Jesus' tears

When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.  Matthew 9:36

There are few portrayals of Jesus in the Gospels that appeal to me more than this: I see him shaking his head in sorrow, the tears standing in his eyes.

The key word is “compassion”. The verse could be translated literally, “When Jesus saw the crowds his stomach churned with pity…”. This is a level of emotion that we, perhaps, rarely know – though seeing a little child dragged out of the ruins of Gaza must surely come close.

Here is the full humanity of Jesus: he wasn’t God pretending to be a man, simply playing a part; no, he was fully divine but fully human as well. This is what God is really like.

Matthew uses some graphic words to describe the crowds in Galilee: “harassed” could equally be vexed, or distressed; “helpless” could be laid low, or unable to cope; “like sheep without a shepherd” – well, that speaks for itself: lost, wandering, aimless, hopeless.

These aren’t people caught up in the horrors of war, which of course is even worse; they are people – just “ordinary” people - struggling to cope with the everyday pressures of life. I can’t help thinking of the people milling around our local city centre in the build-up to Christmas: struggling to make ends meet, determined to have “a good time”, whatever that may mean, but looking anything but happy. In a word, just ordinary human beings like untold millions on the face of the earth from the beginning of time. Whoever it was who called this sad and sinful world “a vale of tears” wasn’t far wrong.

As I imagine Jesus, full of tenderness, surveying this scene, I find myself challenged by the question: How might I react in the same situation? Indeed, how do I react?

Do I react with indifference? “Well, that’s the way life is. There’s nothing much I can do about it, so I’ll just look after myself as best I can, and leave others to look after themselves.”

No Christian, reading about the compassion of Jesus, can possibly be content with that. Famous as the shortest verse in the Bible, John 11:35 tells us that “Jesus wept” at the tomb of Lazarus. (And that was by no means the only time.) God help us all to pray, in the words of the beautiful little Graham Kendrick song, “Soften my heart, Lord, soften my heart… from all indifference, set me apart…”

Hopefully, I don’t react with callousness. “It’s none of my business, so why should I bother with the sufferings of other people? I’m all right, so as far as I’m concerned that’s that”. That, in fact, is just one step away from indifference, our first category; it’s indifference that has hardened into heartlessness, and we need to be very watchful, for it isn’t only our bodies that change, it’s also our inner selves. Let’s examine ourselves, in case we wake up one day and find ourselves asking, “How – oh how! – did I come to be this way?”

I might just shrug my shoulders and react with despair. “The pains of this life have no end; they are questions without answers, wounds without medicines”.

Even a Christian may sometimes feel this way, and that’s understandable. The list of problems seems infinite: wars and rumours of wars (as Jesus foretold); economic crises wherever you look; climate change threatening the future of our planet; poverty, homelessness and hardship; gender confusion; political instability and tension…

When tempted to despair we need to come back to base, so to speak, and to remind ourselves that it was ever thus. The pains of our world may take different forms from centuries ago, but in principle they are very much the same – and that was a world to which Jesus came proclaiming good news!

Only faith can enable us to hold fast to the promises of Jesus in, for example, Matthew 24, so our business is to be totally honest with God, and with one another, and to cling on if necessary by our very finger-nails. As Christians we are essentially deeply serious people, as well as full of joy.

There is also a fourth possible response to the suffering of our world: I might choose to condemn: “These people who are so lost and helpless – well, they have brought it on themselves. Unlike me, they have failed to get to grips with the forces of life, and that is why we see them dependent on food-banks, or lying in shop doorways in the city centre, or unable to hold down a reasonable job. They’re just life’s losers”.

There may be some truth in our criticisms, for we know that all of us need to be held to account for our sins and follies. But judging, ultimately, is God’s business, not ours. Our business is to foster the compassion of Christ within ourselves and within others. Lord, preserve me from arrogance and self-righteousness!

A key thing to finish with: Jesus didn’t just feel compassion; he went on to act compassionately, to do something. He preached the good news; he taught the truth of God; and he healed the sick and fed the hungry.

“But I’m not equipped to do that!” we say. To which Jesus relies: Oh yes, you are! You have the equipping of my Spirit. No, you can’t feed the world’s hungry or stop the world’s wars. But you can take a look at your own tiny bit of the world, and work out how to make a tiny bit of a difference right there.

Can’t you?

