A recent Saturday morning found me sitting in the upstairs classroom of a Baptist church. Not quite funeral, not quite visitation; I was there with about a dozen others to mark the miscarriage, the death, of a friend’s baby.
As they were returning home from Christmas travels, my friend and her husband were confronted with signs that this pregnancy was coming to an end. At just shy of four months, plans were already well underway for this little one’s arrival. My friends had to say goodbye to their precious baby boy. They had to say goodbye as well to their hopes and dreams for him and for themselves in the future as they were imagining it.
Babies die, children die; even those yet unknown die in their mother’s bodies. There is nothing to say in the face of such loss; there is only to cling to promises from God of his great mercy. And death is not the only pain that comes: children are bullied, disappointed, and hurt by life, over and over. Then adulthood throws a new set of challenges their way.
Parenting is one of, if not the most, joyful experience life has to offer. You watch this tiny being come into existence, grow, change, and blossom. You love them like no other; a love that is as unconditional as earth can provide and filled with a fierce desire to protect. But even within such joy, parenting is downright painful. Parents carry upon themselves all that their children experience.
I have never experienced the death of one of my own children; my heart breaks for those who have, and my heart trembles at the thought of losing one.
All one has to do is open the Bible to see that mothers, parents, have been weeping, mourning for their children throughout all time. Eve buried her beloved Abel. Naomi lost both sons after already losing her husband. And we hear that Rachel wept for her own lost sons and for all of Israel. And Mary. Mary, who was so young and untouched when she first held her baby close to her; Mary, who watched her baby boy hang stripped and beaten, a bloody mess upon the cross; Mary who could not stop her son’s death. How she must have felt such pain.
In Luke, chapter 2, the new parents Mary and Joseph bring their beloved baby Jesus to the temple, according to the law of Moses, along with a sacrifice. Probably under the spell of love for a new baby and certainly tired from the work it requires, Mary and Joseph bring this new prized possession before God; God’s own child offered back to him.
At just the right time, another man has come to the temple, Simeon. In his old age, Simeon comes to the temple because the Holy Spirit has told him that he will not see death before he has seen the Lord’s Messiah.
Finally, his moment has come.
Guided by the Spirit, we hear that Simeon comes to the temple and is there in the temple when Mary and Joseph bring in Jesus. Upon seeing him, Simeon scoops up Jesus into his own arms, as if this was his very own flesh and blood, and proclaims the greatness of this child. He has long waited for this very occasion. Simeon begins with his own swansong of goodbye:
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,
according to thy word;
for mine eyes have seen thy salvation
which thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and for glory to thy people Israel (Luke 2:29–32, RSV).
Mary and Joseph had expected maybe a quick acknowledgement of a new baby, maybe some smiles, but this? This devout man with his over-the-top proclamation of Jesus’ power? They are amazed.
Simeon goes on to bless the new parents and then turns specifically to Mary and speaks a difficult truth to her. To Mary, Simeon gives a warning of what is to come:
Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel,
and for a sign that is spoken against
(and a sword will pierce through your own soul also),
that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed (Luke 2:35).
Your child will have enemies and will suffer. He will be ridiculed, embarrassed, plotted against, and eventually captured and killed. And mother, you will suffer because of your child. You cannot escape this. Simeon doesn’t deliver every detail to Mary, but he nevertheless paints an unnerving picture. These are not the words of a greeting card you send to new parents. No fuzzy teddy bears, receiving blankets, or hot dishes here. But it is the truth.
It will be true for Mary and for anyone who has loved a child. It is true of any parent with their child; the child’s pain and suffering becomes the parent’s pain and suffering as well. Maybe your daughter falls on a basketball court, you watch her get hurt, you wince in pain from afar, and you want to run down from the stands. Or your grown son suffers in a broken marriage, trying to conceal it from you, but you still feel his pain and weep for him.
It is this scene of the child front and center, bearing the weight, and the parent suffering alongside, which we know so well from scripture, and which points us to Christ who suffered for us.
