Day 19: Pierced
“…yes, a sword will pierce through your own soul also”
Luke 2:35a
I can only imagine a baby dedication of this sort in our churches today! In the midst of the consecration and blessing, ominous words of suffering and division are spoken. Amidst the familial smiling and grandparents snapping off photos from the front row, everyone sits in stunned silence as a haunting and discomfiting prophecy is declared over the infant.
While He will indeed be the prince of peace, not everything around Him would be peaceful, quite the contrary. Mary would be chosen by God for both great honor and great suffering. Simeon, even at the Messiah’s infant consecration, foretells it. This is not the Christ people were expecting.
She who was perhaps closest to Jesus, his own mother, would endure ineffable piercings. She will lose Joseph far too soon, and then she will lose her miraculous son. He will strike out to gather His disciples, abandoning His family in Nazareth. Then He will strike dead death, Himself dying in the process, leaving His widowed mum. Mind that Mary has no hindsight on these matters. For her, though the Holy Spirit will fill her with His presence, she will miss her boy for the remainder of her earthly years.
It is the recurring theme that those who draw near to Jesus will suffer. Those who draw near enough to touch Him, will lose themselves in finding Him, so that the suffering strikes not the same sting, but a blow nonetheless. For reasons beyond our purview, it seems God reveals Himself more fully to those and in those who suffer for His name’s sake. Few would suffer as Mary, and none would know the Messiah as she did. None more blessed, and none more burdened.
The tension between the lightness of His burdens and the heaviness of them are real and true. He gives strength to the weary, and He also bids them suffer. The call to His rest from our burdens runs tandem to taking up His cross, to the piercing of our souls. Yet in this is the rub! We find joy in our suffering, because it is when He is nearest to us, and when we know the authenticity of our own discipleship. Because a race run without the hardship, without the suffering, is hardly a race at all.