Father, thank you that Jesus knew the meaning of tears. Please increase daily the level of my tenderness, until I truly can feel his compassion and weep with his tears. Amen.

From terror to joy

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. ⁹ An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. ¹⁰ But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. ¹¹ Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. ¹² This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” Luke 2:8-12

My mother was a farmer’s daughter. I remember visiting the farm on childhood holidays, in what seemed to me, born and brought up in London, the backwoods of southern Ireland. A city boy through and through, I’m afraid that nothing of that rural way of life has left its mark on me. So the story of the shepherds and the angels doesn’t strike any particular chords with me.

The farm had dairy cattle anyway – big lumpy, floppy, smelly cows, I remember - rather than sheep. So, probably like most of us, I have to work hard with my imagination to picture these unnamed men Luke tells us about, “living out in the fields” as they guarded their flocks by night.

The experts tell us that probably they were looked down on by their more prosperous neighbours because their work routine prevented them from fulfilling their religious duties – just as in our world there are those for whom standard Sunday service times are simply not possible. (I began my ministry twenty years later in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, a “steel town” which functioned according to a shift system that imposed a sleep pattern quite alien to anything I had known.)

I wonder what that night-shift was like for the shepherds of Luke 2? I picture them huddled up against the cold, struggling to stay awake and longing for morning to come. Then something odd happens: a stranger appears as if out of nowhere. Who can he be? Why has he come? How has he come? A sense of something uncanny creeps over them, but it doesn’t last long, for it becomes apparent that the visitor is a messenger of God himself (that’s really what an “angel” was), and “the glory of the Lord shone around them”. Puzzlement turned to sheer terror.

The angel’s first words are simple: “Do not be afraid…” Then he goes on to tell them about the birth of “a Saviour”, the “Messiah”, in Bethlehem; and just to ensure there’s no risk of mistaken identity, that they will find the child “lying in a manger” (there can’t be too many new-born babies in Bethlehem answering to that description!). Whereupon a heavenly choir appears, filling the night sky with awesome light and the sound of glorious singing. It doesn’t take the shepherds long to agree to visit Bethlehem “to see this thing that has happened” (verse 15). So off they hurry (I wonder what happened to the sheep?). And sure enough…

There’s much to encourage us in these few verses.

First: the first people to receive the message of Jesus’ birth were low on the social scale, on the margins of society. He wasn’t made known to the religious leaders in the temple at Jerusalem, or to the political leaders like King Herod in his palace. His parents were nobodies - and the news of his birth came first to nobodies.

What does this have to say to us in the church today? I speak as a pretty “middle-class” Christian belonging to a pretty middle-class church. Well, to be middle-class is no sin! But there’s something to ponder here. We only have to read through the New Testament to realise that the early Christians were, many of them, slaves – lower in status even than those shepherds.

So thanks be to God for Christians who have heard his call to make his love known to those at the bottom of the pile, and have rolled up their sleeves for serious action! – whether we look back to people such as William Booth and his Salvation Army, or in our own time to those who serve as Street Pastors, or who run food banks, or who sit with drug addicts and alcoholics in our city centres, or who establish little Christian communities (churches in embryo?) in run down parts of cities.

Lord, forgive us if we have come to value respectability, correctness, even doctrinal precision, rather than the practical outworking of love!

A second encouragement: the first word of the angel to the shepherds was “Do not be afraid”. Isn’t that precious! Certainly, a heavenly vision of angels is likely to result in a need for a bit of reassurance. But I fished out my heavy Bible concordance a little earlier to discover that this same exhortation, or something very like it, occurs more than 100 times throughout the Bible in all sorts of different situations.

“Religion” has often been used to instil fear in people – Am I good enough?... Am I doing enough?... Am I measuring up?... Might God be angry with me?...

There is, no doubt, a time and place for such questions - sin certainly needs to be “called out”, to use a current in-word. But let us never forget that the first word is one of love and reassurance: “I bring you good news that will cause great joy…”

Am I living a life of good news? Is my church a community of great joy? If not, are they worthy of the description “Christian”?

We never meet those shepherds again in the Bible, so we have no idea what became of them. But perhaps a day will come when we will meet them in heaven, and they will tell us their full, joyful story…

Father, thank you that your great desire is not to crush us but to lift us up, not to condemn us but to forgive us. May even my everyday life convey something of the good news and the great joy which can be ours in Christ. Amen.

