Man of sorrows
The worst thing you can say to someone is: “You shouldn’t feel that way.”
Nothing takes away a person’s personhood faster than someone like a guardian or hero figure or teacher telling them not to feel what they feel.
Human being is human feeling.
I am barely holding back tears as I sit alone in a coffee house. I don’t want the barista to see a grown man “ugly crying” at the table in the back.
And I don’t want to “ugly cry” because I’m afraid I would drown in the feeling. It’s so big that it makes me feel small. Like I’m little again.
As I sat here trying to figure out what to do with all this fear and sadness, these words came to mind: “Man of sorrows.”
He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering (sorrows) and acquainted with infirmity; as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account (Book of Isaiah 53:3).
Christians believe that the prophet Isaiah was talking about Jesus Christ when he wrote those words.
We Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the image of God.
Therefore, sorrow and suffering are in God’s nature.
God feels.
Even feelings that we presume that God does not have to feel. God is God and can do (or choose not to do) anything.
“Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases” (Book of Isaiah 53:4).
He has borne our infirmities.
The suffering that we suffer as human beings, God suffers with us.
I think some of us get this backwards. We think that God makes believe that he is suffering out of pity for us. He actually feels good (since he’s God), but he choose to make himself feel a little suffering once in awhile so that he can empathize with us.
But I think the Bible is revealing that God’s nature–God’s personality–is a vulnerable one. God is not “above it all.” God is not immune. God is a lover at heart and therefore God’s heart breaks like a lover’s heart.
Could God get out of feeling so much pain?
Sure he could, but he would have to do it the same way that we try to do it: Stop loving.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.“–C.S. Lewis
Sorrow and suffering are vital signs that love is alive.
Thank God for sorrow and suffering.
And thank God that he is down in the sorrow and suffering with us.
This is how we know that love is alive in God and in us.
Grace and peace.