What Easter Can Teach Us About Suffering

Jimmy Dorrell is the kind of Texas pastor who slips into preaching mode within the first five minutes of conversation, who has to tell two stories before finishing the first. His jokes can skip right past you if you’re not paying attention. On Palm Sunday, the fast-talking 70-year-old stood in the middle of Waco’s Webster Avenue, near Baylor University, wearing a light-blue face mask and a black hoodie, surrounded at six-foot intervals by homeless men and women waving palm fronds. Beside the street’s double yellow lines, a tattooed Jesus washed the feet of one of the men, while volunteers in masks and gloves waited on the sidewalk to put food from a slow cooker onto Styrofoam trays.

This is what church looks like during a pandemic: distanced, clouded by the threat of disease, but stubbornly persistent. Dorrell, whose congregation started meeting under a bridge close to I-35 nearly 30 years ago, is sad that his people can’t meet the way they used to on Sundays, that the crews who cook for the homeless are limited to 10 to 15 people at a time. As weird as this time is, though, remaining faithful through a period of fear and illness is exactly what faith is about, he says. “Protestants, we don’t do very well when it comes to dealing with the suffering of Christ,” he told me. Despite the many parts of the Bible that depict intense pain, “we middle-class Christians don’t like those passages, because we don’t want to suffer. We just want the good stuff.”