Journeying with Mary, the Mother of Jesus: Woman of Sorrows | Associate Pastor: Matt Armstrong

Well, I this month, actually just a few days ago, is kind of a milestone in my life.

It's been three years since I came here to Redeemer.

That's something to celebrate.

I'm happy to be here.

As some of you know, maybe many of you, uh, when I came here to Redeemer, it was a time of incredible grief and loss in my life.

I was I was not fun at parties.

I had recently resigned from the church I planted, my family and I.

We we moved to a new neighborhood, an urban neighborhood in Atlanta, planted it in 2010.

For 12 years we lived, we pastored, we served.

When I got here, I was exhausted, I was bewildered, I was angry and doubts.

Our family was struggling to understand what had happened.

For about 18 years, we had kind of lived with this focus to plant and pastor a church.

And in the blink of an eye, it had come to an end.

I entered what I would later uh come to learn is called the night of the soul.

I didn't know if I had failed.

I wondered if God had failed.

All I knew was that our life had been utterly turned upside down.

Now, often when we experience severely painful events like this or long-term suffering, it causes us to question many things in our lives, not least of which is God and our relationship with God.

In those moments and seasons, God can become strange, he can become distorted in our eyes, even monstrous.

The God we thought we knew would never have allowed these things to happen to us or to the ones we love.

So who is he now?

Maybe you've been in that place.

Maybe you're in that place this morning.

What do we do when we when the unspeakable happens?

Where do we go when God is no longer familiar and he no longer feels safe?

Well, that's the subject of our sermon this morning.

The truth and the good news, strangely, is that this experience is not unusual for Christians.

In fact, that's why it has a name, the Dark Night of the Soul, which I was surprised to discover three years ago.

In fact, we can turn to a number of places in the scriptures themselves to find God's people asking these very same questions.

Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers in the faith who have walked these dark paths before us.

This morning we come to one of those passages.

For the last few weeks, we've been following in the life of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

The Annunciation when the angel Gabriel came to tell her that she would bear the Messiah.

Um she, I I forget, I wasn't here for some of those weeks.

But anyway, we've been, I know that was the first one that Brad that Brad preached.

Um today we come to, as we read, the crucifixion of her son.

This was the darkest moment of her life when Jesus, her oldest son, was tortured and executed on a Roman cross before her eyes.

In John 19, uh, we see Jesus being hung on the cross.

The soldiers are carelessly dividing up his minimal belongings.

This was sort of one of their privileges, as those who oversaw awful crucifixions.

Um, and in that moment we're told this that standing by the cross, what uh cross of Jesus were his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopus, and Mary Magdalene.

This was the moment that Simon the Prophet Simeon the prophet had spoken over Mary in the temple when Mary and Joseph brought the baby Jesus to be presented before the Lord.

He said this to her Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and the rising of many in Israel, for a sign that is opposed, and a sword will pierce your own soul also.

As we've seen over the last few weeks, Mary often stands as our representative in these stories, in the Gospels.

She is like us.

She experiences the joys, the challenges, and the complexities of following Jesus.

Today she stands in for us as the woman of sorrows.

What does Mary have to say to us in our sufferings as one who has endured such great suffering?

And how does she help us to understand the place of suffering in the lives of all Christians?

Those are the questions we're looking at this morning.

Glad you're here, especially if you're visiting.

This is uh, you know, what we talk about every week.

No, just kidding.

Sorry, I'm just trying to introduce some levity to a heavy subject.

All right, point one.

Mary shows us that becoming a follower of Jesus includes following him into the depths of pain and suffering.

You see, Mary was like most Jews of her day.

She expected that when Messiah arrived, he would be a powerful political and military leader who would overthrow their oppressors.

For hundreds and hundreds of years, God's people had lived under the thumb of brutal oppressing powers.

She believed that Messiah would come and restore Israel to a prominent world power as it had been back in the days of King David and King Solomon.

But that's not what Jesus did.

From almost the beginning, Jesus' ministry, Jesus' life frustrated and confused the Jewish people of his day, including Mary.

Similarly, as Christians, we often think that following Jesus means moving from strength to strength.

I know that I believed that early in my Christian walk.

We know the truth now.

We have the Holy Spirit, we have access to great wisdom.

Surely my Father in heaven wants goodness for me.

I mean, isn't that how Jesus closed, or uh David closes Psalm 23?

He wrote, Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.

Don't we wish that that is what encapsulated the Christian life?

Now, when I embarked to plant a church, I was already fully aware that I was a people pleaser, as we like to call it.

I was, I cared too much for what other people thought of me.

And that's a tough place to be when you're planting a church, when you're starting a new organization.

But my hope and even my expectation, my faith, was that Jesus would heal me of this, so that it wouldn't take, have so much control over my life.

But after 12 years, the vitriol, the conflict, the chaos of COVID, both inside and outside of our church community, broke me, and I came to the end of myself.

The most disorienting part of that whole experience was that I expected God to save me.

I knew entering into that season how hard it was, and I could see how hard it was going to be.

But I put my faith in the God who made promises to me.

And I believed he would get me and he would get our church community through it.

But he didn't.

When I resigned, I felt both the shame of failure and the disbelief that God had not come through.

I was devastated.

After stepping down, I began a long and slow process of grappling with what had happened.

Questioning my relationship with the Lord, my calling to the pastorate, many, many things.

Through readings, meditations, conversations, I was reminded that Jesus had said to his disciples, if anyone comes after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.

To follow Christ, the crossbearer, is to become a crossbearer ourselves.

I can only imagine what Mary was feeling as she saw her son hanging on the cross, gasping for air.

