Hebrews
4:14 - 16 Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven,
Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do
not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we
have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may
receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Life can be brutal. A friend of mine recently had a tragedy of
magnitude visited upon her family. The
violence involved is mind-numbing and I have found that it has set off a cascade
of memories of other ugliness that I have known about or seen:
A
mother prostituting her daughter
A
father killing his wife
A
husband stalked by his controlling and violent wife
An
infant picked up from the crib and thrown against a wall
A
father or mother sexually abusing a son or daughter (I have known all four
variations of that)
These are just a few, but I think the point
is made: we can be incredibly cruel to each other. Each of these events was not
limited to just the one occasion of damaging people. They reverberate through the community of
people that knew the perpetrator and knew the victim to injure those people as
well. They give license for others to do
even more despicable acts.
It seems to me that the only thing greater
than our propensity to hurt each other is the grace and compassion of God. I am always struck that Jesus came to earth
fully human. He was born, and thus knew
what it meant to suffer. They go hand in
hand, ask any mother or father trying to comfort a baby who is getting their first teeth. He would have known firsthand what
it meant to suffer and to feel pain. And
he would have known all too well the tragedies of those around him.
He would have known children that would
have been killed by a parent. (Such an abomination is not a modern day
invention). He would have known women and men that had been raped as children. He would have known families devastated by
the death of a parent, or left staggered by the death of a child. But he would have known of these even if he
had not come to earth. But because he
came to earth he knew these people from a much different perspective.
Matthew
9:35 & 36 Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their
synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease
and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they
were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
He came to earth knowing that we would kill
him. He came knowing that he would know the
injury of rejection. And yet he came. He knew the pain of
betrayal. He knew what it was like to be
unjustly tried. Jesus knew what it was
like to be tortured for the morbid amusement of those torturing him. He also would have known the claustrophobic
fear of waiting for his life to finally drain out of him. And he knew the agony of a mother’s heart-being-torn-out
look as she witnessed her son being executed.
It is one of the chief reasons why I am
drawn to him. He is not a cold distant
god waiting for us to get it right. The
humiliation, abandonment and degradation of the morning of Good Friday shows a
God that intimately knows the brutality of humans. He shares in our misery, he knows our pain. I
think of the shortest verse of the bible.
The verse records Jesus’ reaction to his friend’s death. “Jesus wept.”
As I find my knees to pray for my friend and
her family I realize that even before I speak – he knows. I am praying to a God who knows all too well
the sorrow that lies within me. I am
praying to a God who, before knee has rested on pillow, embraces me. While I believe this compassion existed in him
before Good Friday, after all if there had been no compassion there would have
been no Good Friday, I cannot help but to believe that his compassion holds a
greater depth and a more tender texture as a result of his own suffering.
<3 Thank you. Well said.
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