As the sun dips, many sick people feel perky again, many deaf folks are hearing a day’s gossip for the first time, and everyone’s soul is filled. But their stomachs are empty. “Send them away to buy supper,” his disciples urge him. But he says, “This is a lonely place; where would they go? What food can you find?” Some kid’s mom has packed him a lunch he didn’t eat. Jesus looks in the basket, they have a prayer, and five thousand people need a good stretch and a belly-rub before heading home.
Who does Jesus do all this for? Polite society? Most of them get upset and leave after they hear a thing or two he says. It’s the everyday people who really take to him—some fishermen, a tax-raker, two spinsters and their unmarried brother. Jesus goes out of his way for folks carrying just a little too much baggage. There was that lady with the bleeding problem—you hate to even mention it. He was pushing through the crowd to reach some little girl who was failing fast when the woman grabs his robe, hoping not to be noticed. He turns around and she sets to crying and it makes a scene. But he’s not angry at all. “Daughter,” he called her, “your faith has healed you. Go in peace” (Luke 8:48).
Then there was that graveyard man—the one who ran around naked and screaming and made everyone not want to attend funerals. But Jesus had a way with him, and by the time Jesus was done the fellow had clothes on and everything, sitting like a kindergartner with folded hands on desk. No one ever begged so hard for Jesus to take him along.
Condemned criminals, half-breeds, short guys with too much money, women whose homes you visited only after dark—these were the people he went after. He washed their feet and went to their parties. But you never got the sense that his hands were dirty afterwards. Children liked to tug on his clothes and crawl on his lap. He saved his anger for the self-important, or for his followers when they tried to shoo kids away, or for when they got to talking about “calling fire down from heaven” on folks who weren’t buying the message.
That doesn’t mean he went easy on sin—no store-front preacher in Harlem ever so vividly stoked a congregation’s image of a brimstone lake. But people who were sorry about themselves and sick with how they had acted never met with such mercy. Take that incident the night Peter tried to blend in at the courtyard—the denials, the rooster crowing. Three days later when Jesus sent word to the Eleven that everything was all right, he made sure that one hurting pup in particular got the message: “Go, tell his disciples and Peter…” (Mark 16:7). Later still, he predicted in front of the fisherman’s friends that the elderly Peter would one day distinguish himself by a brave death for the Master’s sake.
He healed the severed ear of the very one arresting him. He rescued the soul of that pitiful wretch who was crucified next to him. He tread lightly on the sorry doubts of Thomas on the evening of his rising, in the room with the bolted door. How he wept at the graveside of a friend and spoke the gentle word to the most timid among us! He fulfilled in every way the ancient and sacred promise: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out” (Isaiah 42:3).
“Very impressive of Jesus,” we say. “But what about the Father? There’s a little too much Old Testament in him for my taste—all that lightning and thunder on Mount Sinai. He’s in heaven enjoying himself. But does he care about us?”
Listen to the eye-opening words of the Son of God: “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does” (John 5:19).
Does the Father care?! The healer from Galilee never lifted a bent blade of grass without watching his Father do it first. Jesus was moved at the sight of the straining, clueless crowds—but a millennium earlier it was written of Jehovah: “As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:13–14).
We know Jesus took pity on the orphans, but Hosea said of the Father: “In you the fatherless find compassion.” Yes, Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, but of the Father we learn, “His loved ones are very precious to him and he does not lightly let them die.” Christ defended the poor, railed against the oppressions of the rich, and overturned tables of dirty money in the temple—but centuries before, Jehovah hurled his prophets at a partying, poor-be-damned culture: “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will you do on the day of reckoning when disaster comes from afar?” (Hosea 14:3; Psalm 116:15 LB;Amos 5:7-12, 18).
The Lamb of God turned his cheek to the smiters and pled clemency for his murderers—but we read of Jehovah: “The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever; he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities” (Psalm 103:8-10).
It was the God of Moses, the Holy One of Israel, the subject of Ezekiel’s visions and Daniel’s apocalypses, who forbade Israel to curse the deaf or trip the blind. He took pity on Hagar sobbing in the desert, her water skin empty, sitting a bowshot from her baby because she said, “I cannot watch the boy die.” He promised a son to Hannah who wept so bitterly that she appeared drunk over disappointment with empty arms and an empty womb. He says to anyone with a heart to believe: “The LORD longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion” (Leviticus 19:14; Genesis 21:15-17; 1 Samuel 1; Isaiah 30:18).
Yet he also says, “It has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him” (Philippians 1:29).
Our call to suffer comes from a God tender beyond description. If we do not cling to this through life’s worst, we will misread everything and grow to hate him.
But now to something about him even more profound.
Three
THE SUFFERING GOD
Five centuries before Christ, Xerxes, King of Persia, organized the largest land-and-sea force ever witnessed and crossed the Dardanelles into Europe. His goal was to thrash Greece for its role in a rebellion against his father, Darius the Great. No suffering was too extreme to require of his subjects during the campaign, although his own safety and comfort were paramount.
