The primary Christian response to the problem of evil and the human suffering it causes is not to spiritualise it, attribute it to fate or explain it as punishment, but to declare that God suffers too, both in the historic event of the Crucifixion and in all human experiences of pain, anguish, abandonment and grief. As Jesus describes in Matthew 25:40, those who relieve the suffering of others, also relieve his. The greatest of saints such as St Francis of Assisi could almost literally see the face of Christ in the wounded outcast, the dying soldier, the destitute child, the weeping mother. And the greatest saints also saw that suffering is somehow the corollary of love. The Crucifixion would have had little meaning if Christ had not been surrounded – and is still surrounded to this