Suffering 7
He is despised and
rejected of men; A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: And we hid as it
were our faces from him; He was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath boren our griefs, And caried our sorrows: Yet we did esteem him stricken, Smitten of God, and afflicted.
Isaiah 53.3-4
Any study of suffering must constantly
come back to Jesus Christ. No man ever suffered as much or as well as He did.
The biblical references to His suffering are many in number and deep in emphasis.
At the outset, let me briefly mention
two foundational truths we must understand if we are going to rightly apply
Christ’s example of suffering. First, Jesus was fully human. The incarnation is
a precious and vital doctrine. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among
us. (John 1.14) He did not have a sinful nature, but everything else it was
to be human Jesus was. For example, humans are emotional creatures; Jesus was
emotional. Second, Jesus was (and is) sinless. Following our previous
example, this means He experienced all of these human emotions without sinning.
For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of
our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.
(Hebrews 4.15)
Two important applications flow from
these two truths. First, it cannot be intrinsically sinful to sorrow, to hurt,
to grieve, or to suffer. While we certainly can respond to these feelings
sinfully we can also respond to them righteously. Thus, second, if we can learn
to respond to suffering and grief and pain like Jesus did then we, too, can
suffer without being sinful.
So how did He suffer?
First, Jesus suffered in His humanity.
What I mean here is that Jesus felt and experienced what every human being who
has walked this vale of tears has suffered. Since Eden, we live in a fallen
world. No, He was not a sinner, but He experienced the human suffering we all experience.
We call it life. He was tired from time to time. He tasted hunger and thirst. His
muscles ached with soreness. At some point, He probably injured himself in some
way while working or playing. That work was as much labor to Him as ours is to
us, as exhausting as ours is.
Second, Jesus suffered with
compassion. On the surface, this seems a funny thing to pair with suffering,
but it makes sense if you think about it. Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian
author who died last month, said, “Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for
feeling what it’s like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge
that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace
and joy finally for you.” As a compassionate individual, you are always
carrying the grief and sorrow and injustice and suffering of others in your own
heart. They are dipped in grief and you taste the sorrow.
Jesus had compassion on the multitudes.
But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them,
because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.
(Matthew 9.36) He also had compassion on the individual. Now when he
came nigh to the gate of the city, behold, there was a dead man carried out,
the only son of his mother, and she was a widow: and much people of the city
was with her. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said
unto her, Weep not. (Luke 7.12-13)
He had (and has) compassion for the
burdens, trials, heartaches, handicaps, disease, baggage, loneliness, fear,
worry, the chains of their sin, and the consequences of their sin. Of course,
this is not compassion for sin or on sin; it is compassion on people struggling
to carry the result of sin, the curse of sin. Jesus therefore again groaning
within himself cometh to the grave. (John 11.38) For we know that the whole
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. (Romans 8.22) As
we wrote last week, if you carry it, He cares. If you care, He cares. What matters to you matters to Him. He enters into it with His compassion and
sympathy.
Third, Jesus suffered with grief. And
when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the
hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And
he stretched it out: and his hand was restored whole as the other. (Mark 3.5) This
was a grief driven by the rejection and hardness of His people. Here, this
grief manifested as anger, or perhaps we could say His anger was the secondary
emotion caused by His grief. We see this elsewhere, as well, namely in the
cleansing of the Temple precincts at the bookends of His ministry. B. B. Warfield,
a 19th century theologian said of this, “The emotions of indignation
and anger belong therefore to the very self-expression of a moral being as such
and cannot be lacking to him in the presence of wrong. We should know,
accordingly, without instruction that Jesus, living in the conditions of this
earthly life under the curse of sin, could not fail to be the subject of the
whole series of angry emotions.”
This grief or anger is over sin. Yes,
He has compassion on us as we struggle beneath the effects of our sin, but some
people do not struggle at all. They are not fighting sin but welcoming it,
embracing it, wading full-body into a willful rejection of God. To endure that,
as righteousness personified, is to suffer. Holiness suffers sin. Purity
suffers defilement. And it hurts. For thirty-three years He lived amongst us.
For three and a half years, He had it thrust in His face. He took it, but He
grieved.
Fourth, Jesus suffered with dread. Saying,
Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will,
but thine, be done. And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven,
strengthening him. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his
sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground. And when
he rose up from prayer, and was come to his disciples, he found them sleeping
for sorrow, And said unto them, Why sleep ye? rise and pray, lest ye enter into
temptation. (Luke 22.42-46)
I believe He knew Who He was and what
His ultimate earthly destiny was by the age of twelve. It then follows He must
have carried the dread of the cross for the balance of two decades, a dread
that only grew as it loomed larger on the horizon. And he took with him
Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very heavy. Then
saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye
here, and watch with me. (Matthew 26.37-38)
He was about to become sin for us. How
painful that thought must have been to the morally perfect Christ. He was about
to experience the wrath of His father as a result. How painful it must have
been to feel the perfect, intimate, eternal relationship sundered, and to taste
the Father’s wrath.
This dread produced agony in
Him, the only use of the original language word in the Bible. In contemporary
times, the word use revolves around Olympic wrestling. He wrestled with His dread,
wrestled with His desire to avoid the cross, wrestled with the devil. He wrestled
so intensely His internal emotional agony evidenced itself as hematidrosis,
bloody sweat. Historical medical cases of this have been observed in men waiting
for battle or facing execution. Who in the days of his flesh, when had
offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that
was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared; Though he were
a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered. (Hebrews
5.7-8)
Fifth, Jesus suffered the cross.
Entire books have been written about just this aspect of His suffering, and
justifiably so. The physical torture He endured was only exceeded by the emotional
savagery of all He had to undergo. All of humanity’s sin and suffering and all
of those eternity’s worth of punishment was compressed into a short span of
time. But we see Jesus… that he by the grace of God should taste death for
every man. (Hebrews 2.9) It is literally indescribable.
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| The Valley of the Shadow of Death Roger Fenton, 1855 |
Sixth, Jesus suffered the final
suffering of us all, death. We will all walk through that long valley – some of
us with a slow and lingering tread, others rushed through on angel’s wings – but
if the Lord tarry His coming all of us will walk it. As in all other things, He
went before us even here. He closed His eyes, knowing yet not knowing what was
on the other shore, trusting like we must that He would be raised
incorruptible.
Beloved, never forget, He went first.
He felt and feels what we feel. He cares. He carried it all, not with His
innate divinity, but in the power of the Spirit with the grace of God.
And so can we.
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