Jesus is drawing closer and closer to Golgotha and to the cross. He is the only one who senses his own path, the only one who seems to know that something terrible is coming. Scholars have surmised for centuries about how much Jesus knew. Did he know he would be crucified? How much could he see? How much could he know?
Jesus seems to feel that something terrible is coming. He seems to know that he will die, but not how or precisely when. His impending death creates pain for him. He becomes troubled, lonely, he struggles with God. He offers us small glimpses into his struggle both in John's gospel and in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Jesus seems to get more and more lonely. As he approachea the cross, the disciples do not seem to be able to hear his distress. Though they are physically present up until a few days before his death, yet Jesus seems incredibly alone.
Meanwhile the disciples are having a great time. They are planning the rescue of Jerusalem from the Romans. They are trying to gather a large following for Jesus. They are busy making introductions. There are some Greeks in town and they want to see Jesus.The disciples seem excited to raise Jesus' profile, to get things moving. The Greeks speak to Phillip, who tells Andrew and together they go to Jesus to try to schedule a meeting. When can you meet with the Greeks, Jesus? And Jesus gives them the strangest response. He doesn't answer their question at all. Instead he starts talking about dying...
The hour is coming for the Son of Man to be glorified, he says. And then Jesus launches into this speech that the disciples don't seem to get at all. He talks about how a grain must fall into the earth and die before it can bear fruit. And in the middle of this speech, Jesus stops explaining theology and has a moment of vulnerability.
Now my soul is troubled, he says. I wish I could make it go away...but what can I say? Father, glorify thy name...
I wish that I could make it all go away.
Jesus sensed that he was going to die. He felt restless, troubled, conflicted. His anticipation of something terrible was causing him emotional pain. But he did not avoid this feeling, he just articulated it as he walked closer to his death. He did not try to change anything or argue with God. He did not pretend that everything was OK. He just spoke about what was on his heart, like he was making an observation. I am troubled. I am in pain, he said. It is his pain that alerts him to his predicament.
Now my soul is troubled. The word in the ancient Greek means to be disturbed, agitated, like boiling water...
Jesus told the disciples exactly what he was feeling and the disciples didn't listen. They could not or would not hear him because what he was telling them was troubling. He was saying that he was upset and no one could bear to hear it.
It is hard for us to hear one another's pain. It's hard to look in the face of trouble. We tend to want to fix peoples problems, to get rid of their pain as soon as possible. The worst kind of counselors are people who give lots of advice or tell you that everything is going to be OK. I had a counselor like that in Seminary. My father-in-law had been diagnosed with cancer and I felt so sad for him that I went to a counselor in Washington DC.
This woman was terrible. She told me not to feel bad. She told me that her father was in much worse shape. I felt completely ignored and even angry after my session with her. It was as if she could not bear to really hear me out. She just wanted to cure my pain, get rid of it. And somehow that just made it worse. I felt like she should have paid me!
Americans hate pain. We are disciples of numbness. We try to anesthetize ourselves at the slightest provocation. When we have an ache, Advil, fever, Tylenol. Our mantra is get rid of the pain. Make it go away. Pain is bad. It is a sign that something is going wrong, a sign of failure. That is what we believe.
But pain is not always a bad thing. It is something that needs to be heard. It is a warning sign. Pain delivers a message. And God asks us to feel it, and to listen to it. And then, perhaps most importantly, to ask ourselves how God can be glorified in it.
The country has been rocked by the killing of young Trayvon Martin. A young black boy was shot by a neighborhood watch president in a gated community. The boy was walking home from a convenience store with a bag of skittles. He was an honor student. And now he is gone.
What happened? Well, the matter is under investigation, but we can safely say that this man made a horrible mistake. This man assumed that because the boy did not look familiar, because he was black, because he was a stranger, that he was up to no good. The man was wrong. He made an assumption and he was wrong and now a child is dead.
We do not want to listen when bad things happen, when people are upset, when there is injustice. But moments of pain, moments of great injustice are moments when God can be glorified. People's hearts and minds can change because something has gone terribly wrong. If the pain causes us to wake up, we can change, grow, become better disciples.
From the pain of the Trayvon Martin tragedy, we have much to learn, about how we judge one another too quickly, how we judge based on appearances, how we do not listen to one another. We have much to learn about our culture of fear and retribution, about the violence that we promote in movies like the Hunger Games where young people are rewarded by shooting one another to the death. This tragedy was horrible but shame on us if we do not look at it carefully and learn from the pain of our mistakes.
I have always wondered, if someone had really heard Jesus, would it have helped him, even just a little? But no one wanted to hear his pain. And so Jesus gets more and more lonely the closer her gets to Golgotha and to the cross. We could not stand the pain so we abandoned our Lord. The disciples didn't just abandon Jesus at the cross, they abandoned him much earlier, when they did not acknowledge his pain.
You could say, in many ways, that the greatest failure of all eternity was the cross in all its pain and agony. And God used that pain for glories that would change the world. If we admit our failures, our mistakes, our pain, God can be glorified in them.
What if we, like Jesus, went to the pain instead of running from it? Instead of running and hiding, what if we let ourselves try to understand why we suffer? What if we looked at our pain, examined it? What if we asked ourselves, "Why does it hurt? Where did the pain come from? What can we learn from it and, most importantly, how can it be used to bring us and others closer to God?"
Pain is not evil. It is just hard. It is a sign of trouble and a sign of change. Pain is a messenger. Pain is a teacher. Wake up and listen to your own discomfort and pain. We have so much to learn.
