Our Comfort: Jeremiah 31: 31-34; Hebrews 5: 5-10
A few years ago, I visited an elderly friend whose adult child had just died. As I was sitting in her living room, she posed an emotionally charged question: “Why did both of my children die before me, and here I am as a 90-year-old woman, left to suffer. Why?” There are few times in my life given my legal training and my pastoral training that I have had no answer to give. This was one of the worst. For agonizing minutes, I sat in silence. There was nothing I could say, and nothing that came to mind. I could only quietly offer, “I don’t know.”
A few days later I was able to collect my thoughts and write a short letter in response. What I told her was this: I don’t know why you have to suffer and endure the death of both of your children. It is cruel, unfathomable, and shakes a person’s faith to the core. But what I know is this. God, too, had to watch his only son suffer and die. Though God knew Jesus would rise from the dead, be perfectly made whole, and returned to heaven, none of that softened the heart-wrenching misery of watching his son die on the cross. Though there may never be an understanding in this life of the suffering you are going through, you do not go through it alone. Our God will be with you to comfort you.
Friends, as we travel through this Lenten series on This Faith Is Ours, we look today at one of the tougher aspects of faith: knowing our God in the role of comforter. One of the very basic principles we start out with is the idea that God is not all that far away from us. Unlike the days of the Old Testament, we don’t have to approach God through a ritual sacrifice or a high priest. Jeremiah talks about a new promise God makes: “But this…new covenant I will make with the people of Israel. I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” These powerful words echo those of Ruth who promised Naomi that “your God will be my God and your people my people.” That promise was backed by a powerful resolve.
The power in that promise from God is that we will know God. Now, theologically, we know that this means Christ is with us, and the Holy Spirit dwells with us to be this presence of God, “Immanuel, God with us.” As opposed to a god who is far off, unknown, and unreachable, God is known and with us—always. Christ loves us, suffered for us, and has left the power of the Spirit with us in his stead. There is something inherently comforting about this basic theology which tells us how God knows us, and how we can know and approach God in times of need.
But in Hebrews 5 we see another aspect of Jesus which truly makes Jesus real and human for us. Beginning around verse 7, “When Jesus was here on earth, he offered prayers and pleadings, with a loud cry and tears, to the one who could rescue him from death. And God heard his prayers because of his deep reverence for God.” Now verse 8 reminds us that Jesus still had to suffer, but there’s a very powerful word in that verse—God heard his son’s prayer and pleas.
Now at this point, you may ask what, exactly, is the point of all this? Jesus prayed in earnest to God in his time of crushing pain and need. God heard Jesus. And yet, Jesus still suffers. What changed? What was the point if Jesus still suffered? The answer is found, not in blanket deliverance, but in the comfort, the resolve, and the strength God gave Jesus. When Jesus finishes his prayers in the garden on that dark night, he goes with the guards on the path that would ultimately lead to the cross with resolve, in strength, unflinching, and undeterred from his horrific task. Jesus didn’t find deliverance from his situation in his prayers, but instead, he found God’s deliverance from the dread through God’s strength and God’s comfort to continue forward in power, in strength, and without ever looking back on his final journey to the cross.
We need to find this comfort and resolve from God in our lives, lest we become overwhelmed by the darkness we see in this world. Jesus was killed by the warped and twisted beliefs of the Pharisees and religious leaders conspiring with the state to have Jesus executed. There are times and days where it seems like little has improved with regard to the depth of grief and sorrow we live with and the twistedness that allows people to see human life as so easily destroyed. This has been yet another week of collective grief.
A gunman shot and killed several people in Atlanta, primarily in the Asian community. He’s charged with 8 counts of murder. There is debate whether it’s his due to his addictions, a hate crime, or something in between, or all of the above. Whatever hatred existed in his heart for others, we still are left to collectively grieve for the lives lost and for this continuing struggle to understand why people care so little about the lives of others. Their families grieve, their communities grieve, we all find sorrow in the fact that over and over we deal with pain and death or skirt by the valley of the shadow of death.
This, I think shows the symptom of our closeness to grief. One of my good friends is Asian-American, and he often goes to dinner at a ramen noodle restaurant in that area of Atlanta after work. When I heard the bare minimum of a killing spree targeting Asians in Atlanta, I spent the next few minutes with a sick feeling knotted in my stomach until I had texted and knew he was okay. But we all live in this anxious place. Much like we read about the valley of the shadow of death in Psalm 23, we also live in the shadow of grief and sorrow.
How do I know this? Here’s an example. Let’s say your loved one is coming to visit, and they are running 15-20 minutes late. Do you first think, “Eh, it’s traffic,” or do you begin to get that same knot or sick feeling in your stomach? Usually, we begin to check our phone, worry, call them, and as the minutes go on, we fly all the way off the handle and assume they’re dead in a car accident or some other horrible thing. That, my friends, is living in grief and sorrow’s shadow, where in every situation, we expect the worst tragedy to occur.
When that shadow appears, we must, then, face grief and sorrow head-on knowing that God will abide with us. Francis Henry Lyte wrote the hymn, “Abide With Me” just a few weeks before his death. He knew the end was near as tuberculosis was overtaking his strength. The hymn is subtle, quiet, but packed with this strong resolve we see in Christ himself. Lyte writes, “I fear no foe with Thee at hand to bless; ills have no weight and tears no bitterness. Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory? I triumph, still, if Thou abide with me.” So always remember in every struggle, grief, and sorrow you go through, God is there grieving with you, holding you steady in the pain, and offering a presence to comfort; “In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.”
Worship Plan: https://www.facebook.com/fccmacon/videos/863970570841156