During my first parish call, when Roger Ingstad died of a sudden heart attack, his children and grandchildren all gathered from afar for his funeral. They shared stories, remembered the lessons and the love they had received from him, and wept for their loss. But it was his mother Carol, his seventy-eight-year-old mother, whose heart was broken. Parents, they say, are not made to bury their children.
We meet Simeon and his foreboding message in Luke’s gospel, and reading further we find more and more grieving parents, parents whose children are suffering in one way or another. We hear of children who have died, been possessed, or even become lost or estranged from their families.
In chapter 7, Jesus brings to life the only son of a widow, telling her there is no need to weep. Without her only son, this woman would have been left to suffer alone for all her days, and yet Jesus brings to her life and hope by reversing death and reuniting mother and son.
In chapter 8, the distraught father Jairus, a religious leader in the synagogue, falls at Jesus’ feet, begging him to come to his home and heal his dying daughter. The desperation is clear as this well-respected, educated man flings himself into the dirt at the feet of a rural, wandering preacher; he clings to any hope he can find, that maybe, just maybe someone, this rumored man of God, can save his child from certain death. And all this for even his daughter, a girl, who in those days would not necessarily have had any monetary or other value to the family. But parents have always grieved for their children, and this man is no different.
As Jesus approaches Jairus’s house, the pronouncement comes from inside, “Your daughter is dead; do not trouble the teacher any longer.” But Jesus himself has a different message for Jairus, “Do not fear. Only believe, and she will be saved.” At Jesus’ word, a young girl is restored to life, to the joy of her heartbroken father.
Again in chapter 9, a frantic father comes pleading with Jesus, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son; he is my only child,” and the desperate father goes on to describe the possession from which his son suffers. “He is my only child,” the man cries; “please, please, do not take him,” you hear in his voice. And indeed, this son, Jesus, who will himself suffer in front of his own parents, has compassion upon father and son and casts out the demon, heals the boy, and gives him back to his father.
Most famously comes the parable Jesus tells of a father and son, in chapter 15. This good and loving father gives his son his share of goods and property, only to watch and grieve as his son takes it all, runs off, and squanders it on wild living. But this father is not pained by his son’s bad choices in and of themselves, but by losing this son to another world, a world away from family and home.
When this delinquent son returns home to beg for a new life, he is not met with the expected lectures and punishment, but rather the grief-stricken father runs to his son and rejoices in his good fortune to be saved from this loss and grief. The child that was lost has been found, and what full and complete joy that brings to the father. In Jesus’ teaching here, we come to know of God’s own joy over each of us, his very own children, who once were lost, but are found again in faith.
These are but a few scenes of the parents in Luke’s gospel, and in the whole of scripture, who suffer as their children suffer, and grieve at the loss of their children. But, ironically, in all of the suffering we experience in our lives, whether it be as parents or just as people, it is, in the end, a child who suffers for us; a child who saves us from the pain that we feel for and with our own children.
This child suffers for us, so that our burdens would be made light. This child has already suffered for the young and for the old, for parents, for the childless, and for those from whom death has taken their children, that most painful of losses. This child is God’s very own child, Jesus, the Messiah, who suffers for all of the children of God.
Simeon is correct in his warning to Mary. Jesus was opposed. Jesus faced trials. The sword pierced him, and the sword pierced his mother Mary as well. But it is in the death Jesus suffered that death is finally defeated. And in this defeat of death itself, we are given the gifts of forgiveness and new life, lavished abundantly and unmerited upon us, the children of God.
In this season of Easter, we hear that the door to the tomb is flung wide open; the child lives again, for us and for our salvation. The child lives again so that you too live. Your own lost child lives again with his savior in heaven. We have and will suffer just as Simeon predicted Mary would suffer with Jesus. But because of Jesus’ suffering, our suffering will never be the end of the story.
…and a little child shall lead them (Isaiah 11:6).
Jaroslav Pelikan
June 1961
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O. P. Kretzmann
September 1969
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Stanley Hauerwas
June 1977
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Martin E. Marty
February 1984
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Nicholas Wolterstorff
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