We Can’t Avoid Suffering, but God Is with Us in It

“For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” — Luke 2:30–32

Guided by the Holy Spirit, Simeon makes his way to the temple in Jerusalem to find the Messiah, the one come to save God’s people. Simeon is a devout man, and he’s been promised by God that he will not see death before laying his eyes on this savior foretold by the prophets.

What Simeon finds is not a mighty warrior, as many imagined, but a newborn baby. And as he looks into the face of the infant Jesus, something within him clicks into place and he can now face death without fear. He sings, “You are dismissing your servant in peace . . . for my eyes have seen your salvation.”

In Jesus, Simeon sees the solution to our separation from God and from one another: God come to us in the vulnerability of a human body. Simeon not only sees the Messiah with his own eyes, he holds God in his arms. Could God get any closer, or become more personal, than that? I think Simeon was never the same again.

Being with God does not mean avoiding suffering. In this world there is danger and pain and, yes, goodness. But God can be found in all of it.”

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet,”  wrote theologian Frederick Buechner. This song Simeon sings is where his deep gladness at seeing Jesus meets the world’s deep hunger for a savior.

But alongside the gladness there is pain, or the promise of pain. With Mary, Simeon shares these haunting words: “A sword will pierce your own soul, too.” The child destined for glory is also destined for suffering, and whether Mary intuited it already or not, now there is no escaping the fact: Her baby will one day return to Jerusalem for another purpose. The temple priests who bless her son today will soon seek to crucify him, and there is no turning back.

Being with God does not mean avoiding suffering. In this world there is danger and pain and, yes, goodness. But God can be found in all of it, and that’s a fundamental lesson we must learn from our own firsthand experience. We must make our way to the temple, too, and allow our own fragile hearts to be pierced, because somehow that is the only way we can be at peace. Somehow, it is the only way we can live.

Read all of Sunday’s scriptures

Step Into the Story

Here are some ways to think about how we find God even in our human suffering.

Poetry

In “First Coming,” Madeleine L’Engle meditates on the moment God’s joy meets our deepest pain: “We cannot wait till the world is sane to raise our songs with joyful voice, for to share our grief, to touch our pain, He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!”

Visual Art

The Nunc dimittis — performed here by the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge — is also known as the Song (or Canticle) of Simeon. Taken from our reading in the Gospel of Luke, its Latin name comes from the opening words, meaning, “Now you let depart.” Having seen the fulfillment of God’s promise in Jesus, Simeon faces death with peace.

Visual Art

Iconographer Kelly Latimore reimagines Simeon meeting baby Jesus at the temple in a modern-day setting.

Mother Yein is priest and associate director, Sacramental Life and Membership, at Trinity Church.