Everybody Has Problems Except Jesus

There is something about a Saturday night that feels different than the rest of the week. I have been writing blogs on Saturday Evening for twenty-four years and posting them for two, and this weekend marks the anniversary of both those events. If you have been following along for any length of time, thank you, and now settle in, because I want to give you something tonight that I hope will help you sleep.

Everybody has problems except Jesus, and at the very same time, nobody has any problems except Jesus. Both of those are true at once. Go ahead and read that again, because understanding that both of those things are true at the same time will give you joy and humility and the wonder of a good riddle, and at the same time, the beautiful tangle of a Gordian knot. Those two sentences are certainly paradoxical, and they seem to shove up against each other. We are all weighed down by our problems, and yet, not a single one of us is weighed down by anything at all. Tucked inside that paradox, inside that apparent contradiction, is one of the most comforting and tenderest truths in the entire gospel.

Let’s start with the obvious half. Everybody has problems. You don’t need to be a pastor or a physicist to know that the bills are piling high, that the diagnosis at the doctor’s office was worse than you feared, that the phone call in the middle of the night was one that nobody should ever have to receive, or that the empty chair at the table has become a constant reminder of a departed loved one. We live in a world that is defined by the cross of Christ, with all of the horror and judgment and cruelty and disappointment that hung in the air that day. Our lives are marked by pain and loss and confusion and fear. Those struggles are real, and they are personal, and they sit very heavy in the heart of every single person you are ever going to meet.

Now for the other half, the one that I hope begins to change the way you frame everything that ever happens to you. Nobody has any problems except Jesus. He has reached all the way down and gathered every last one of them up into himself. It is the way in which he has done it that I find so extremely comforting. You and I, and every single human being you have ever met, reside inside the life of Jesus, as members of his ubiquitous, infinite, all-encompassing body. He is the one who has all the problems. As an example: Suppose your knee kept complaining to you about all the trouble it was having down there. Well, you, as the brain of the whole operation, would say to that knee, I am the one with the problem. Whether it is the knee or the ankle or the heart or the liver or the appendix, every last one of you reports back to me and tells me your troubles. Your problems all converge inside of me. And I am the one who doesn’t just understand you are experiencing problems. I am the one who feels the pain of it.

And at the same time, filled with that same beautiful paradox, the body of Christ where all of this converges, turns out to be a stronghold, a fortress in the day of trouble. We take refuge inside that same wounded and crucified and hurting body that belongs to Jesus. That is a paraphrase of something the prophet Nahum wrote long ago. Solomon weighed in too, with something beautiful from out of Ecclesiastes, where he spoke of God redeeming time itself, not just the events that happen in time but the very passage of the thing. Every hour in which something bad has ever happened to you, Jesus is able to roll it up and say, all of this, yesterday and today and tomorrow, all this chronology and cause and effect, it all belongs to me, and you don’t need to worry about it one bit. Every human trouble, past, present, and the ones still on their way, have already been swept up into the crucified arms of the one who contains all of our experiences. I am going to say this again, probably for the hundredth time. We are not living in history, and we are not doomed to relive the regrets of everything we did and didn’t do. No. We are living his story. We are living his problems, his crucified, defining attribute. 

So let me put it as plainly as I can. When we weep, we do nothing more than participate in the tears that already belong to him. Your eyes are not the true location of the sadness behind them; it is the brain that knows and carries that sadness, and that brain is Jesus. When we strain under some heavy load, we are feeling only a fraction of the straining that belongs to the man who holds the whole world in his hands. And when you feel the water rising up over your head, and you are certain you are going to drown in your own situation, you are participating in your own blessed and personal baptism, the very baptism into which we were all plunged with Christ on Good Friday. Your problems are not going to evaporate today, or tomorrow, or the day after that. But they are going to stop being problems. They are going to become emblems you are borrowing, carried for a little while, until your life, your piece of the image of the crucified God, is permanently put in its eternal place at the right hand of the Father.

Come to me, he says, all you who are weary and heavy laden. I’ve got this. However heavy it feels in your hands tonight, the strength that resides inside of me is limitless. It is infinite. This is not a magic trick, and it is not me making light of the seriousness of evil and sin and horror and cruelty and injustice. Far from it. This is the paradoxical glory and shame, the life and death, the riches and poverty, that all belong to my cruciform image, and I am not asking you to look away from a single bit of it.

This is what makes our salvation so much more than a comfort. It is a transaction of love and a complete reframing of what the love of God even looks like. Christ does not solve our problems from a safe distance; in fact, I am not even sure solve is the right word. He comes infinitely close to them. He claims them as his very own, and he signs his name to our suffering. He has a way of taking our deepest distresses and sanctifying them in our own minds. The worst burdens that humanity has ever heaped upon herself and upon each other are folded into his greater story of grace, in a way that we cannot articulate or fully comprehend. The whole story runs straight through Good Friday, and here is the part we so easily miss: it does not stop, and it does not get reversed on Resurrection Sunday. No. That crucified life is brought back from the dead and carried up into eternity, distributed to every corner of the universe in his Ascension, and then sent back down, aimed straight at the heads of his own people on the day of Pentecost. Those people walked out into the world, and for the next thirty years, as the book of Acts records, showed everyone what it looks like to be marked by the crucified life of God. The problems that fill that book were never really their own. They all belonged to Jesus.

So, both halves are true. Nobody has any problems except Jesus, and everybody has problems except Jesus. And the Bible never once asks you to pretend otherwise. He has made you his own, he has gathered you up into his saving work on the cross, and so your life will contain both the full validation of your pain and the ultimate resolution of all things inside the inscrutable mind of God. We are never alone in our troubles, just as your knee never aches by itself. Cast all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. Your problems will find their way home, not in some tidy resolution, for there is no such thing, but in redemption, a redemption that looked terribly painful on Friday and was carried all the way up to heaven and back down again to the glory of God the Father through his Son.

So, rest now. You have absolutely nothing to worry about. I hope, in some small way, this helps you get a good night’s sleep. God bless you, and goodnight.