Saturday, January 19, 2008
The Good Shepherd
At the moment I am aware of a number of people who are facing really hard times in their lives. For many, their battles have been going on for a very long time; for some, they will not get any easier in the future. I am struck by the depth of care and love that others are showing to these people in their suffering. Indeed, some of them have said to me how they have been overwhelmed by the concern shown to them. Long-term suffering is, of course, extremely hard to bear and to make sense of. More often than not, no sense can be made of it at all; it is a mystery, to be endured not explained. And many of us, I know, are profoundly inspired and challenged by the way in which our friends do face their troubles or suffering with remarkable patience and endurance; and yet also with great honesty, acknowledging the exhaustion, the temptation to despair that the struggle with suffering so often entails.
In the season of Lent we remember particularly the sufferings of Jesus: not just the 40 days in the wilderness without food, but the suffering that characterised the whole of his life on earth and that culminated in his death on the cross. His was a persistent, long-term suffering: the sinless one, devoted to serving all whom he encountered, yet bearing the pain of insult, rejection and hatred year after year; all the while knowing that his suffering would not lift but only intensify; the gathering cloud of Calvary steadily growing over him.
For those whose daily walk is a battle with pain or trouble or despair, there can be deep comfort in the knowledge that he who said, ‘I will never leave you or forsake you’, is one who knows what it is to suffer and to go on suffering; that he is the Good Shepherd who offers to walk with us through the darkest valley, his rod and his staff to comfort us.
But his experience of those 40 days in the wilderness also has much to teach us about how to deal with suffering and the temptations of mind and body that assail us because of it. Jesus met his temptations by standing on the solid ground of Scripture. He found strength and perspective in the words of God in the Bible. It is far from easy to do this when you are suffering; but then I don’t think anything is easy when you are suffering.
The apostle Paul, who also knew what it is to suffer, wrote of those same Scriptures, ‘everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.’ This is where Jesus found his hope, in the Scriptures. It was a hope that enabled him to endure the cross; it was the hope of Easter.
May God bless you this Lent.
Tim