All about bruised reeds and smouldering wicks

A bruised reed he will not break,

    and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out. Matthew 12:20

My, we Christians can be a pretty quarrelsome lot, can’t we?

Look back over two thousand years of church history and what do you find? Answer: splits and splinters, arguments and wars (sometimes literal, sometimes theological), massive fallings-out, hatreds, even killings. True, there’s been a lot of wonderful stuff as well – let’s not be ashamed to highlight that fact - but there’s no doubt that divisions, factions and enmities are often what catch the eye. Oh dear! How alien this is to the spirit of Jesus.

Matthew 12:20 gives us a strange but rather beautiful description of his personality, and the way he went about his ministry. Matthew tells us that he wasn’t interested in “breaking bruised reeds” or “snuffing out smouldering wicks”. That’s a striking turn of phrase! What does it mean?

Matthew is in fact borrowing words from Isaiah 42:1-4, where the prophet speaks about the mysterious figure called “the servant of the Lord”, a figure whom the early church couldn’t help but identify with Jesus of Nazareth - once his first followers had witnessed him proclaiming the kingdom of God, healing the sick and even raising the dead, it became apparent to them that this was indeed the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy.

It’s worth quoting the Isaiah passage more fully, putting the part about reeds and wicks back where it belongs…

… Jesus withdrew from that place. A large crowd followed him, and he healed all who were ill. He warned them not to tell others about him. This was to fulfil what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah:

 

“Here is my servant whom I have chosen,
    the one I love, in whom I delight.
I will put my Spirit upon him,
    and he will proclaim justice to the nations.
He will not quarrel or cry out;
    no one will hear his voice in the streets.

A bruised reed he will not break,
    and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out,
till he has brought justice through to victory.

In his name the nations will put their hope.”

There’s a lot one could draw from that passage, but what strikes me is the way it spotlights Jesus’ quiet manner. He didn’t “quarrel” or “cry out” or “raise his voice in the streets”. He was no ranter or blusterer. In terms of our modern world, he wasn’t the kind of person to take to social media in order to fling out angry, ignorant or vicious opinions. (Might there be a word there for some of us?)

 

Certainly, there were times he could be quite ferociously outspoken; witness his disputes with the scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 23:13-36). But that was a blast against hypocrisy, which he detested, and could find no excuse for (might that too be a word for some of us?). The words of the old children’s hymn, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild”, though perhaps rather sentimental, are still worth pondering.

 

Going back to the bruised reed and the smouldering wick, they are a clear reminder that not all Bible truth is literal truth. They are figures of speech, “metaphors”, like so much else in the Bible, and they serve to illustrate something far more important. After all, as I said earlier, Jesus had no particular interest in reeds, bruised or otherwise, or in wicks, smouldering or otherwise.

 

To me, the bruised reed is the broken person: the person who has suffered great pain or injustice, and who can’t imagine ever getting over it. Perhaps it’s because of marriage or other relationship hurts; perhaps injustice at work; perhaps a major disappointment; perhaps being let down by a once-friend; perhaps serious illness, whether physical or mental; perhaps some kind of addiction.

 

Whatever, you sometimes hear people say, “I felt as if I had been tossed on the scrap-heap”. In which case the message is good news: Whatever this big, brash, go-getting world may do to you, however much it may despise and dismiss you, Jesus never tosses anybody on the scrap-heap; he works to comfort, mend and heal. If I may put words into his mouth, he says, “I still value you; I still have a meaning and purpose for your life; I will never leave you or forsake you; I will never give up on you; trust in me”.

 

And the smouldering wick? I see this as the person who is, to use an in- phrase, “burnt out”. No energy, enthusiasm or motivation; just dragging him or herself from one wearisome duty to another: only half alive, if that.  A candle-flame guttering just before extinction is a perfect illustration of this kind of person. And to them is given the promise of Jesus: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). As if to say: I have come to patiently nurse that dying flame back to life.

 

If anyone reading this is in this kind of situation, all I can do is urge you: Remember the bruised reed… remember the smouldering wick… And turn your face to the gentle, quiet, loving face of Jesus!

 

Lord Jesus, thank you that you don’t cast us off when we are beaten by the pressures of life or even when we give way to sin. Thank you that you offer us forgiveness, new life, new hope, and never-failing love. Help me to live in the light of that love. Amen.

