Does God understand our suffering?

HE was despised and rejected, a man of suffering, and familiar with grief.’ Isaiah chapter 53 verse 3 Does God know what it’s like to suffer?

Does He know how we feel when we see dreadful suffering around us and feel helpless to stop it? Does He know how we feel when we’re grieving?

Maybe you have asked those questions as you have seen the news in recent weeks. Maybe you have asked for personal reasons too?

It’s not long now until Easter, and Good Friday two days earlier when Christians remember the death of Jesus on the cross, a dreadful event nonetheless full of positive meaning.

Part of that positive meaning is that in Jesus’ cruel torture and crucifixion Christians believe we see God himself experiencing the full depths of the violence and suffering of the world we humans experience.

The idea of God suffering can be a hard one to grasp. Surely a real God couldn’t suffer!

But Christians say that actually in Jesus we see a God who feels pain, just as we all do.

And that’s so important when we see so much suffering around us, including in Ukraine, and for many much closer to home than that.

But there’s more: as Jesus was suffering, God the Father was suffering too. While the Son chose to die for us, the Father had to stand by and see it happen.

So God also understands what it’s like to watch a loved one experience terrible pain and death, and to feel deep grief and loss.

This is a God worth believing in: a God

‘familiar with grief’. To this God we can turn in our own pain and our own grieving and give it to Him, knowing He understands.

You may want to do that right now.

The Revd Nick Hudson is Minister of Wokingham Baptist Church, writing on behalf of Churches Together in Wokingham