The Pains of the Lord Christ
The Pains of the Lord Christ…1
I want to speak to you tonight about the pains of the Lord Christ, in preparation for the Pascha Week which we will celebrate.
It is truly painful that the Lord Christ, who offered every good to the world, received from the world nothing except all pain… The world was treacherous toward the Lord Christ.
The pain of the Lord Christ was not in the last week of His Incarnation, nor was it during the trial or on the Cross, but pain encompassed His whole life on earth, until it was said about Him that He was “a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”… It was also said that He wept more than once, and that He sorrowed and was troubled, and said about Himself once, “My soul is sorrowful even to death.”
The Lord Christ could have received from the world all glory and all attention, had He not emptied Himself and taken the form of a servant.
People perhaps would not dare to afflict the mighty, powerful one with authority, or the rich man, but Christ came poor and without status and took the form of a servant and shared with us in everything, and also shared with us in pain.
When we see the pains of the Lord Christ, we are comforted in our pains… And when we see the pains of the Lord Christ, our hearts are reproached within us, for we as humans were the cause of His pains in the past or in our present days.
Many grieve over the pains of Christ while they increase His pains by their actions every day… Many see the image of the crucified Christ and weep within themselves, while they crucify Christ every day.
What were the pains of Christ? … The first thing that pained the heart of Christ was rejection and abandonment…
The world rejected Him and abandoned Him, and it was said about Him, “He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him”… Even in His own country in which He was born, they rejected Him, so He said, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country.”
This rejection was fully felt by the Lord Christ, and the Psalm says about Him, “They have rejected me, the beloved, like a despised dead man”… And Christ remained rejected despite His love, His tenderness, His forgiveness, and His endurance… He was rejected despite all of that… And the famous image that represents the rejection of Christ remains… He knocks on the door, and the door is closed and the owner of the house does not open… I am standing at the door and knocking and the door remains shut before me… Christ still says as He said in the Song of Songs, “Open to me, my sister, my love… for my head is drenched with dew, my locks with the drops of the night”… Yet the bride still refuses.
The door remains closed in the face of the Lord Christ continually… In Jerusalem, and also in Samaria, they closed the gate of the city and did not let Him in because His face was set toward Jerusalem. And because of this rejection, zeal and fervor filled the hearts of John and James, and they said… “Do You want us, Lord, to command fire to come down from heaven and burn this city?”… But the Lord Christ accepted the rejection, and He did not accept that the city be burned.
They were rejecting Him, but He was accepting them, and because of this rejection Christ found many enemies without cause, as the Psalm says, “They hated me without cause”… And David said, “More than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause.”
Such was the Lord Christ… The scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, priests, chief priests, elders of the people, lawyers, and Galileans all hated Him.
Many hated Him without cause… They wanted to trap Him in a word; they wove conspiracies around Him and accused Him with false accusations… They complained about Him to the state, saying that He was against Caesar… They wanted to get rid of Him, and more than once they picked up stones to stone Him (Jn 10:31).
And once they wanted to throw Him off the top of the mountain, and many times they directed numerous insults at Him… They said about Him that He was a Samaritan, and that He had a demon, and that He associated with sinners and visited tax collectors, and that by Beelzebul He cast out demons… And that He broke the Sabbath and overthrew the Law… And countless were the accusations directed at Him.
The Lord Christ was met with rejection in His love… He loved people to the utmost, and He opened His heart wide to the end… He lived compassionate and loving toward all, yet He did not find love from anyone; it was a one-sided love.
Such was Christ, and He still loves and is rejected in His love… He loves and finds betrayal as a reward for His love… And astonishingly, He found resistance at the very moments in which He was doing good… They were enraged when He healed the man born blind… And they also rose against Him when He healed the woman with the issue of blood and the man with the withered hand.
It was not only hostility that Christ faced, but also envy and jealousy… Envy and jealousy are always the cross of the successful and the outstanding, the cross of the righteous and the saints. Christ was successful in His ministry, and envy pursued Him and conspiracies were devised to get rid of Him… The problem of Christ was the saying of the priests about Him, “Behold, the whole world has gone after Him.”
Believe me, envy and jealousy met Christ even when He was an infant… Herod envied Him when he saw the Magi coming to worship the Child Jesus, saying He was the King of the Jews. And his envy reached the point that he killed all the infants of Bethlehem, and this envy caused the Lord Christ to leave His homeland and become a stranger in the land of Egypt, and thus we receive His blessing here, and Egypt hosted Him at the time when Judea expelled Him, and He found love in foreign lands at the time He found no love in His birthplace.
