The Suffering Christ

Shakespeare once advised, "Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o'erfrought heart and bids it break." Yet I would venture to add that even grief that is spoken can make a heart split right apart. It almost broke Jesus himself. 

Sorrow can push a soul and body to its absolute breaking point, causing one to wonder if they will survive. Forcing prayers for any other way besides the way one is being asked to walk. Testing faith. Planting doubt. Drawing thoughts and emotions from inside that one never knew they had until now. I know...because that's been my heart, too. 

As I go through Passion Week, my thoughts keep returning to the image of my Savior in the garden. Betrayed, feeling rejected by the very friends He thought would stand with Him in prayer in His greatest hour of need, the weight of the world's sin, grief, and pain pressing Him to a breaking point that nearly crushed Him. I imagine what it must've been like as He cried to His Father for another way. Even though He knew the plan, He still felt the human pull to avoid and take an easier path. He still wondered if there was a less painful route. As the Son of God, he voiced feelings we all struggle to sort out and bear. He gave His sorrow words, yet the drops of blood falling from his temples prove His soul's anguish was nearly unbearable anyway. 

While I've always known the Easter story and Jesus's journey to the cross for the sins of mankind, somehow after the griefs I've bourne in the past year, I'm feeling a connection with the suffering Christ I've never experienced. The truth that He has carried our sorrows, bourne our griefs, and offers healing for us in the stripes He wore - that has spoken comfort in ways a thousand other words could never say. Because the heart of God knows my hurt better than even my closest friend. And for all the ways I've felt alone, abandoned, and crushed beneath the weight of my mourning, He's felt that too. In fact, His burden was greater because all the losses and pains of humanity were upon Him! When He fell to the ground before His Father in Gethsemane, all of the sorrows we walk through in this life were on His mind. So for all the ways in which we feel like our pain just might kill us, we can know that He identifies with us fully...but our griefs are only a touch of what He went through. 

Why could the Lord go through what He did that fateful week? Because He knew the only way to was through. He still asked His Father if there was any other option...even as we often do the same...but He knew that the blessing, the reward of His suffering was only on the other side of His pain. He would never obtain the Father's purpose if He backed out now. And just what might you miss if you were to quit on His plan now for your own journey? 

The thing that sustained Christ as He endured the physical and spiritual agony of those dark days was the hope that lay at the end. He knew the resurrection would happen. He knew salvation would come and death would be swallowed in victory. And so, even as He felt the Father's absence and the weight of sin pressing down upon Him, He reminded Himself that even this had a purpose. And that purpose...that redemptive end...was worth the grief of the present moment. 

Friend, I don't know what you're going through right now but, perhaps like me, you've had a tough time and you find yourself asking if the pain you're walking through is worth it. You find yourself questioning why God would allow this season of suffering in your life and if He's needlessly crushing you for no good reason. You feel like giving up altogether. Just throw in the towel and stop hoping because hope feels like it's not doing anything. If this is you, look to the example of your Savior and know that it's not wrong to ask why or feel isolated in your pain or plead with God for another way. Jesus experienced all these things as He went to the cross. Yet...He trusted His Father still. 

And so must we. Even when we don't see Him working or know how things will turn out, we have to believe that the blessing that awaits us is worth the struggle it takes to get there. We have to have faith that, in God's eyes, the pain of all this has a purpose. From His perspective, there is no other way, and the only way is to accept His way and keep saying yes to Him even when it hurts. That's what His Son did, and we share in His sufferings insofar as we willingly bear our own with God-given grace. 

So go ahead and cry those tears. Have those dark days. It's okay for that to happen because Jesus went through it, too, and He knows the grief you bear. And even when there is nobody else to speak hope to you in your saddest moments, He is right there to comfort and sustain you as only He can. But take heart that He sees the end result. What looks vague and uncertain to you is perfectly clear to Him, and all He asks is that you trust and follow Him. In your own Garden of Tears, Christ stands with you and for you as the suffering Savior who's pain and subsequent victory paved the way for you to have courage and faith in your own.