I've spent a lot of time recently talking to people about loneliness and abandonment; about suffering and loss. Of course, this is a regular part of my profession. It is my comfort (or at least my occasional comfort) with such topics that has lead me to this role. I think most people really struggle to look at this stuff dead in the face. They don't want to see it.
Today alone, I have heard about or experienced examples of the ways we deal (or really don't deal) with these pains. We loose touch with reality (through lies and pretense and dissociation), we harden our hearts (through bitterness and unforgiveness), we delude ourselves (through the illusion of control), we run away. It's all such utter nonsense.
And when we are there, forced by circumstance or choice to look these things in the face, we often find ourselves very much alone because the rest of the world is totally not on board. I cannot tell you how many times in this very week I have heard the following phrase: "I just wanted someone to be with me." From the mouth of a divorcee, a longtime single, the victim of rape, someone coping with death, someone facing death - "I just want someone to be with me." Not someone to fix it, to minimize it, to run from it, to delude me about it, to encourage me to be bitter or entitled, not someone to know exactly how I feel or say exactly the right words but "someone to be with me."
And it strikes me that God chose two names for his son:
Matthew 1:21
And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins.
and Matthew 1:23 (as well as Isaiah 7:14)
Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel, God with us.
So the God's son shall be named "God saves" and "God with us". God saves.... God with us.
I don't know about you, but when I generally think of saving or rescuing I think of escaping. You know, a train barreling toward you and you are saved by the person who leaps into you, pushing you out of the way of the train. You've escaped.
When we think about Jesus, I think we can get stuck in this same kind of reasoning. Jesus saves by leaping onto the cross, just in the nick of time before our sins run us over. We've escaped. We've been rescued. Whew - now that's over.
But this is not my experience of Christianity. That's not to say it might not be an accurate reflection of some spiritual event I couldn't fully experience, I don't know. But what is certain, is that I have never felt the pressure of sin bearing down upon me and Christ narrowly carrying me out of danger. Nor was I immediately twinkled out of every desperate sin and ditch I had dug for myself when he came into my life. Something is very different about the way Jesus goes about saving.
In fact, it seems very clear to me that God does not save by sending a rope down from heaven with an evacuation plan. Cause look around dudes, we are all still here. And so was Peter and Paul and Mary and Martha and John.
So what's the deal God! Do you save? Yes - but the clue is in his other name. Because it is not just "God saves" but "God with us."
So Jesus doesn't push us out of the way of the train, He stands with us staring at the train and somehow this saves us.
Suffering.
God saves.
Someone to be with me.
God with us.