Thus the Lord Christ lived a life full of pain… with opponents, enemies, the envious, and conspirators… A Pharisee named Simon hosted Him, yet watched Him carefully to seize a fault, and astonishingly those enviers envied Him although He had left everything to them… He did not compete with them in wealth, status, or titles, and He had nowhere to lay His head… He lived wandering with no house, no family, no wealth… absolutely nothing, yet they were not satisfied!
He preached to the people, He had no temple or hall in which to preach… He preached anywhere… on the road, on the shores, in the fields, on the mountains… He left them the temples, yet they were not satisfied.
Envy never calms; it is the worm that eats at the heart and mind and destroys the soul… It is the fire that burns the envious.
And the Lord Christ spent a period of pain over the sins of people…
He suffered because of the low spiritual level to which humanity had descended at that time, and He looked at Jerusalem and wept over her… And He looked at the people and saw them cast down and scattered like sheep having no shepherd… He had compassion, in pain, on this lost, wandering, perishing people who found no shepherd to tend them.
There are pains caused by insult, and pains caused by love. The loving heart suffers for the mistakes of the one it loves.
The Lord Christ looked at humanity which was created in His image and likeness, and found it had lost the divine image… lost innocence, purity, holiness, and the connection with God… And Christ toiled in guiding people, and they did not be guided.
Many betrayed Him… Even the person whom He entrusted with the money box and gave an important role among the twelve betrayed Him… Judas was among the prominent, and he betrayed Him, stealing what was given for the poor… “How often I wanted to gather your children as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings”… How many times I wanted and you did not want.
The Lord Christ found a humanity not in accordance with His divine will… How many times I wanted and you did not want… He calls people to accompany Him, and they excuse themselves… One excuses himself because he has a wife, another because he has a field… Thus they excused themselves and left Him… And the excuses did not come only from strangers, but even from His disciples… His beloved twelve left Him and He stood alone, and when He needed them to watch with Him one hour, they did not watch, but left Him and slept, and He rebuked them more than once… “Could you not watch with Me one hour?” … “Sleep now and rest.”
Strangely, the Lord Christ did not often rebuke… He endured people’s betrayal, abandonment, and rejection without rebuking, and sometimes He found excuses for them. There is an astonishing phrase in the Holy Bible: “And everyone went to his own house, but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives” (Jn 8:1)… The Lord Christ knew this and said to them… “The hour is coming—yes, has now come—that you will be scattered, each to his own, and will leave Me alone; and yet I am not alone, for the Father is with Me”… The only refuge was the Father.
Everyone left Him… and He said to them… “All of you will stumble because of Me this night.” This is the chosen elite, the essence of His beloved ones and His own… Whoever reads the pains of Christ is comforted within.
And very amazing is that all the mistakes of people never changed the heart of the Lord Christ at all… All their betrayal, rejection, and abandonment did not shake His great love that has no limit… He remained the same loving heart, the great heart that contains all… It contains not only all the beloved, but also all the betrayers, rejecters, and those who stumbled in Him.
This is the loving heart that said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Lk 23:34).
The Lord Christ loved before the betrayal and after it as well… He loves, they betray Him, and He continues in His love… He always offered the other cheek.
The Pharisees plotted against Him and He visited them in their houses and ate at their tables and comforted them and spoke kindly to them.
The Lord Christ suffered from people’s sins, and from the hardness of their hearts and their hypocrisy…
He found sinners dragging a woman with harshness and humiliation and demanding for her the sentence of death without mercy, so He looked at them displeased by the hardness of their hearts and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone at her.”
Even His disciples He found with this hardness before they absorbed His love… James and John said… “Do You want us to command fire to come down and burn this city?” and He said… “The time has not come, O sons of thunder; the Son of Man did not come to destroy the world but to save the world. For this I came, to seek and save that which was lost.”
And despite the distress caused by people, the love of the Lord Christ was manifested in one deep phrase, “He went about doing good”…
He walked everywhere distributing goodness, love, tenderness, forgiveness, wisdom, and teaching… He went about doing good and healing every sickness and every weakness, and He taught His disciples also to go about doing good… “Whatever house you enter, say, ‘Peace to this house’”… “Go, heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons”… It is a message of love and tenderness for those who deserve it and for those who do not deserve it as well.
The mistakes of people had a great effect on this loving and sensitive heart of Christ, for He was wounded in the house of His beloved.
The story of the pains of the Lord Christ cannot be taken now in full detail, and during the Holy Week we shall follow in detail the pains of Christ and His events day by day.
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An article by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III, published in Watani Newspaper on 7-4-1974.
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