He Gets Us: Diving Deeper | Plan 2Chikamu

He Grieves with Us

Everyone moves through grief differently, but we all suffer, and on our own timetable.

When Jesus and his family returned home from burying his father, he likely felt the sting of death like never before. We don’t know how old Jesus was because the Bible doesn’t give us these details. There’s a silence in the story—much like the silence that can be felt when there’s an empty place at dinner. But the details don’t change the reality—now he was head of the house; the weight of the family on his shoulders. They sat shivah together, seven days of quiet, private grief. Every one of them had torn the fabric of their shirt over their heart, symbolizing the sorrow now ripping through their lives.

If you’ve lost someone you love, you know all about this trauma, perhaps the most painful thing you’ve ever experienced. You know how surreal it feels to stand beside their coffin or grave and how disorienting it is to think of regular life without them. Everything flips upside down. Whatever you felt was so important yesterday, now is forgotten.

Jesus felt the sting of death at least two more times. A couple years before his own death, his cousin John was brutally murdered by a political coward. John the Baptist’s bloody beheading makes any decent person sick. You can imagine Jesus felt nauseous at what John suffered. When he heard the news, all he wanted to do was get away, by himself. But the crowds wouldn’t let him. They followed Jesus, asking for miracles, healing, and teaching.

Another time, just weeks before his own death, Jesus got word his good friend Lazarus was dying. By the time he got to his friends’ place, Lazarus was four days gone. Standing outside the tomb, Jesus wept. The neighbors remarked, “Look at how much he loved Lazarus.”

Jesus knows all about the time it takes to pick up the pieces after such a loss. He is aware of the mental and emotional fog that rolls over you like an ocean wave at midnight. He gets our grief.

Yet even in his personal heartbreak, Jesus turned to the crowds that followed him and saw them with radical compassion. In Latin, the word “compassion” means to “co-suffer.” Even in his own suffering, Jesus wanted to relieve other people’s suffering.

We’re not the same people after grief. We’re scarred, and broken, and sometimes better. So was Jesus.