A second try on the Easter meditation

Over at the ATB comment thread where my previous post is under discussion: the Guest made a couple of comments about God's "eternal suffering," Michael asked what that meant, and in the process of trying to explain what I understand the Guest to have meant I finally said what I spent the previous post trying, and largely failing, to say:

...And that is the point I tried but really failed, I think, to make effectively [in my incoherent meditation]. One of the deepest meanings of Easter is that humiliation that springs from love becomes something intrinsically glorious; that the Passion and the Resurrection are both eternally present to God because they are eternally a single act, and that God Himself rejoices in the humiliation -- even while it remains awful -- because He rejoices in the glory and love of the act as a whole. Christian Hope is that theological virtue (i.e., a virtue that would be difficult to deduce from ordinary unaided natural reflection on morality) that says that a Christian who is suffering does not simply grit his teeth and "hope" that this will all be over eventually. The theological virtue of Hope says, "In my suffering, right now, God is doing something glorious, and so long as I do not in the end reject His grace I will one day look back at this suffering and rejoice that it befell me; there will be a time when I look back and understand what God was really doing. When that time comes I will realize that I would not trade this suffering for all the pearls in the sea -- and therefore I choose right now to rejoice in God's grace, even before I can see the glory -- for I know, by Faith and Hope, that the glory is there." The virtue of Hope, allied with Faith, is what makes it possible to obey Paul's injunction to "rejoice always," that makes it possible seriously to "in everything give thanks," that caused the Apostles in all sincerity to rejoice that they had been counted worthy to share in the sufferings of Christ. God's humiliation is, as the Guest says, eternally present to Him -- and He eternally rejoices in it, not as a sadomasochist, and not as one who has forgotten how much it hurt or who likes pain for its own sake, but as One to Whom the whole act of Easter is eternally whole, eternally glorious, and eternally a fount of joy. For His humiliation on the Cross is the point at which His Love reached its most glorious level of expression. "Greater love hath no man than this..." What Christians call "Hope" is the echo, in our own temporally bound experience, of this eternal rejoicing of God in every moment of His act, including Gethsemane and Calvary just as much as Easter morn.