Suffering-With--May 25, 2021

Suffering-With--May 25, 2021

"For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin." [Hebrews 4:15]

It is so much more than a rack of schmaltzy messages in pastel colors in the greeting card aisle of your local Walmart.  Sympathy--at least in the roots of the word--means "to suffer with."  That ain't a pastel-colored sentiment; that is a claim made in the deepest, most vivid colors there are.

And the claim, as amazing as it is to hear it, is quite simply that in Jesus, God has chosen to suffer with us, all the way "down," as it were, to the root of our human experience. 

The writer of Hebrews is going to explore the idea of Jesus as "high priest" more in the coming verses, and we'll give him the space to do that in due time.  But for now, let's just let it sink in that in Jesus, God is able to sympathize--to suffer with us--and to share the burden, the hurt, and the heartache, of life in these finite bodies and minds.  God's "God-ness" doesn't prevent God from caring about the day to day challenges, troubles, sorrows, and pitfalls of ordinary human life.  

That really is a big deal, because, my goodness, even we human beings aren't very good at sharing the sufferings of others without sliding into either callousness or condescension.  Like Humphrey Bogart put it so famously in Casablanca, "The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."  We easily lose sight of the troubles our neighbors are struggling with, or we look for ways to blame them for having those troubles--they should have made better choices, or they shouldn't have gotten sick, or they should have planned for the unforeseeable, or they should have had more money.  We are terribly skilled at wagging our fingers at others whose troubles we have not experienced--and that we therefore assume must not be very troublesome at all.  (How does the old line go?  Privilege is believing something isn't a problem because it doesn't happen to affect you personally.  Yeah--that.)

How much easier would it be for an almighty being, infinitely beyond us, to lose any sense of compassion for us mere specks?  I'm reminded of what happens in Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen, which imagined a real-life superhero, going by the title Dr. Manhattan, having almost omnipotent powers as a result of a science experiment gone awry, and in the storytelling, the human who becomes near god-like loses his grip on caring about humanity.  Because he can see our existence on a cosmic scale, he loses any attachment to the particular details or troubles of individual people.  Dr. Manhattan even notes coldly that a dead body and a living body have the exact same number of molecules in them and are, from a chemical perspective, hardly distinguishable.  And while, of course, the comic book story of a coldly indifferent blue superhuman is fictional, as a thought experiment, it's helpful to consider--if you or I had virtually limitless power and immortality, we might just stop caring about others altogether.  There's no guarantee that power or knowledge will make you more loving.

So it really is a wonder that the actual Creator of the universe really does care about us--that in Jesus, God retains the connection to our humanity that makes compassion and love possible.  God choose to see us, not as expendable little ants whose problems are merely a hill of beans, but as beings worthy of love--even worthy of the kind of love that chooses to suffer with us, in all that we suffer.

You might even say that what makes the Christian understanding of God different from say, Zeus of the Greeks, Odin of the Norse myths, the Force in the Star Wars saga, and Dr. Manhattan in the Watchmen comics, is that the God we meet in Jesus chooses to share our pain, our limitations, and our suffering, even though God could have avoided all that.  God chooses to hurt with us, as one of us, rather than staring at us coldly without being able to relate.  And God chooses to endure pain rather than to inflict it to save God's own skin.  God chooses a life marked by vulnerability--weeping over the tomb of friend Lazarus, feeling the loneliness of betrayal and abandonment by close friends, enduring the weariness of attending to one need after another, and still regarding each person who came to him as a life worthy of attention and love.  That makes all the difference.

So whatever you are facing today--whatever difficult situation, whatever painful set of circumstances, whatever heartaches are moving you to tears when you think no one else is looking--know that God shares it with you.  And by God's choice, God suffers with us--all of us.  That is the mightiest power and the greatest glory of the God we meet in Jesus: God chooses to suffer with us.

Lord Jesus, help us to know you are going through our struggles along with us, so that we can face whatever comes our way today.