Jesus was lonely too

You may have prayed about your loneliness and felt it go nowhere. Heaven seemed as quiet as the flat. It is easy, in that quiet, to imagine that God is somewhere warm and crowded and does not really know what an empty evening feels like.

Here is the comfort this article is built on. The Son of God knows loneliness from the inside. Not in theory, not by watching, but by living it in a body like yours. He was misunderstood by His own family, deserted by His closest friends on the night He needed them most, and on the cross He cried out that He had been forsaken. He did all of that on purpose. He walked into the deepest loneliness a human being can know so that you would never have to face yours alone, and so that the Father would never turn His face from you. When you pray tonight, you are praying to a High Priest who has been where you are.

A man of sorrows

Seven hundred years before Jesus was born, Isaiah described the Servant who would come, and the description is not of a popular man.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Like one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.

Isaiah 53:3

Despised. Rejected. Acquainted with grief. A man people hid their faces from. That is not a picture of someone at the center of a warm circle. It is a picture of someone on the outside of one. Jesus grew up in a small town where everyone talked, and when He began His work, His own townspeople tried to throw Him off a cliff. His brothers did not believe in Him for a long time. At one point His family came to take Him home because they thought He had lost His mind.

So when you sit in a family dinner and feel that nobody there really understands you, or when you sense people avoiding you because your sadness makes them uncomfortable, you are in company you did not expect. The Son of God was looked at like that. He knows exactly what it does to a heart.

The night His friends fell asleep

The loneliest night in history was in a garden. Jesus took His three closest friends with Him to pray, the ones who had seen Him raise a dead girl and stood with Him on the mountain, and He asked them for one thing.

Then He said to them, “My soul is consumed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with Me.” Going a little farther, He fell facedown and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not as I will, but as You will.” Then Jesus returned to the disciples and found them sleeping. “Were you not able to keep watch with Me for one hour?” He asked Peter.

Matthew 26:38–40

He asked them to stay and keep watch with Him. It is the request of a man who does not want to be alone. His soul was crushed with sorrow almost to the point of dying, He told them, and He went a little way off to pray, and when He came back, they were asleep. Not once but three times. Then, within the hour, one of the twelve betrayed Him with a kiss, and the rest ran. The Gospels say plainly that all of them deserted Him.

If you have ever asked someone to sit with you through a hard night and had them drift off, or check their phone, or not turn up, Jesus knows that exact hurt. He asked. They slept. And He did not stop loving them.

Earlier that evening He had told them it would happen, and He said something about it that is the hinge of this whole article.

“Look, an hour is coming and has already come when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and you will leave Me all alone. Yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.

John 16:32

They would scatter and leave Him all alone, He told them, and yet He would not be alone, because the Father was with Him. Hold onto that sentence. It was true in the garden while His friends slept. Then, on the next day, it seemed to stop being true.

The cry from the cross

At the ninth hour, after three hours of darkness, Jesus cried out in His own language, and Mark kept the words exactly as He said them.

At the ninth hour, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

Mark 15:34

He was quoting the first line of Psalm 22, a psalm that ends in trust, and Christians have always seen that. But do not rush to the end of the psalm. Sit for a minute at the beginning of it. The eternal Son, who had never for one moment been without the Father’s presence, hung in the dark and asked why He had been forsaken. The abandonment of the disciples was one thing. This was another. This was the Father’s face turned away as the Son carried the sin of the world.

Why did He go through that? So that it would never happen to you. That is not a figure of speech. Because Jesus was forsaken in your place, God has promised His children that He will never leave them or forsake them (Hebrews 13:5). Jesus took the forsaking so that you could have the promise. The loneliest cry in history was the price of your never being alone.

A High Priest who knows

The book of Hebrews puts all of this in one sentence and then tells you what to do with it.

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who was tempted in every way that we are, yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Hebrews 4:15–16

A high priest, in Israel, was the man who went into God’s presence on behalf of the people. Hebrews says that ours is not a distant official but someone who has felt our weakness from the inside. He was tempted in every way that we are. He knows the temptation to believe that nobody cares. He knows the temptation to give up on friends who let you down. He knows the temptation to think the Father has forgotten. He felt all of it without sinning, which means He knows it more deeply than we do, not less, because He never numbed it or ran from it.

So approach with confidence, Hebrews says. Not because you have your loneliness sorted out, but because the One you are approaching has been lonely too, and He is not embarrassed by yours.

Tonight

Read Psalm 22 from beginning to end, out loud if you can. Notice where it starts and where it finishes, and let yourself be somewhere in the middle. Then pray something like this.

Then this week, do one thing His friends failed to do. Stay awake with someone. Sit with a person who is having a hard night, in person or on the phone, and do not drift off. Loneliness eases, strangely, when we keep watch for someone else. There is more on the Father’s nearness in When no one calls.

Keep praying, keep reading, and find a church where Jesus is spoken of as the crucified and risen Lord. He is not alone now. He is at the Father’s right hand, and He is praying for you. You have never once been as alone as you felt.