In the days of His flesh He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety. (Hebrews 5:7)

What accounted for Jesus’ emotional intensity? Even though He asked if it might be avoided, His personal suffering was not the heaviest thing on His heart; it was ours. He knew we had been ravaged. He longed to deliver captives from the killing burdens of sin and religion. He saw how disease wracked men with pain, ultimately claiming their bodies. He also knew either eternal glory or catastrophe awaited every soul.

Rolling toward Him in Gethsemane, Jesus saw a wave, accumulating all the horror and filth of sin, past, present and future. He knew this tsunami was headed straight for Him and that He would be crushed by it. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. (Hebrews 5:8)

Jesus knew the more you see, the more you will need to cry. He grants that some will share His burden and know His tears. Even with darkness in view, He wants them to see the superiority of Light. He is the Light of this world. We are His children!

For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ. (2 Corinthians 1:5)

That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:10)

That God’s children have not been exempt from suffering is a mystery. Instead we are called to endure it and learn from it. It is not meant to crush us as it did Him. It is meant to draw us to Him and to teach us to abide in Him. If He permits us to know the suffering of clear vision, He knows we cannot carry it alone. He desires we live in a state of continual dependency upon Him, always casting our burdens back upon Him.

Father, in these brief days of our flesh, may we see and may we offer up, with passionate tears, our prayers and petitions to You – the One who has saved us from death, knowing that we have been heard because of Your piety. Amen.

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