God Is Empathetic

One of a series on "God's Endearing Personality":

Empathy is different from sympathy. The latter is sharing the feelings of others, that is, "with them" in it. Empathy is experiencing as one's own the feelings of others. That is what God does, through His Son. "Therefore, it was necessary for him [Jesus] to be made in every respect like us, his brothers and sisters, so that he could be our merciful and faithful High Priest before God. Then he could offer a sacrifice that would take away the sins of the people." "This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same testings we do, yet he did not sin." (Hebrews 2:17; 4:15)

While I was very ill, the thought of God's empathy was comforting to me. He knows what this is like! It's quite possible that Jesus did not ever have a sinus infection that kept Him from His work for two weeks. (But then again, we don't know that, for sure!) We presume He had a normal boyhood, with its stubbed toes and scabby knees. And we do know that as a grown-up, He got hungry, grew tired, and became emotional enough to weep. Is it absurd to think that He might have had a headache from too much sun sometimes or a case of the sniffles?

[If such a proposal is too much of a stretch for you, just ignore it.] It has been, however, a source of encouragement to me that Jesus understands our human frailties, for He faced them too. Without murmuring or blaming or evading, He became one of us. True, He has taken our sins away, removing the guilt of them completely, as depicted by driving the scapegoat into the wilderness during the time of Old Testament sacrifices. But I do not see the Scripture indicating that He took away our sorrows, our neediness, our suffering of various sorts. Isaiah 53 says that he carried our griefs and bore our sorrows. But He did not carry them just so that we won't have to. He bore them, endured them, so that He could be our merciful and faithful High Priest. In fact, we are able to find peace in these various situations because as we carry them, we can be united in a special way to Jesus who carried them for us.

Of course, that is not all. I am not denying Divine healing power for the physical being as well as the spirit. But it is important to me to know that God is not just sorry for me when I'm down. He remembers being like me.

MaryMartha

Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. United States of America. All rights reserved.

Art from http:www.sxc.hu/