{"id":5270,"date":"2026-03-05T08:35:27","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T13:35:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5270"},"modified":"2026-03-05T08:35:27","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T13:35:27","slug":"suffered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/05\/suffered\/","title":{"rendered":"Suffered"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a>
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Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.<\/em>
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A number of ancient philosophers believed in a Supreme Being.

But for centuries they struggled to agree on exactly what kind of deity they believed in.\u00a0

How should they account for the character of a God who rules such a spectacularly beautiful world, but which is filled with so much suffering and loss?

The philosophers of the ancient world decided that God, in order to be God, had to be impassive.\u00a0<\/em>That means God was endowed with no\u00a0passion\u00a0<\/em>or feelings of any kind.\u00a0

God could not feel joy, anger, disappointment, or pain.\u00a0After all, if your prayers could somehow affect God, if your suffering could inspire in God a feeling that wasn\u2019t there before, then you would have a measure of power over God.\u00a0

And that would make God vulnerable.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0

If God were vulnerable, he would not be the eternal, unchanging, omnipotent Deity who rules the cosmos.\u00a0The God who is impassive watches everything from the sidelines, or gazes upon our little problems and crises from the balcony of heaven.\u00a0Think of Bette Midler\u2019s 1990 hit From a Distance<\/em>, which won the Grammy for Song of the Year and portrayed God as a blissful spectator to human happenings.

That\u2019s the God of the philosophers. But let’s be honest.\u00a0Nobody wants or needs a God like that.
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When we consider the smorgasbord of today\u2019s global religious options, divine impassivity seems to rule.
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Muslims insist that Allah\u2019s perfection is incompatible with transient emotional states.\u00a0Hindus, Buddhists, and Taoists imagine the Ultimate Being (if they even conceive of one) to be impersonal, and thus incapable of feelings.\u00a0The Deists of the Enlightenment suggested that an all-powerful Cosmic Force apparently got the universe going \u2013 it was a bit like winding up a clock \u2013 but then permanently left the scene.\u00a0We cannot touch the heart of such a God, and he will certainly never touch ours.
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The texts of both the Old and New Testament are stunningly different.
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God reasons.\u00a0God feels.\u00a0God cares<\/em>.\u00a0
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Two unusual Greek verbs stand out.\u00a0The first is splagkhnizomai<\/em>, which is often translated into English as \u201chaving compassion.\u201d\u00a0But it means so much more than that.\u00a0
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Its root is the Greek word for small intestines, or \u201cguts,\u201d which were widely assumed to be the seat of human emotions.\u00a0It denotes a visceral reaction \u2013 something that makes you clutch at your stomach, perhaps with a twinge of outrage.\u00a0
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The word isn\u2019t used very often in the Bible. But wherever it appears, it definitely leaves a mark.
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In the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus says that the waiting father (who represents God) has a gut reaction when he sees his lost boy approaching \u2013 he runs and throws his arms around him.\u00a0In another parable, the good Samaritan who comes upon the mugged traveler feels a visceral surge of compassion and stops to help him.
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When Jesus sees the restless crowd \u201clike sheep without a shepherd,\u201d his heart goes out to them (Matthew 9:36).\u00a0He then provides both a literal and spiritual feast of loaves and fishes.\u00a0His \u201cguts\u201d are moved to compassion when he sees a widow who has lost her only son, hears two blind men crying out for mercy, and is approached by a leper whose disfiguring disease has left him nowhere else to turn.
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In each of these dire circumstances, we see God\u2019s Messiah stirred to do something<\/em>.\u00a0He is not neutral.\u00a0He doesn\u2019t remain on the sidelines.\u00a0This is a God who rolls up his sleeves and goes to work.
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The second Greek verb is even more dramatic.\u00a0It is embrimaomai<\/em>, which is usually translated \u201cdeeply moved.\u201d\u00a0It appears twice in the John 11 account of Jesus\u2019 visit to the tomb of his friend Lazarus.
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Most of us know \u201cJesus wept,\u201d one of the shortest verses in the Bible (John 11:35).\u00a0But as author and theologian Os Guinness points out, sorrowful weeping doesn\u2019t begin to exhaust the description of what Jesus is experiencing in this cemetery.\u00a0
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Embrimaomai <\/em>is the verb used in John 11:38 to describe his feelings as he approaches the tomb.\u00a0Its root meaning is to \u201csnort in spirit.\u201d\u00a0The ancient writer Aeschylus famously used this verb to describe Greek stallions \u2013 war horses \u2013 just before battle.\u00a0They pawed the ground, reared on their hind legs, and snorted before they charged towards the enemy.\u00a0
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Jesus likewise displays a surge of anger as he approaches the enemy.\u00a0What enemy?\u00a0
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He is coming face to face with Death.\u00a0
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Guinness writes, \u201cEntering his Father\u2019s world as the Son of God, he found not order, beauty, harmony, and fulfillment, but fractured disorder, raw ugliness, complete disarray \u2013 everywhere the abortion of God\u2019s original plan.\u00a0Standing at the graveside, he came face to face with a death that symbolized and summarized the accumulation of evil, pain, sorrow, suffering, injustice, cruelty, and despair.\u201d
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Crying real tears and feeling heartfelt outrage, Jesus declares that Death\u2019s days are numbered.\u00a0\u201cI am the Resurrection and the Life.\u201d\u00a0And then he provides a preview of coming attractions by raising Lazarus from the grave.\u00a0

The God embodied by Jesus, alone on the world stage, feels the world\u2019s pain.\u00a0Then he actually does something to heal the sorrow and the loss.

Jesus is conveying to us, \u201cThis is what God is like. God is not neutral or impassive.\u00a0He feels with us.\u00a0He suffers with those who suffer.\u201d\u00a0
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But there\u2019s more. Much more<\/em>.
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Astonishingly, the God of the Apostles\u2019 Creed has been wounded<\/em>. We proclaim that Jesus \u201csuffered<\/strong> under Pontius Pilate.\u201d The one who grieves outside the tomb of Lazarus will himself suffer and die just a few days later.
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This means that empathy is included in the bandwidth of divine feelings. Jesus doesn\u2019t just see<\/em> our pain from a distance. He knows<\/em> and shares<\/em> our pain from the depth of his own experience.
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A God who suffers?
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The philosophers of the ancient world mocked the early Christians for worshipping the victim of a public lynching. Talk about backing a loser.
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But the God who wells up with tears at funerals is the kind of God we so desperately need.
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And the best news of all is that he\u2019s also in the business of raising the dead.

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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.\u00a0A number of ancient philosophers believed in a Supreme Being. But for centuries they struggled to agree on exactly what kind of deity they… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5271,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1080,1085,1086],"class_list":["post-5270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apostles-creed","tag-emotions","tag-john-11-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5272,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5270\/revisions\/5272"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}