You’ve heard the Christmas song, “Mary, Did You Know?” What I’ve been thinking about is: Mary, how did you feel? Knowing when my kids are struggling, their suffering is mine I can only imagine what it must have been like for her son to be God’s suffering servant. She had to have felt all alone, so if I could I’ld ask her…
Did you lie awake at night each time your Son was ridiculed?
Did you feel rejected in the same way he was?
Did you want to take revenge against those who mocked him?
Did you suffer silently because who could possibly understand?
Did you pray, as your Son did, that God would let his cup could pass before him?
Did you question God’s plan for you and your Son?
I imagine Mary felt as I do that the pain of childbirth only begins after labor ends. Because the real pain of childbirth comes with the loving a child so much that their hurt hurts you so deeply that you would do anything to absorb it only to realize as the years go by you can’t. That pain keeps you up at night, as any parent knows.
But if bearing the burdens of my tribe feels like the weight of the world to me, what must it have been like for Jesus? He really did have the weight of the world on his shoulders. All of the sin, suffering and trials of all of God’s children from all time.
I’ve tended to gloss over this reality as if it’s not that big of a deal since he’s God. But as a man, he fully felt every emotions as we do. Let that sink in. No wonder he was called the Man of Sorrows.
But this crushing truth is a huge reason why God sent his Son in the form of man. There was no other way he would have been able to identify with us in our pain and enter in to it. And because he does we have someone who understands completely our suffering and pain.
So for Jesus it wasn’t just that suffering surrounded his death, it characterized his entire life. But we are told he thought nothing of the shame of the cross because of the joy set before him (Hebrews 12:2), and I imagine he felt the same about carrying our grief and sorrows. Not that it was nothing, but that the cost of bearing it was nothing in comparison to the relationship he was securing between the Father and his children.
I wonder if Mary was able to find rest in this perspective? Or, was she like me and couldn’t escape the worry even when Jesus told her not to fear? How hard it must have been to know she couldn’t bear his burdens, but that she must let him bear hers.
Even harder to compute is God the Father’s love for his children is so great that he cast everything onto his Son and turned his back to him. And if “he who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will be not also with him graciously give us all things (Rom. 8:32)?”
I believe this is true, but probably like Mary need his help to rest in it.