Five centuries later the Son of God, King of Kings, by himself crossed the chasm between divinity and humanity and walked onto earth. His goal was to endure the thrashing due his creatures for their rebellion against his father, Jehovah. To this day he requires suffering of all his followers, some of it intense—but only for their good, and never equaling what he himself passed through.
Consider the contrast.
Near the start of Xerxes’ march, Pythius of Lydia, rumored to be the second-richest man on earth, lavishly entertained the king and his army. He then made an astounding offer—to furnish Xerxes’ complete war expenses. Taken aback, the king warmly thanked Pythius but declined. Soon afterwards the wealthy Lydian sought Xerxes again with a small favor to ask. All five of his sons were serving in the campaign against Greece, and he himself was getting along in years—could the eldest son alone remain home to care for his father? The historian Herodotus gives the king’s reaction:
Xerxes at once gave orders that the men to whom such duties fell should find Pythius’ eldest son and cut him in half and put the two halves on each side of the road, for the army to march out between them. The order was performed.
And now between the halves of the young man’s body the advance of the army began.1
This was typical of the Persian king—a minor glitch in the schedule, a decision to be settled before lunch. All in a day’s work. Yet he boasted that his expedition was “for the benefit of all my subjects.”
Now consider the Son of God. His gentle kingdom is described in the four gospels. The scenes will mean more to us, however, if we don’t flip the pages too fast getting there. Let’s not burst into the roo
m where he sits with his disciples. Let’s watch his reign through the keyhole first. Let’s stand back twenty centuries or so before Jesus ever came and see what led up to God becoming man—see things that foreshadowed his arrival—things that hint about the tone of his rule. Let’s start, of all places, in Genesis.
In Genesis 15 God appears to Abraham.2 He promises him a baby boy and more great-grandchildren than Abraham can see stars. But the nomad’s beard is not as dark as it was, and the midwife has never shooed him out of the tent and told him to go boil some water. God also promises him a country, the very one they are speaking in. But other people already live there. How can the old shepherd be sure?
“So the LORD said to him, ‘Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.’ Abraham brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other” (Genesis 15:9-10).
The sun is setting. Abraham dozes off uneasily. A blackness thicker than night settles on him, and a deep dread. It is God come close. This time the Lord repeats his promise with words more solemn than before. Still, they are only words. But look! A little stove appears—like the everyday earthenware bread-baking jars where the coals glow inside and the dough is pressed against the outside. A burning torch rises from inside the stove. Abraham shudders—he senses that God is inside the stove and torch. The Lord is about to “cut a covenant.” Having promised Abraham something, he will now bind himself to it with chains that cannot snap. The stove and torch rise by themselves and move toward the carcasses. Abraham cannot believe what he sees. The Dreadful One, so great that he has never even told Abraham his name, passes between the bloody pieces. He is speaking by his actions. “If I fail to keep my word to you and your descendants,” he is saying, “I will make myself like these animals—I will saw myself in two.”
“Say what?” Xerxes would say if he knew.
But there was no need for any sawing. The Lord kept his word. Abraham had a boy, who in turn had a boy, who had bunk-beds full of boys, who each married nice Jewish girls—and soon there was an Israel. God carried the nation from birth “as a father carries his son.” When Egypt enslaved them he “heard their groaning” and “was concerned about them.” He loved them and engraved their names on the palm of his hand. He gave them the country he had promised to Abraham. When they fell into trouble, he rode to the rescue because he “delighted in” them and “could bear Israel’s misery no longer.” He “caused them to be pitied by all who held them captive.” They were his “sheep,” his “wife,” his “inheritance”—“the apple of his eye,” “the people close to his heart.” Mothers would forget their nursing babies before he forgot them—he swore it.3
But they forgot him. Even though he had adopted them forever at Mount Sinai. Even though he had handwritten their family agreement on pages of stone. They had stood, knees shaking as the mountain breathed fire, swearing up and down to stick to his wishes. Like a bride at the altar, who can scarcely wait for the “I do”—they couldn’t spit the words out quickly enough: “We will do everything the LORD has said; we will obey” (Exodus 24:7).
But they lied. The nation that was given rest in Canaan grew restless. Jehovah and his commands started feeling like a coat a few sizes too small. Normal countries—Israel began mumbling—had less demanding gods, visible ones you could see and know were there and could carve into a shape that suited you. Their worship services ended with dessert, pleasure on the heels of prayer, brotherly-sisterly fellowship with those lovely priests and priestesses who tended so well to the worshiper’s libidino-spiritual needs.
In no time the nation’s hand was in the cookie jar. One sin led to another, and soon there wasn’t a commandment that Israel hadn’t broken. They set their children on fire at the shrine of that grisly god Molech. They sank lower than the degenerates who had infected Canaan before them. They got creative with sin. Why didn’t they just urinate on the tablets of Moses?
“The LORD, the God of their fathers, sent word to them through his messengers again and again, because he had pity on his people and on his dwelling place. But they mocked God’s messengers, despised his words and scoffed at his prophets” (2 Chronicles 36:15-16).
The one race equipped to shine truth into the world eclipsed the very sun with its own evil example. Who now deserved to be sawn in two?