Two happy women

 At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, ⁴⁰ where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹ When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. ⁴² In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! ⁴³ But why am I so favoured, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? ⁴⁴ As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵ Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfil his promises to her!” Luke 1:39-45

I find it hard to read this little passage without smiling. It’s just such a happy episode, and if sheer happiness doesn’t make us smile, well, something is wrong indeed.

Mary, young and fit, and no doubt flushed from her walk, comes bustling into the home of Elizabeth and gives her a loud greeting. Elizabeth - not so young and not so fit! – perhaps hoists herself out of her chair to return the greeting, and as she does so she feels the child in her womb, John the Baptist-to-be, give a lively kick. She interprets this sudden movement as her baby greeting Mary’s, womb to womb.

John is to be the forerunner and herald of Jesus the Messiah in thirty years’ time, and here they are, depicted as starting to get to know one another, so to speak. Wonderful! Are you smiling too?

Various great truths emerge…

First, we never know when God is going to do something new.

The people of Israel had long been promised a Messiah, a King - indeed, the King of kings. But why precisely now? And why precisely here, in “the hill country of Judea” - as we might put it, “out in the sticks”? It’s been a long, hard wait, centuries long, in fact. But now it’s coming to an end.

From which the simple lesson is: never give up on God. We never know when he will spring a surprise; it may be in bleak and unpromising times. He is always there, even if sometimes he seems to be hiding behind the scenes.

Second, God has a wonderful habit of using very ordinary people.

The fact that Elizabeth was a priest’s wife didn’t make her particularly special – the priesthood was something a man was born into, not something he “qualified” for. And as for Mary herself, we know next to nothing about her except that she had “found favour with God” (Luke 1:30).

Yes, God can take the most ordinary human material and do the most extraordinary things with it: think David the shepherd boy (1 Samuel 16); or Hannah, the barren wife (1 Samuel 1-2); or Amos the shepherd and mere “tender of sycamore-fig trees” (Amos 7:14); or Simon Peter, whose only talent was for pulling fish out of the sea.

God loves to take and use the “humble and lowly”. So why not you, or me? Lord, help me to be of use to you this very day, even if it is cold and wet and grey!

Third, it’s a story about humility.

We don’t know how old Elizabeth was, or how exactly she was related to Mary, but Luke 1:36 describes her as “in her old age”, so she was certainly far senior to Mary. Yet instead of feeling in any way jealous or put out by what God was choosing to do through the younger woman, she delights to rejoice with her, and humbles herself with the question, “Why am I so favoured, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” As if to say, I don’t deserve this!

The fact that Mary is putting her in the shade – taking centre-stage in God’s great drama – is neither here nor there.

This poses a challenge: How good am I at delighting in the success or blessings of others? Somone outshines me, perhaps somebody far younger: do I feel stirrings of jealousy deep down inside? A well-known novelist once said, “Every time a friend succeeds, something in me dies”. Oh, you poor, cramped, bitter little man! (Or could that be me…?)

Fourth, the euphoria of that special day was not a permanent state.

As we read on in the Gospels we find that for both Elizabeth and Mary there would be tears aplenty ahead.

We aren’t told how long Elizabeth had to live; it seems unlikely that she would have survived long enough to see John launched on his strange career, with his camel-hair robe and weird diet and his habit of disappearing off into desert places (Matthew 3). But it seems unlikely that as he grew up he wouldn’t have exhibited signs of what may have seemed quite troubling eccentricity.

And as for Mary… What pain and frantic anxiety she must have felt that time when, as a 12-year-old boy, Jesus went missing in Jerusalem for three days (Luke 2:41-52). (One of our sons, when he was little, did a runner on us in a garden centre which may have lasted ten minutes, if that; it still brings me out in a sweat.)

Then that time when word was going round that Jesus had gone crazy, and Mary had to send other sons to fetch him home - only to hear him almost seem to disown them (Mark 4:20-34).

Not to mention the cross… “Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother…” (John 19:25). Just imagine that for a few seconds.

All a long, long way from that glorious encounter between Mary and Elizabeth that we started with.

Faith in Christ crucified and risen promises joys without limit and without end. But the experience of these two women makes very clear that there may be many tears along the way. May God help us to bear them with faith and glad endurance!

Dear Father in heaven, thank you for the beautiful encounter between Mary and Elizabeth on that memorable day. Thank you too for the times I have known highs in my spiritual life. Help me to remember them, to cherish them, and to build upon them – but also to know that, wonderful though they were, they are nothing compared with the eternal glories to come. Amen.