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Grace and peace to you from Jesus our way in the wilderness.
A few days ago in one of our virtual small group meeting at Luther, I mentioned a story that Debie Thomas told about her daughter, who as a middle schooler, struggled with an eating disorder. There came a point where the situation because so serious that her daughter had to be admitted to the hospital for both malnutrition and depression. When Debie realized that she would have to check her terribly sick daughter in to the hospital and leave her there, she was a mess. She said that she left the hospital shaking and, after aimlessly driving around, she arrived in a Catholic gift shop. Wandering up and down the aisles a saleswoman approached her and asked if she could help her find something. Debie burst into tears. The saleswoman returned with a little velvet box with a small crucifix inside. She pressed it into Debbie’s hands and said: “Only a suffering God can help.”
After reading them, these words, which were actually written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer while he was in prison, have been stuck in my head: “Only a suffering God can help.”
If things were normal right now, we would be preparing for Holy Week. We would be organizing volunteers who would help set up the Maundy Thursday meal and footwashing stations, we would be rehearsing the dramas and the music for Good Friday and Easter Vigil. We would be carefully lighting the candles and hanging the banners outside the church. Some of us would be on vacation somewhere but would be perhaps to return to celebrate Easter Sunday next weekend. On a normal Palm Sunday, I think I might have chosen to talk about Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem on a donkey. But we’re not in a very “normal” space right now. Instead, we are at home The palm branches that we ordered for the church for the Palm Sunday celebration are sitting wrapped up in a box inside the door of the church building, the heat has been turned down and the doors locked in the sanctuary. Things are not normal. But it’s even worse than just “not normal.” Some of us have had our incomes cut. Some of us are working to renegotiate our rent or our mortgage payments. Some of us have loved ones who are sick. Life is monotonous on one hand and on the other hand stressful.
On one hand, it kind of seems like what could help is a superhero God, not a suffering God. Like, a God who could come in and squash all threats and restore everything to the same as it was before. A God who could just waive her magic wand and pouf things into existence like ventilators, and medications and rent checks. But today’s bible story doesn’t give us a super hero Jesus.
The bible story today is one that sits at the heart of our Christian story. In the story of Jesus’ Passion, he is abandoned by his friends and unfairly put to trial. He is isolated and alone. Before Jesus was arrested, he begged God, terrified in the garden of Gethsemane to take this cup from him and preserve his life. As the story goes on, Jesus is hit, whipped, mocked, and so gravely injured that he cannot even carry his cross. Simon of Cyrene carries it for him. On the cross, he struggles to breathe and suffers alone in physical and emotional agony hour after hour. He feels utterly forsaken by God and cries out to God, “why have you forsaken me?!”
In this story, Jesus is our God who suffered and is our God who suffers with us. In this story, it sinks in that God isn’t some distant, callous deity, but is instead this eternal love who deeply feels and suffers with us. As Jungen Moltman put it: In our pain, God’s pain is present. “God loves with those who love, God weeps with those who weep. God sorrows with the sorrowful.” God is not some external, unfeeling indifferent heavenly power named “fate” but the eternal love who feels and suffers with us.
Only a suffering God can help. Only a suffering God can help us to carry our fears and griefs and pain. Only a suffering God works on our fears and anxiety. Only a suffering God can forgive our short tempers and petty frustrations. Only a suffering God can lead us to live differently and tune us into the suffering of others. We see that suffering God in ourselves. And then, when we see him in other suffering people, we mercifully reach out.[i] This suffering God on the cross teaches us how to love. Look at the medical professionals and first responders who are drawn to care for people in love. Look at the different people who are making masks and sandwiches for vulnerable people who need them. Look those of you who are drawing pictures and writing notes to our homebound members. God suffers with us and also leads us to reach out in mercy to those who suffer.
When we lived in New York City, we bounced around between a few different churches. The pastor at one of the churches where we occasionally landed was named Heidi Neumark. She used to tell this story about how after 9/11, she would visit a member of her congregation who was in the burn unit of the hospital. No matter what time of day or night she was there, she would see this hospital chaplain also working and ministering to people. She finally asked the chaplain one day, “how are you holding up?” And the chaplain responded, “I’m not holding up.” (Which was like the last thing that Pastor Heidi was hoping to hear). But a moment later she finished: “I’m being held up.”
In the heart of God, we belong to each other and we are both held up and holding one another up. I pray that you all—that we all—are being held up in God’s mercy in all the big and small ways we need it to make it through the day.
Pray for one another. Serve those around you. Christ is with you.
[i] Bonhoeffer also said that we are called to “share in the suffering of God in the world. Christians stand with God in God’s suffering.”
