Think it Through No.5 Loneliness - Jesus faced it

Walking wearing walkmans, scouting around for fun, wandering lonely as a clown, searching out games for one. We sat at the smallest tables, alone with a paper or a book. Not that we're out celebrating, we just can't be bothered to cook.

Another night with the TV, the conversations all one way. I'd just love someone to talk to. I've got so much I want to say.

Walking wearing walkmans, scouting around for fun, wandering lonely as a clown, searching out games for one. Terminally bored with jigsaws, with a hundred bits of sky. I never finished the crossword, could try a word search, but why? Well I once tried happy families, but now I drink to dull the pain.

Find I'm stuck playing odd one out, it looks like it's patience again. Walking wearing walkmans, scouting around for fun, wandering lonely as a clown, searching out games for one. See the point? Searching out games for one, lonely in a crowd.

You know there's a scripture that anticipates Jesus and his experience towards the end of his life. And it says of our Lord, and sometimes my eyes are filled with tears literally when I've read this particular statement, it says, see if there be anyone who is as troubled as I am. And it goes on, I looked for someone to have pity on me, and there was no one.

The loneliness of Jesus Christ. We'll address that a little more in a while. I asked a couple of very precious friends of mine just to complete this statement in a matter of two or three minutes.

My loneliest moment was, Muriel, who helps us in our pastoral team, I don't know whether you'd prefer to stand or sit here dear, but I'll give you the option. Come along and fill that statement. My loneliest moment was, do you prefer to stand or sit? Okay.

I literally can't share with you the most devastating lonely moment of my life, because it incriminates, it involves someone else, and that would be unfair. But there are two points in my life that I'd like to refer to, strangely linked, and yet you may not think so. And they were both devastatingly lonely.

The first one was when I was four plus, and my mother disappeared from the family. I was confused, I was hurting, I was bewildered, I didn't know what had happened. I sensed a loss of identity, and I didn't know where my world had gone.

I was sent to Granny's for two years and came back to find that I had a stepmom. Now speaking to you as a congregation, separated parents never know just what devastation they leave in their children's lives. And had it not been for the goodness of God and the grace of God, that could have damaged me for the rest of my life.

The second occasion that I want to refer to has a connection. When I was turned 40, I was serving, I believe, the Lord in Israel, and I was working with girls and young women who were blind. And in the course of doing the duties that were allotted to me, I was asked to go and visit families and a blind, a home for blind in Jordan.

And so I set out. Now at that point, it was in the 70s, and at that point, the relationships between Jordan and Israel were not very friendly. And I had to get a bus across the Allenby Bridge to take me into Jordan.

Someone was detailed, Abinastri was detailed, to meet me on the other side and to take me into his care while I visited these families. So I got on this bus along with many people to cross this bridge. And you pass the check out point from the Israeli side, and then there's a no man's land bit, and then you come to the check in point on the Arab side.

It was when I got to the Arab side that the lonely experience became mine, because they took everybody's passport from the bus, and they took them away to this little sort of shack place they had on the bridge. And they brought everybody's back onto the bus, and they gave them out. But instead of giving me mine, they took me off the bus and took me into this shack place and sat me down.

And then nothing happened, and still nothing happened, and nothing happened, and nobody would tell me what was going on, and nobody would tell me what was going to happen or why I was there. And I began to feel desperately vulnerable, desperately confused, utterly bewildered, and not knowing what was going to happen next. But you know, when I joined this church, a scripture was given to me, and I'd been sent out from this church, and the scripture was, trust in the Lord with all your heart and don't lean to your own understanding.

And I had to literally learn to make that scripture real for me in that moment. I stayed on that bridge until the next bus came and went, and I knew that was it. There weren't any more, and I was still on the bridge.

So what were they going to do? Take me to jail? What were they going to do with me? I was desperately lonely in that moment, and yet, in and through that experience, the Lord made me aware that it was all right. He was in charge, and ultimately, some soldiers brought Apenasri onto the bridge to take me across to the other side. Thank you, Muriel.

Mike, would you come and share with us, please? Mike's a teacher, helps us quite a lot down here, and we're grateful for him and his dear wife. So we're going to stand with you, please, sir. Go on, sit.

Tony asked me at lunchtime today if I would think about the times when I'd been really lonely, and funnily enough, I was just reading a book about Mother Teresa, and in it, I saw a quote that she had said to Margaret Thatcher, which was that loneliness and unwantedness is the leprosy of the West, and I thought that was very, very true. I'm very fortunate in that I come from a very loving family, and so I've always been surrounded by love, and in effect, I believe that has prevented me from being really, really lonely, because I've always known I've had my mum and dad there and my sister. So I had to think quite hard about times where I've been really lonely, and I thought of three.

