Created For CommunitySample

Jesus Became Lonely for You

The trinitarian nature of our God shows how He never experiences loneliness. The Father, Son, and Spirit have lived in perfect community forever, and humans were created to enter into that community and join in perfect, eternal fellowship with God. As we’ve already seen, though, sin ruined this and now we long for that perfect community once again. 

We experience loneliness because we don’t have that community we were created for, but through Jesus, we can start experiencing it once again.

By stepping down from heaven, Jesus stepped into the flawed, difficult community that leads to loneliness. In the Gospels, we see stories of his friends disappointing him, people not wanting him around, and others refusing to try to understand him. In one prophecy, Isaiah tells us that Jesus “was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”(Isaiah 53:3). Christ understands the pain of loneliness because he experienced it too.

We can see this clearly when we look at Jesus’ last night before his crucifixion. Not only did one of his closest friends (Judas) turn Him in to the authorities, but the rest of His disciples ran away when the situation got scary. They all left him alone. While Peter followed from a distance, he denied even knowing Jesus when people pressured him for information.

Jesus experienced the loneliness that comes with friends abandoning him, but even worse, he felt His once perfect community ripped from him on the cross. God turned away as Jesus took on the weight of all humanity’s sins. The community that he felt in for all eternity was, for a brief time, completely gone. 

As you read these stories today, think about how Christ did not have to do this. Unlike us, he did not deserve separation from the perfect, trinitarian community. He chose separation, he chose loneliness, so that we could enter into God’s perfect community. In times of loneliness, look to the cross as the ultimate display of God’s love and his desire to be with you.