On Suffering With

On Suffering With--January 11, 2019

"For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who is every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need." [Hebrews 4:15-16]

It is so much more than a rack of pastel colors in the greeting card aisle.

Maybe that's just about all we use the word "sympathy" for these days.  When someone is sick, or going through loss, the Wal-marts and Hallmark stores of the world have just the thing: a sympathy card!  No inconvenience, no big sacrifice (they're only a few bucks, after all), and not even a need to go out of your way--you can pick one up while you are doing your grocery shopping and tuck it in the card next to the toilet paper and green beans.

It is, in other words, easy, to sympathize with someone in the age of the supermarket and shopping mall--we have turned it into a cheap consumer good that can be sent for fifty cents first-class postage.  And with that kind of picture in our minds, "sympathy" itself can seem like a meager thing.

But the word itself, in its linguistic roots, is powerful.  Our words "sympathize" and "sympathy" come from Greek roots that mean "to suffer with."  The image is so much richer and deeper than saying, "I happened to buy you a greeting card with a sad-faced puppy dog on it while I was buying bologna and aspirin," but rather it is the willingness to share someone else's suffering with them, alongside them, and beside them.  That kind of love is costly--not in price tag, per se, but in the real terms of heartache and time and presence.  Greeting cards get pitched after a couple of days most of the time, but someone will remember it when you share their sufferings--sitting with them in a waiting room, having coffee with them while they vent their troubles, weeping with them when there are no good words to "fix" things.  Those are powerful, precisely because they are instances of "suffering with."  

And that is the image that the writer of Hebrews gives us of Jesus.  Jesus is the One who suffers with us.  That is what makes his coming so powerful, so worthy of celebrating.  The living God doesn't merely stay up in heaven and send us pleasant thoughts or happy wishes to feel better--the living God has chosen to suffer with us, with all of us, so that there is nothing we can experience in this life that God has not entered into through Christ.  Betrayal and disappointment, rejection and anger, hunger and pain, loneliness and weariness and everything in between.  Jesus has suffered with us--he gets it.  He really gets it.

There is, of course, more we can say about why Jesus came and what he means. But it is enough for one day simply to let it sit with us that.  There are times in this life when it feels like nobody else understands what you are going through.  There are times when it feels like everyone else is rushing to find ways to "fix" you or "cheer you up" or "solve" you like a story problem, and what you really most need is to know that someone shares your suffering, because some sufferings in life are not meant to be waved away.  They are to be endured, and in the enduring they may be redeemed.  

What good news it is that God doesn't take the cheap and convenient way out of merely offering a bit of card stock with some cliché couplets on the inside to check us off God's list, but that God has chosen in the human flesh of Jesus to suffer with us.

It was always more than the greeting card aisle from God's perspective.  Maybe today it can be more from ours, too.

Lord God, give us the comfort of knowing you suffer with us, and give us the courage to suffer with others.