I know a lot of people think that I find it quite easy to get up here and speak to people, but the few moments that I have before are really lonely minutes for me, and one time that sticks in my mind was the Ruth Milne concert, and I was walking up and down the back here, and I hadn't really organised everything in my mind, how I wanted to say things, and William Wren came up and said, are you okay, Mike, and I knew the seconds were ticking away, and that was a very lonely time, and in the end, I just thought that's it, and I put the paper down, and I said, okay, God, it's over to you, I'm all of a twitch and I couldn't sort it, and things went well. The other time when I was really lonely, I was doing interrail around Europe on a train, and I arrived in the very north of Germany, waiting to get to a town called Aurich, but the train stopped one town short and didn't go any further, and it was dark, and it was cold, and I had nowhere to stay, and I had a big rucksack, and it wasn't a very hospitable place. There are funny lot up there in the north of Germany, a bit like north of England, really.

It was a lonely time, and I thought, where will I sleep? I looked at park benches, and what do boys do when they're really lonely? They tend to phone their mums, so I phoned my mum, and she said, where are you sleeping tonight, dear? And I lied through my teeth and put the phone down and sort of thought, that's it, you know, and I remember thinking, God, I really need a bed tonight, I don't want to sleep rough tonight. I really need a bed. I don't want to sleep rough.

It was a wild sort of place, and just as I'd finished praying, really, I suppose, I saw a little light which said motel, and when I got there, this big German frown line came in, and I went through the door, and I saw her, and she said, oh, yeah, come eat, and showed me the room, and I remember I fell on my knees, which was unheard of. This was quite a few years ago, and I wrote in my diary, you know, the Lord is my shepherd, there's nothing I shall want, and I just didn't do that sort of thing, but I somehow knew that God had heard me in my loneliness, and then the last time, a couple of years ago, I was with all my family, and we broke down in the middle of France, or in northern France on the motorway, and there was nobody about for miles, we had no petrol, and France is so big, and so flat where we were, and both sides of the motorway was barbed wire fences, and we had a small baby in the van, and we thought, well, what are we going to do, and clear out a migraine, and this baby was squawking, and my mother was ill, and it was a disaster, and I remember I walked to try and find this telephone, and I couldn't find it, and then I walked back, and I thought, God, I'm really alone here, and I felt really responsible, and I remember saying, God, if I've ever needed you, I need you now, and I really do need you now, and so I went to the back of the van, and picked out a small petrol can, and walked down the motorway, and I shook it at the first car that came by, and it was a police car, and he pulled over, and within half an hour, we had petrol, so I think when I look at my loneliness, each time when I look at those three occasions, God has pulled me through, and the only time that I didn't have God pull me through was when I had left the church that I'd always gone to with my parents, and it was what I call my spiritual interregnum, really, where God wasn't there in my life, or I didn't acknowledge him, because I was going to let him come to me, I wasn't going to look for him, and of course he didn't force himself upon me, and I think I was very spiritually lonely then, but that's another time. Thank you.

I was asked to look through the Bible for some passages on loneliness, and I have several, ending with Jesus himself, so some are teachings on loneliness, and some are people who are lonely, so I'll read out the verses if you'd like to look them up, but I'm going to do six, so if you'd just like to listen, that's fine too. The first is in Job 19, verses 13 and 215. He has alienated my brothers from me.

My acquaintances are completely estranged from me. My kinsmen have gone away. My friends have forgotten me.

My guests and my maidservants count me as a stranger. They look upon me as an alien. The next one is in Psalm 25, and verse 16.

Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. Also in the Psalms, Psalm 38 and verse 11. My friends and my companions avoid me because of my wounds.

My neighbors stay far away. Another Psalm, Psalm 68, and verses 4 to 6. Sing to God. Sing praise to his name.

Extol him who rides on the clouds. His name is the Lord, and rejoice before him. A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.

He sets the lonely in families. He leads forth the prisoners with singing. And into the New Testament, some about Jesus.

Matthew 26, and verses 36 to 40. Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane. And he said to them, Sit here while I go over there to pray.

He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.

Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, My father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me, yet not as I will, but as you will. Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. Just one more verse in Luke chapter 5 and verse 16.

I'll start at 15 actually. Yet the news about him spread all the more, and the crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sickness. But Jesus often withdrew to a lonely place and prayed.

