“He Is Able to Help”

February 4, 2024

Hebrews 2:14-18

Pastor Mike

One of the hardest questions that we face in living life with God is how to make sense of our suffering. I don’t mean the question of why we as human beings suffer. That’s a philosophical question better suited for classrooms, and it’s a question people ask whether or not they believe in a god. What I mean is, “Why am I suffering? Why am I desolate, exhausted, rejected, bereft or sick, overlooked or depressed? Why do I hurt like this – right here and right now. O God, O God, why have you forsaken me?” That’s the real question, the hard question for those who believe in Christ. It’s a question that each individual can only answer for themselves, and yet that aloneness in the question must be the right kind of aloneness. When we suffer it is very easy to kick our defense mechanisms, those automatic behaviors that conceal our pain, into high gear. It is very easy to reject input from others, to brush off or snap at another person’s offer to listen or help. It is tempting to suffer apart from the community. But the narrow way that leads to life is learning to abide alone in the question of my suffering while keeping the channels open to others.

 The question of suffering is also hard to answer because Christians have often approached it in ways that are sloppy, callous, or downright manipulative. Like this answer: Well, if you’re suffering, you must have done something wrong, because God only wills our health and prosperity. Or this one: You must stay and suffer in that abusive relationship because through your suffering you will learn unconditional love and forgiveness and may one day win over your partner. Or this one: God has willed your enslavement, because through your submission and lowliness you will emulate Christ and receive a reward in heaven. Eek.

Often, we do suffer as a result of our own sin. And we often can learn important lessons or experience God in new ways as a result of suffering. But all these explanations share the fatal flaw of coming from someone who is trying to take advantage of another’s vulnerability. One-size-fits-all answers to the question of suffering do not work. Sometimes we are just sloppy, and when someone is visibly full of pain it is not helpful to say things like, “Well, just have faith. Everything happens for a reason.” Jesus was able to forgive his executioners from the cross, but he might have had a harder time if faced with that sort of patter.

 So if in most cases we are unable to interpret the meaning of each other’s suffering (let alone our own) with any prepackaged cliché, then where does that leave us? Hear the Word again: “Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things… Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect… Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.”

 These verses point to a place we can go when we are suffering. It is a place accessible by grace and trust and the slow breakdown of our defenses and control. It is the inner spiritual awareness that Christ himself, the giver of salvation and hope and perfect love, is present with us, in us, and alongside us as we suffer. Though he was eternally God, holy and mighty and eternal, he emptied himself and took on flesh and blood, becoming human just like you and me so that he might share in the things that you and I suffer. And he did. In Jesus, God suffered.  

 He grew up in obscurity. He was carried from his home as a child when kings sought to kill him. He hungered. He thirsted. He was tempted by Satan. He was exhausted by the care that he offered to the crowds day in and day out. He wept at gravesides. His companions abandoned him. He despaired over his own people, that they had turned so far from the ways of God. He was betrayed, unjustly convicted, mocked, tortured, and killed. He, God, was God-forsaken.

There is no depth of human agony that Jesus has not participated in, no sphere of suffering that he has not brought, through his resurrection, into the life of God. Jesus is able to help us when we suffer, because he has gone with us into our sufferings, even into godlessness and the grave. He is able to help us because that solidary, that union, was perfect. He suffered yet was without sin. And so, in his resurrected and ascended life, where he intercedes before the throne of God for us with scars on his hands and feet and side, he becomes for those who abide in him a new resting place in times of suffering. Our darkness suffused with his companionship. The God who made all things knows what tears running down the cheek feel like.

How is this truth about Christ different from those one-size-fits-all answers to the question of suffering that get lobbed at us from the outside?

 Here’s how it’s different: Christ does not give us an answer to our sufferings; he gives us himself. He does not give us an explanation or interpretation; he communes. Our sufferings don’t bring us closer to God as if God is far from us, waiting for us to be in pain. But suffering can refine our sense that, even now, even here in the midst of this fresh hell, Christ communes. And in that sense, it completes us, because no corner of our heart remains closed off from him.

 I want to be clear that is not the only response to suffering. The Bible tells us to ask for prayers when we are sick, to seek healing. The Bible compels us to resist evil and oppression. The Bible shows us how to be tenacious, how to wind our way through the crowd in a last-ditch effort to relieve our pain, if only we might touch the hem of Jesus’ robe. But when the healing doesn’t come, when resistance would only exacerbate the pain, when there is nothing really to resist or no last-ditch effort to make, the truth remains: Christ communes. And that is a place we can get to, a place established by the brokenness of his own body, and the shedding of his own blood.

 The idea that such a place of spiritual awareness exists is not a passing fancy of Hebrews but a theme, a promise, that runs through the scriptures:

“Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering…    Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied” (Isaiah 53:4, 11).

“We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Corinthians 4:10).

“For though He was crucified in weakness, yet He lives by the power of God. For we also are weak in Him, but we shall live with Him by the power of God” (2 Corinthians 13:4).

        “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10-11).

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3) – the words of Christ himself.

 Blessed when inwardly impoverished. Clearsighted when in anguish. Knowing Christ in our sufferings, that we might know him in resurrection.

 These are mature insights of faith that the Bible speaks of. I think one of the reasons it’s hard to talk about the why of suffering is because everyone must get there in their own time, and no one can go there for anyone else and, at first, we spend our energy grumbling, overanalyzing, evading, keeping up appearances. Remember, the disciples fled in the night from the prospect of the cross, and they could not stay awake with Jesus in the garden as he prayed for the cup to pass from him. But just as they came into maturity through the power of the Spirit and embraced the mystery of his communion in their own trials, so we, slowly and persistently, can seek and be found by his abiding presence in our pain.

But whether we can get there or not at this particular moment, the truth remains: Christ communes.

I want you to remember that as you come to this Table. No matter what you’re going through, no matter what ache or wound or panic or emptiness you bear in your soul, no matter what pain is in your body, Christ communes. And if there is something for you to learn from what you’re going through, you will learn it – in God’s time; if there is something for you to let go of, you will let go of it – in God’s time; if there is something for you to take hold of, you will take hold of it – in God’s time, because Christ communes. Your suffering is not a chasm between you and him but a bridge.

I also want you to remember that we are called to be Christlike, to have his Spirit and his mind and to live as he lived. If we cannot answer the Why of suffering for one another, then what can we do to bring one another strength and hope? We can enter in, as far as is appropriate and possible, to the suffering of others. We can bind our lives to the lives of those really going through it. We can offer our gentle, quiet, steadfast presence. We can become one flesh, one Body, weeping with those who weep, remembering those in prison as if we were imprisoned with them, visiting the sick, sharing at table with the hungry, opening our homes to strangers, washing feet. That is the Church, the Body that suffers and lives as one.

Thanks be to God that Christ communes.     

Amen.