out in us as well.
As a particular suffering is carved into our life, so too is a particular comfort (the specific comfort that was shaped like a well-crafted key for that specific suffering by the resurrection of the Lord who bears that same suffering on the cross) so too is a particular comfort fitted into the cavity of that suffering, filling up its every contour, and ‘opening’ it into resurrection rest (even as we remain with Him upon the cross). But these keys of comfort—shaped by our suffering as it is borne in Christ, secured by His resurrection, which is also ours—these keys of comfort are not merely for the sufferer, they are then to be used to loose the suffering of others who suffer with similar suffering. And so, in this way, God comforts the suffering body of the Church—which is His own suffering Body in Christ—through the suffering body of the Church.