If you want a 35 minute address, or just short of that, then you can borrow the tape of this morning's study from Scripture. What I want to do is just briefly to thread together, and it will come up on the overhead, what I believe is a summary of the biblical teaching on this particular topic. The Bible addresses the subject.

That's the first line in the statement as we build it up. The Bible addresses the subject. In the Old Testament, the writers will tell you in the opening books, even the book of Leviticus, to which reference was so graphically made last week, that you are always to grant hospitality and friendliness to the stranger within your gate.

Bedouin fellowship today is legendary in the Middle East. It goes back to the earliest biblical times. Here's Abraham.

Three men pitch up unannounced. Abraham, in typical masculine insensitive fashion, invites them in. That's not the insensitivity.

And then he nips round to the other tent and says to Sarah, Get cooking. That's where the insensitivity comes. But the point is that in the earliest chapters of the Bible, you find evidence that we are to be a friendly people.

And the psalmist who says in the 25th Psalm and the 16th verse, I am lonely and afflicted, is actually outlining a condition that the Bible thinks is clearly wrong and should be addressed. When the apostle Paul writes to the friend of his, Timothy, in one of his epistles he lists the men who he wants to be sent to him, because Paul, this very great and very successful evangelist stroke Bible teacher, knows what it is to desire fellowship and to make up for what otherwise would be loneliness. Someone has said real loneliness is not in being alone, but in being with the wrong person, in the suffocating darkness of a room in which no communion is possible.

If you unravel that statement, what it means is this, that we all need people, a person, a group of folk, to whom we are comfortable in their presence and can enjoy verbal intercourse. And the Bible suggests that this is reasonable and valid. The Bible addresses the subject.

Furthermore, the Bible addresses the subject and reveals that Jesus himself knew loneliness. In one sense, it was unavoidable. I mean, Jesus is not your ordinary person, although there is an ordinariness about him.

I mean, he's born in an ordinary fashion, inasmuch as he went through the same processes of birth, even though the conception was miraculous. He's a carpenter in Nazareth, and yet he's more than just someone who can identify with humankind. When he's in Nazareth, when he's in Capernaum, when he started his public ministry, there is an unavoidable loneliness that comes his way because he is increasingly reckoned to be famous.

Famous people can often be the most lonely because you can't go anywhere without people knowing you. One of the problems of Princess Diana. And our Lord, you find in the early chapters of the Gospels, is sometimes described as spending the night away from the village on his own because fame brought to him the difficulty of being anonymous and having rest in places which were inhabited like the towns and the villages.

What's more, our Lord Jesus was often found on his own at the crack of dawn and at dusk when he would give himself to intercession in a way that very few people prior to him coming on earth had prayed. And prayer really demands, although there is corporate prayer, the bulk of prayer demands time in the diary on your own. And our Lord Jesus, he exhibits this need.

What's more, he needs to remove himself from time to time from his disciples. On one occasion, he deliberately climbs a mountain, sends them into a boat at the foot of the mountain where there is a sea, they push off into the darkness, and our Lord is praying. And the implication is that he prays that there'll be a good storm.

The reason being, he wants the faith of his disciples to be tested. He wants them to be on their own in certain instances during his own public ministry so that when he is corporally, that means when he is bodily, no longer with them, they will know how to cope. So, our Lord Jesus, he knew loneliness in a threefold way, but I move on.

Yet, there was a compensation for him. Here is our Savior, and although he has these friends, these colleagues, these disciples, he can never really be at one with them in the same way as he can be at one with, in communion with, someone else who's very special. And I refer, of course, to his Father, with whom he's in contact in his prayers.

Time and time and time again in his ministry, you find that he refers back to the Father. I'm on my own, and yet he corrects himself. I'm not on my own.

Why? Because you are with me. I'm engaged in my Father's work. It doesn't really matter, in one sense, to our Lord when he doesn't get the quality of fellowship that he requires from the disciples because he can always fall back on Father.

And one of the things that's dominant in the Gospels, when you read the life of Jesus, is this constant intercourse between the Father and himself. Sometimes it is so intense, so intimate, that what the Jews in the Hebrew language call the bath kol occurs. That means God actually speaking, the Father speaking from the heavenlies.

Here's Jesus immersed in the river Jordan, and his Father is so elated that he disturbs the scene. And this voice comes from heaven, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And on another occasion, when Jesus is on the Mount of Transfiguration, the same voice is heard, This is my beloved Son, hear him.