Mary knows the pain of God utterly forsaking her expectations.

If you've ever felt utterly bewildered or even forsaken by the things God allows in your life, I want you to hear this morning that you are in good company.

Point two.

Mary shows us that God uses the downward movement of our suffering as a way of drawing us closer to Himself.

As I reflected on this passage this week, it occurred to me, you know, Jesus died on the cross to defeat sin, death, and Satan.

He died for the sins of God's people, and so he died for Mary's sins too.

And so it raised this question in my mind.

Is Mary with Jesus in this moment in his suffering?

Or is Jesus with Mary in hers?

Of course, she's there because she is Jesus' mother.

She loves him.

Her heart is breaking for him as he hangs upon the cross.

But Jesus would have been on this cross whether she was there or not.

And then we see this happen.

When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, Woman, behold your son.

Then he said to the disciple, Behold your mother.

And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.

In the midst of this sword piercing her own soul, Jesus is there with her, loving her, providing for her.

This is one of the profound mysteries of the gospel.

Listen to what Paul says in Philippians 3.

He's talking about the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus as his Lord.

And he says that his desire is that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and may share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain to the resurrection of the dead.

How can we experience the blessing and joy of being united with him in his resurrection if we are not also and at the same time united with him in his death?

Beloved, this is not an easy concept, I can confess.

But I will say this: that I believe that the gospel teaches us that our suffering is transformed when we realize and embrace that Jesus meets us right there in our suffering.

When I was in between pastoral positions, I had stepped down from our church in Atlanta, and discerning whether I was still called to pastoral ministry or not, I began networking, just meeting with people, looking for opportunities.

Another position.

In those meetings, I would inevitably share what had happened, uh, or bits and pieces of it at my previous church.

And the most unexpected thing happened.

Inevitably, when I would share my experience, the person I was meeting with would begin to share their experiences of suffering and loss, often in the workplace, but but also more broadly.

And this sharing of grief and suffering became a lifeline to me.

I left these networking meetings, often they had no contacts, they had no offers, they had nothing to offer me, but I would leave knowing and experiencing that I was not alone.

And there was a deep and surprising comfort there.

And what I came to realize is that Jesus himself could relate to my suffering.

He had experienced loss, grief, betrayal.

And so through these people, in these networking meetings, I was experiencing the heart of God.

His love and compassion met me there.

No matter what you are going through, no matter what you have gone through or will go through, brothers and sisters, our Lord Jesus Christ can meet you there.

And I encourage you to bring those griefs to him.

Because in a surprising way, he meets us there in ways that we would not expect.

Alright, point three, final point.

Mary shows this that those who follow Jesus into death will also experience the surprising joy of resurrection.

What do you think Mary thought as they lowered Jesus dead from the cross?

She probably didn't have the capacity to think much into the future, but we know what happens.

In two days' time, Jesus would rise from the dead victorious.

The loss she thought she was seeing and experiencing was actually the greatest victory in history.

And the same promise is made to us as well, beloved.

In Romans 8, Paul links all of this together in a mind-blowing passage.

He writes this.

Heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him, in order that we may also be glorified with him.

Beloved, through our faith in Christ, we become fellow heirs with Christ.

And so, just as Jesus inherited resurrection life, just as Jesus appeared to his disciples and showed them that he was victorious over death, so we, along with creation, Paul says, look forward to the day when we will inherit the same resurrection life.

And as John, the beloved disciples, writes at the end of the book of Revelation, it is the day when all tears will be wiped away, all suffering will be put away.

And so, yes, we are called to follow Jesus, to bear our own cross, to bear grief and loss.

But that is not the end of the story.

It is merely the beginning.

The end of the story is the defeat of death, the defeat of sin, the defeat of all the powers of darkness in this world, and resurrection life, the renewal and the restoration of all things.

Mary shows this that for those who suffer with Christ, we too will experience the joy of resurrection.

Even as we meditate on what she as a mother was experiencing on Good Friday, what was she experiencing on Easter Sunday?

To see her son alive and whole again.

In my story, coming to Redeemer was a resurrection for me.

Russ and the elders, the staff, and you, the congregation, provided a place for me to both heal and to serve.

There were other positions I wanted more than to come here to Redeemer because they were familiar, they were within my denomination.

But after Stacy and I met with the elders, she said to me, Redeemer, with its focus on rest and grace, it is the place we need to be.

And she was right.

In the midst of our suffering, God met us and he provided for us in ways we could not have anticipated and showed himself gracious, kind.

He wept with us, and he lifted us out of the miry clay.

Where have you been able to see God's amazing grace play out in your life in the midst of suffering?

Where is God showing you his loving presence in the midst of your suffering that you may be holding at arm's length?

Beloved, because Jesus is raised from the dead, there is always hope of resurrection in our lives.

Yes, in the life to come, but also in our day-to-day, Jesus is constantly meeting us and bringing resurrection life into our life.

The suffering that often causes us to doubt the goodness of God is also the place where God meets us and reveals the depth of his love, grace, and forgiveness for us.

Though we would never ask for that suffering, in a very real way, we can even one day give thanks for that suffering because of how it becomes the channel of God's love becoming tangible in our own lives.

If there's anything in this sermon you have a question about, or if you have any prayer you need, I'll be down front after the service.

I'd love to meet with you.

Let's pray.

Our Father and our God, Lord, though suffering is always unpleasant and something we would avoid, yet in your upside-down kingdom, it becomes a place of amazing joy, renewal, and life.

Lord, meet us where we are suffering.

Let your grace and love be tangible to anyone here this morning who is in that place.

But we ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen.