Happy God, Man of Sorrows

I’ve been studying Christ’s final days lately. Going over them in slow motion, trying to imagine him as he teaches, reacts, deals patiently, walks through the temple, so many things.

For many years I thought it wasn’t allowed for me to use my imagination when it came to the Bible. As a result I could not relate to Jesus as a real live human being. And while we must be careful not to force our understanding onto Scripture, it’s oh so helpful to see Jesus touch, hear his voice, feel his gaze. I believe that’s why the Bible has four accounts of his ministry.

The more I have come to know Jesus through this exercise of sanctified imagination, the more real and interesting he has become. He always seems to know what needs to be said or done. He sees into hearts and behind masks. He knows thoughts no one says out loud, and answers questions no one asks. His pearls of wisdom adorn him–and others–as much as his words cut like a knife. When I grow up, really, I want to be like him.

An “admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies.” That’s how Jonathan Edwards described Christ’s glory. Christ doesn’t just connect traits like majesty with meekness, justice with grace, obedience with dominion. In him they are combined in perfect harmony. We will never exhaust the depths of beauty and worth revealed in the God-man.

I see one such contrast when I put 1 Timothy 1.11 and Isaiah 53.3 together. The former describes God as blessed, literally happy. The latter describes our Savior as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, despised and rejected and alone. Jesus was both. Perfectly both.

The church I grew up in made a big deal of the remoteness of God, of his holy separateness from the sinful creatures he had made. His only concern, as my child-mind understood it, was that I know right from wrong, the price we pay for eating the “apple.” He constantly watched for me to fall short of his impossible standards, and was always ready to execute judgment should I stray from the straight and narrow. I never imagined him to be capable of happiness, let alone that I could bring him delight or, in Biblical terms, bless him. Even the famous, “Bless the Lord, O my soul!” was far more a command to be obeyed than an invitation to joy.

What a mess. Mind you I was a child going to church. When I became a daughter of God by decision, that didn’t magically straighten out the wrong thinking that had characterized my faith. God himself had to take me in hand and sort out my confused ideas about him, about myself, and more importantly about the relationship I inherited in Christ.

Where did he start? The Trinity.

Sure, this is a mystery, and likely always will be. The fancy word is ineffable, regardless of the analogy that works for you. What matters is this: God is complete in himself. He needs nothing to increase his own joy.

God is joyful? Yes. I found the Bible is full of this truth, once I had eyes to see it. The joy of the Lord is our strength. The Lord rejoices over us with singing. Such verses and many others indicate that God is capable of great joy, which he often experiences in relation to his people.

Outside church I grew up with the classic fine arts-meets-Hollywood version of Jesus. He was cow-eyed, talked super slow, and spent a lot of time gazing into the sky. How did he manage to draw such crowds, I wondered? Time and again over the years, he’s had to show me how my thinking is off.

This paradox is clear in Scriptures like Isaiah 53, where he is called a man of sorrows, literally pain, both body and soul. We immediately think the agony of his last week, from the garden of Gethsemane to the crucifixion on Golgotha. Rarely do we ponder his soul pain, I suppose, except to imagine his frustration with the religious leaders of his day. Maybe his sense of betrayal when Judas kissed him or of rejection when his disciples fled, his sadness when he wept over Jerusalem, or his impatience with his followers’ lack of faith.

Did he know loneliness or disappointment or boredom or anxiety or so many other things we go through every day? Of course he did, but we don’t let ourselves dwell on that. Why not? It would help us trust him so much if, instead of dismissing him as the Son of God, we saw as he called himself, the Son of Man.

“Please God,” we tend to pray, “don't let pains and sorrows happen to me.”

But that’s not right. Should the merciful God answer this prayer, we could end up with a Savior we can’t relate to. Which would be strange, since the whole point of the Incarnation was to bring the likes of you and me to God..

I say “could” because at some point the Spirit of God shows us our error. Jesus was tested and tried in every way, just as we are, as I am. I grew up poor. So did he. I felt like an outcast. So did he. I had a lot of siblings. So did he. Not just temptations but circumstances and decisions and outcomes. He understands them all.

Family, for example, is a powerful thing, one of the most powerful soul-shapers there is, and Jesus knew this as well as the rest of us. Some of our greatest joys and our deepest hurts come from family. Recently my family hurt me deeply. His Spirit reminded me that Jesus’s family hurt him too. They had heard about what he taught the crowds and, fearing the religious leaders’ increasing antagonism, came to collect him before he got himself executed for blasphemy. They didn’t believe in him. That hurts anyone. Yet he schooled himself to persevere on his God-given mission, claiming kinship instead with those who hear the word of God and do it.

His life is full of such lessons I can learn from him.

I’m not always as Christ-like as I should be. I sometimes hurt or disappoint those I love. But that isn’t what counts anyway. Jesus became like us so that we might become like him, true, but sanctification is a process. I am learning to trust this one who has been where I am. He knows what I’m going through. He overcame, and because he did, he is there to help me, to strengthen me, to uphold me with his righteous right hand.

For the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross. A far more brutal and unmerited suffering at the hands of those he loved than I will ever know. He despised its shame, a far deeper humiliation than anyone can inflict on me.

It seems so simple to say and so hard to embrace. Life in this world comes with sorrow, pain and grief and loss. Unless we accept this and find a way through it, we do not achieve eternal life. Do you know why? Because Jesus is that “way.” And he is that “life.” Unless we find him, we lose everything.

May the Man of Sorrows grant me the grace to suffer for him, and the pleasure of being like him in triumphing over my pain. That’s the goal, after all, to know him and share in the fellowship of his sufferings, to be conformed to his death, to somehow attain to the resurrection from the dead.

The Happy Father-God awaits us. He will invite us to enter into his own joy. How great will our joy be? As deep and wide and high and long as our perseverance in suffering here.

Please please please take this to heart. I am not masochistic when I say this. Unnecessary suffering does no one any good, but suffering done rightly does more good now, and eternally, than we can fathom. Don’t be afraid of it. Find ways to get through it. Just don’t be over-quick to deny or escape it.

Let it do the soul work of increasing your capacity for joy.