The God who Cries

God is no stranger to pain. Isn’t that what Lent is all about? We forget that He has been there. God has experienced pain, death, rejection, and separation from
those He loves. Each year we take the opportunity to be reminded of the suffering of Christ.

Why is it important that we remember Christ’s suffering anyway? Why can’t we just focus on His teachings? Why can’t we just focus on His positive example and social witness? Just this, Jesus' social witness and positive example do little for us when someone we love is uprooted, when someone in our family dies, or when we experience sickness or pain in our own bodies. We need more than grand theological concepts of God’s kindness; we need a God who can identify with our pain. How can God expect to understand what we’re going through? He is unchanging, and everything here is always
changing. How can we trust God with our insecurities, fears, and hurts if He has never felt the kind of loss we feel on a regular basis? But that is the story of Lent. God became like us, so that we might become like Him.

This is an amazing mystery.
God, the source of all joy, exposed himself to grief.
Matthew 26:37-38
God, the source of all life, exposed himself to death.
John 11:1-37
God, the source of all love, exposed himself to rejection.
Mark 14:66
God, who binds all things together, exposed himself to separation.
John 13:33

We do not have a God who is ignorant about the emotions that we experience. Rather we have a God who came as a human, to live a human life, with all its pain so that we might have hope. So as we continue in this season of Lent, as we cry our tears for those who we all will miss, let us take heart and remember that our God sees our tears and He cries with us; and let us praise Him for His marvelous acts.

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