Hurting strangers
*In case you’re wondering, yes it has been quite a while since my last post. If you want more info on where I’ve been and what kept me from writing, take a listen to this podcast episode when you have a chance.
Glad to be back. Grace and peace to you.
In the dark of this morning, our dog Winston decided to rise early with me.
He climbed into my lap and fell asleep in the pre-dawn hours. He served as very warm, very furry book rest as I read the story of Jesus’ crucifixion.
Matthew’s account of Jesus unjust conviction and crucifixion is a bit strange. Matthew’s birth narrative is replete with details: names, places, and mysterious images.
The crucifixion of Jesus happens, according to Matthew, with all the warmth of a crime report in a local newspaper. Are those still a thing? If not, then a journalistic article online that aims to tell the details and nothing else.
Yet the sparse details gave me a bit of hope. If not hope, then at least a sense of solidarity.
In Matthew 27:32 and the verses that follow, the cast of characters at Jesus’ execution are Simon the Cyrene, soldiers, bandits, and beyond that the passage has a significant amount of “they’s.”
Nameless they. Faceless they.
The image that came to mind for me is this: at the time of Jesus greatest suffering, he was surrounded by strangers. Jesus’ cry from the cross comes out of a heart that feels abandoned by the God he loves. There is a lot of theological handwringing about what actually happens in that statement, but if you read Matthew’s account you find this.
Amid strangers, suffering at the highest level, Jesus expresses what we know deep in our bones:
When we are suffering, it is all too easy to believe we have been abandoned.
Jesus’ call to the Father echoes our call to our fathers and mothers, friends, family, and co-workers to notice what is happening to us and come to our aid. But where the limitation exists is that in order to meet us in our suffering, the “others” in our life must have:
A sense of their own suffering, and
The resulting empathy that comes when we have felt our own abandoned ache.
Jesus says that the only transformation that is worth having comes through the kind of suffering that comes in a cross, and in the abandonment of the cross.
Henri Nouwen talks about how compassion is the great virtue of all faiths, and the power of compassion exists because
“In a world in which competition continues to be the dominant mode of relating among people, be it in politics, sports, or economics, all true believers proclaim compassion, not competition, as God’s way.” (Here and Now, 134)
Suffering can be the ground of competition: whose is worse, whose is lesser, who “wore” it better. But competition is not the way of transformation. Competition does not require us to know, much less love, ourselves enough to tell the truth and the other enough to discover their own suffering and step into it.
In Nouwen’s words, “We can be with the other (his definition of compassion) only when the other ceases to be “other” and becomes like us.” (145)
Jesus’ suffering is the way he is with us – the abandoned hurting, the isolated, surrounded by strangers and “they’s.”
He feels with the teenager who is stuck between child and adult, and “no one” understands.
Jesus invites the spouse who feels they are the only one who truly cares about working on the relationship. They desperately need a Simon the Cyrene to carry the cross, but even then, it’s just another stranger.
He feels with the single person who desperately longs for a partner with whom to walk through the grit and glory of life.
For the poor and marginalized person, Jesus aches with the economic and social loneliness that comes when you are not a productive or wanted market unit.
Suffering leads us to transformation because it teaches us how to be compassionate to our own lonely selves as we suffer. That way we are naturally open to lean in and suffer with the lonely “others” who, honestly, aren’t all that “other” at all.
Where do you feel lonely in your suffering today?
Who are the “they’s” standing around, watching, immovable?
What would it take for you to embrace the lonely, suffering Jesus in a non-competitive manner? To truly know Jesus’ compassion as it pours through his teaching, healings, and eventual solitary suffering?
If you have a moment, read Matthew 27:32 and following today. Put yourself in the place of suffering in the passage and meet Jesus in the compassionate way of the cross.
May you know the loneliness of suffering and know that you are not alone in your loneliness, and may that knowledge disarm your competitive energy and instead lead you to compassion.
May you know the loneliness of others so you might show them compassion in their own loneliness.
This is the way the world is changed.
Photo by Deva Darshan on Unsplash
