lenten blog | April 11, 2025

In Jesus God suffers with us as us

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for April 11th:  Psalm 31:9-16;  Isaiah 54:9-10; and Hebrews 2:10-18.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Jesus had gone into hiding.  This was a tactical retreat.  He tried to prepare His disciples for what was about to happen when He entered Jerusalem.  And Jesus would not sneak into that ancient and holy city.  He would process in with throngs of people proclaiming Him the Messiah, the divinely ordained King of Israel.  This was offensive to both the religious and political/military establishment.  The details of what follows define Holy Week, culminating in Jesus’ crucifixion, death and burial.

  In the Book of Isaiah, in what scholars refer to as Deutero-Isaiah (chs 40- 55), the inspired writer during Israel’s time of Exile offers both hope and explanation to God’s people.  Their nation and their Temple, their kings and even the Ark of the Covenant, had been taken from them.  Many were forced to live in foreign lands, and many simply accepted the customs and faith of their victors.  Deutero-Isaiah strove to reassure those who remained faithful and to promise them that God had not abandoned them no matter how real that prospect may have seemed.  It is in this context that the biblical author writes:  “For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you.”

This is God’s covenant of love.  No matter how long, no matter what changes, God’s love remains.  God’s covenant of peace, it also states, shall not be removed.  God promises compassion.  This explanation obviously comforted and strengthened many of the Jews because they did survive the Exile and returned again to their homeland.  However, it is not unreasonable to assume that many who heard these words still doubted.  They had been told that the waste and warfare were the consequences of God’s anger at their sins.  The Exile was God’s justice enforced.  Now the prophet’s words of that same God’s love, peace and compassion, while still under the authority of another government, may have sounded unconvincing.

Then in God’s appointed time Jesus entered the world, and in Jesus God entered the world.  Jesus’ union of the divine and the human is the mystery that lies at the heart of Christianity.  God now experiences life as one of us, and we experience at-one-ment with God.  The fullness of Jesus’ humanity goes so far as to include human suffering and mortality.  Why?  Because when it once could have been argued that God’s separation made God’s words appear hollow, that if God truly was about love, peace and compassion why was there so much of their opposite in the world, then why didn’t God make them disappear, now in Jesus there was an answer.  This is the way the author of Hebrews put it:  “Because [Jesus] himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.”  God can’t make bad things impossible and still allow for the freedom that dignifies us as made in God’s image.  However, God can share in those bad things as one of us, showing that if we must face such suffering then God will face suffering with us as one of us, that since God in Jesus has been tested by suffering then God in Jesus can stand with us when we are tested by suffering.  Put simply, this means that God loves us more than God loves God’s own self.

May we ponder this mystery on the last Friday before we enter into Jesus’ last week of earthly life.

If you would like to join us for our online Bible study, please send an email to [email protected] for the Zoom logins.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.