Our Lord, though he doesn't have that quality of fellowship with the disciples, and as a result there were times of loneliness at that level, he nonetheless has this blessed compensation, his relationship with his Father. The Bible addresses the subject of loneliness and reveals that Jesus knew loneliness, yet there was a compensation for him, I continue, which alas had to be forfeited. His mother didn't understand him at the cross.

You find evidence of this. Mary actually comes with her other children, for Jesus, whatever the Catholic Church teaches, actually did have blood sisters and brothers. And on one occasion, the family came to him and tried to dissuade him from engaging, continuing in his ministry.

And when he's at the cross, they don't understand him. What is more, the clergy in his day, the scribes and the Pharisees, they don't understand him. So, conversation, intercourse at that level is not possible with his blood relatives, and it's not possible with the clergy.

What is more, the disciples, they can't piece it together. They've tried to stop him from going to Jerusalem. To them, it's just ridiculous for a man as noble and as pure as Jesus is to risk his life by going to the holy city.

And Jesus knows that if he listens to what they have to say and he's deflected, then the reason why he came on earth would never be fulfilled. So, there's another forfeiture of fellowship as far as the disciples are concerned. So, the only person who can still relate to Jesus and understand him in the final week is his father.

So, Jesus, as we saw him this morning in the Garden of Gethsemane, prays. The disciples are sleeping some distance away. He's in an agony of prayer in the center of that garden that is filled with olives.

And he speaks about the death that's just around the corner. And he says, Father, because the relationship's still intact to that point, Father, if it's possible, can there be some other alternative? You see, Jesus is fully human as well as divine. And it wasn't possible.

So, as you know, he's arrested. He's tried. He's treated like a common criminal.

And the hours lengthen into a day, to a couple of days. And there along, you've got this awful scene, the most desperate picture that the world has ever witnessed, of Jesus, this pure, loving man, crucified. The hands which touched the lepers are now pierced with nails.

The feet that have walked up and down the villages, the streets of Palestine, enabling him to herald the good news, are now strapped to the cross. And darkness falls. And Jesus looks down from his vantage point.

His mother doesn't understand him. His disciples can't grasp what happened, and they've run away. The clergy are hurling abuse at him.

And in the darkness that surrounds the cross, Jesus goes through an even deeper darkness in his spirit. For the relationship which he had, unbroken, with his father, is severed. And from the darkness of that scene comes a cry that's deeper than the deepest blackness.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Loneliness, the horror, the absolute nakedness, of that Jesus, the Christ, experiences on the cross. And I want to go on to say this. The reason why he forfeited all the compensation that he had in terms of his relationship with his father was in order to make the abolition of loneliness possible for you and me.

So the statement reads, The Bible addresses the subject and reveals that Jesus knew loneliness, yet there was a compensation for him which alas had to be forfeited in order to make the abolition of loneliness possible for us. How do I unpack that last statement? Quite easily. You see, when Jesus died, on the third day he's raised from the dead.

Forty days later he ascends to heaven. In heaven he releases his spirit, and his spirit indwells the hearts of men and women who acknowledge him as Lord and Savior. He has said to his disciples, I will never leave you, I will never forsake you.

How can he possibly keep that promise if he remained with them bodily? And the answer is he couldn't. So he returns to heaven. And on return to heaven he doesn't forget them.

He drops his spirit down. They can become, in one sense, so partaking of Jesus' own life that that relationship which Jesus enjoyed with his father, they too can enjoy. So, when you get into the New Testament, it talks about the fellowship of the saints.

It talks about koinonia. It talks about loving the brethren. It talks about sharing what you have.

It talks about an unqualified love that you are to demonstrate, not only to God who loved you by sending Jesus to you, but an unqualified love which you are to demonstrate to other people whom God has brought across your path. Which means that I can't be selfish. I can't cling on to what I've got.

I can't look on my home as being my own. I can't have my pantry as though all the food is mine. I am, because Jesus has called me into his fellowship to show that love and that friendship to others that he, in some measure, has demonstrated.

And that old Bedouin hospitality in the Old Testament surfaces again in the New. And the koinonia becomes one of the key characteristics that Christianity has been known for down the years. So, you see, why I tell you, I can take criticism of the tab in many facets and personal criticism of myself.

But if there's a criticism that's made in terms of our lack of friendliness and offering hospitality, and if that criticism has to be accepted, then it really does hurt. Because it means that that loneliness which our Lord Jesus has come to deal with along with many other things is remaining in the life of some person or some people. And we therefore, as a community, are defective.

The Bible addresses the subject of loneliness and reveals that Jesus knew loneliness, yet there was a compensation for him which alas had to be forfeited in order to make possible the abolition of loneliness for us.