But it wasn’t just Israel. Every nation on earth spurned what little light it had—countries where God’s rain had softened the fields and his sun had ripened the grapes. God’s kindness failed—it failed to fan any spark of human righteousness—there was none to fan. Jews and Gentiles alike sickened the stomach of their maker, causing him to write: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God…They have together become worthless” (Romans 3:10-12, quoting from Psalms 14:1–3; 53:1–3; Ecclesiastes 7:20).
God brooded. His anger began to stir the lid. Is this how his kindness is repaid? There must be an accounting. One by one he let the nations fall into war. Each in turn was overrun and exiled—Egypt, Moab, Phoenicia, Edom, and the powerhouses of the east: Assyria, Babylon, Persia. All the while they kicked Israel between them like a stone on a dirt road. It did no good. None of them truly repented. Every nation cursed its fate and whatever gods it had invented. War, exile, hell-on-earth—and after death, eternal hell—these satisfied God’s justice, but that was all. They did for people what jail-time does for a criminal—the gavel falls, the sentence is read, and the prisoner goes tuition-free to a barbed-wired Graduate School of Evil. There, in the humid darkness, the sick fungus in his heart flourishes as he rubs against other infested souls.
For God, this was not good enough. He had created humans to mirror him, not to be miniatures of Lucifer. Something was needed to cut through the stench and salvage this pathetic race. Some medicine more potent than anyone knew of. Some procedure. Some life-giving surgery.
The king became Great Physician. Summoning his compassion and his plumbless wisdom he conceived of a surgery. How to save the patients without trivializing their guilt? (They had knowingly spread the fatal sickness among them.) How to cure them without letting the horror of the disease ever be forgotten? How to mingle mercy with justice? How to slice the cancer from their souls and leave no scar?
He prepared for the procedure by donning not gloves and a lab coat but a mortal body. Did it feel a few sizes too small? He stretched himself upon the operating table.
His hand reached for a saw.
His last true comfort was that final moment before slipping from his mother’s womb. Then, a borrowed feeding trough met him, and the story of his pain began. “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity” (Hebrews 2:14).
Did he taste tension in the milk of his mother as she hastily fled in the night from those searching to murder him? What did he feel when he grew up to learn what his presence had cost the baby boys of Bethlehem? How old was he before realizing what people thought about his mother and her morals? Did the young boy with his family in Egypt feel like a refugee?
Nazareth became his home town when the danger had passed—a chalk-soiled frontier perch, overlooking the great trade routes of the Esdraelon Valley below but never a part of them. Nothing much happened there. The village never received mention with the hundreds of towns listed in the roll calls of the Old Testament. “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” (John 1:46).
As he wielded the mallet and plied the adz in his father’s shop, he grew used to soldiers passing outside the window. Their plumed helmets and pagan insignia reminded him daily that foreigners owned his country. In another era he himself might have ruled, for he was royalty, or so his genealogy ran.
We never read that as a young man he drew appreciative glances from the girls in his neighborhood. There is no story of courtship or mention of romance, and he was never to marry. “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him�
� (Isaiah 53:2). Instead, he was known for his solitary strolls in the hills. By the time he was thirty, those long walks had done their work. He sensed it was time to go public.
Some curious fellow wearing camel-skins began drawing crowds in a remote spot near the River Jordan. He was fiery, this one. The man was preaching sermons about Someone who was coming; people needed to get ready. The rugged preacher had never met Jesus—possibly didn’t even know his name.4 But his sole purpose in life was to prepare everyone for the Someone just around the corner.
Jesus rounded the corner. He went to the Jordan and stood in line behind hundreds who carried consciences with memories of things he had never even thought about. One by one they bowed to the baptizer’s cleansing water, but when Jesus stepped up the man balked. His eyes searched. Certainly there was no need. People might misunderstand. So they might—but Jesus said, “It is fitting for us,” and bent low (Matthew 3:15 TCNT).
Then the Spirit compelled him into the wastelands to know hunger of more than one sort. For forty days and nights he traced the ravines and heard the wild animals—a day for every year his race had failed their test while plodding sinfully through a different wilderness. No manna here. But at the end there was bread by the loaf, piping hot, dripping with butter, simply for his commanding it to be. A presence suggested to him: “Can you smell it in your mind? But what’s that sound? Ah, it must be the complaining of your stomach. Your face is pale; your knees must be so very weak.” (Charm itself smiled and urged.) But no, the Bread of Life must not indulge today, not in this way. Well then, what did he think of this flight to the temple heights? Ah, the sight of people again, down below. How they would marvel at the spectacle of his leaping from the pinnacle, only to be floated down by adoring seraphs, proving beyond all question his identity. Did he recall the attention and esteem that had bathed him in that former world so far away and long ago? No, he must refrain; this was not the time. Very well. But then, certainly he would enjoy this whirlwind tour of the planet and its kingdoms from the perspective of, say, the southern Alps or perhaps the Himalayas. Ooh, the splendor of India, the courts of China, the intrigue of Persia—Scythia, Gaul, the far-off coasts of Britain. Subjects to be had by the millions. It would take only a dropping to the knee, a slight but respectful genuflection, nothing much.
When God Weeps Page 4
