I was encouraged to read a C.S. Lewis quote last week that, Dan, a friend from church posted. Lewis says, that, “Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don’t agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ.” 

I’ll start with a confession: I am easily overwhelmed. I feel anxious. I often compare myself to others who seem to be able to accomplish a great deal of wonderful things, they bear much fruit, I think. I feel like a couple of measly coins the widow tossed into the temple coffers because that’s all she had to give. I was very encouraged to read the record of Jesus’s response to that widow’s gift in the Gospel of Luke this morning, because I feel like whatever I give, it’s just not all that much.  I am amazed to watch men and women raising children, working normal day jobs, and, by all appearances, seeming to hold it all together well enough. Even those ordinary accomplishments seem to me at times overwhelming. Even in the best of times, when I am feeling encouraged and motivated, I feel that my capacity is very small.  

My life is relatively simple, but not by any real moral effort, but by necessity. I have a real difficulty keeping up with much more than a few things at a time. Sometimes I feel frail and anxious. This Sunday the preacher mentioned Isaiah 42:3, a prophesy about Jesus the Messiah, saying, “a crushed reed he will not break, a dim wick he will not extinguish.” I feel like a dim wick, faintly clinging to a little flicker of light, as opposed to a blazing hearth. Or, instead of a bloom-laden bush, I feel like a blade of grass crumpled on the ground. What a tender assurance the Old Testament offers, the Messiah is interested in tending very carefully and patiently those who are barely hanging on. 

I find it interesting that Jesus’s own earthly ministry was surprisingly small and fraught with anxiety and frustration. I would expect, maybe like his own people expected of the Messiah to come, that he would wrassle Roman Empire, do something really big, and make a name for himself and his people – that he’d take on the world! And all of this without breaking a sweat. Of course, Jesus did take on the world, the whole cosmos, in fact – while breaking out in both sweat and blood. But, strangely, he pulled off the biggest job ever by living a small, obscure life – by being “a man of sorrows”, Scripture says. Honestly, I can’t always make sense of how that works. But it gives me hope. It gives me hope that the marketeers, smiling self-help gurus, and those keeping an eye on the profit margins and customer accounts are all having their attention occupied by some sleight of hand. The real magic cannot be accounted for by any measures mankind has come up with. 

Jesus is doing something alien, unrecognizable to us as good, at least at first glance. We are distracted by big capacities, and Jesus seems too small somehow. But in his Kingdom the small will be big and the big will be small. My friend Bubba says, Jesus’s kingdom will never make sense to anyone in this world, because his Kingdom is not from this world.  

I just saw Joy Clarkson post a quote from George Eliot’s Middlemarch saying that, “the growing hood of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts: and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owning to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”  People do, of course, visit possible sites of Jesus’s tomb, though he is not hidden there or in any tomb. Proverbs 25:2 says it is the glory of God to hide a matter, and to look for it is the glory of kings. He is hidden in us even as we are hidden in him. 

But being hidden in Jesus apparently does not mean that anxiety, sorrow, and the overwhelming feeling of smallness and weakness cannot find us. It may mean that when they do, it’s because they found Jesus first. 

Do you remember that feeling from your childhood of walking down a dark hallway some night you couldn’t sleep and being sure a shadowy power was on your heels and wanting to make a run for it? What do we do with the anxiety we feel? It is real, after all. It was real for Jesus. What do we do when there really does seem to be some monster at our heels in the hallway at night – the same one that dogged Jesus’s ministry and finally caught up with him on his cross? What about feeling so easily overwhelmed? Again, Lewis said that the anxiety isn’t a defect of faith, but an affliction and a means of sharing in Christ’s suffering. So, on some level, we can bear the suffering, knowing the suffering itself is proof of our deepening involvement with Jesus, not a sign of his distance from us. Maybe to know that is enough? Maybe it’s enough to know that no apprentice is greater than their Master, and if Jesus suffered so will we. Not because something’s wrong, but because we’re trying to do something right. 

I recently joined a gym and I’m trying to exercise regularly. A lot of the time it’s unpleasant. My muscles are sore and the gym fees are not cheap. But the reason for the unpleasantness is the result of healthy choice-making. Jesus certainly suffered incredible anxiety, sorrow, and physical pain because he chose to do the right thing – to love us to the full, to the very end. Of course, some of our suffering will be because of our own sins, but not all of it. Others sin against us and that hurts. And Creation itself is groaning with frustration and disease.  

But, in a culture so very uncomfortable with discomfort, it’s easy to feel a lot of shame about our own suffering. Interestingly, Jesus, in his otherworldly compassion, enters this world and offers companionship in suffering. He doesn’t always solve it, or simply smooth it over with acceptance, he gives it dignity by personally joining us in our pain. In a bizarre twist, Jesus seems to be saying, “When you suffer you get a taste of what it feels like to be me, just as I know by my suffering what it feels like to be you.” 

O Love divine, that stooped to share 

by Oliver Wendell Holmes

O Love divine, that stooped to share

Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,

On Thee we cast each earth-born care;

We smile at pain while Thou art near.

Though long the weary way we tread,

And sorrow crown each lingering year,

No path we shun, no darkness dread,

Our hearts still whispering, Thou art near.

When drooping pleasure turns to grief,

And trembling faith is turned to fear,

The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf,

Shall softly tell us Thou art near.

On Thee we fling our burdening woe,

O Love Divine, forever dear;

Content to suffer, while we know,

Living and dying, Thou art near.