The Trouble with Being Troubled

Getting off the sidelines can get us into trouble, but isn't that precisely what God did in Jesus?

Being troubled troubles me. Being agitated agitates me. Being distressed distresses me. I like things to be calm. I can count on one hand the times I was “in trouble.” Most of those happened before I was even in high school. Being called to the principal’s office, getting an earful from a parent, or being stopped by a police officer are the stuff of my nightmares, along with spiders and snakes. Except this feeling from being troubled does not just stop with me. Call it a defect in those who are empathetic, but when I observe others vexed it vexes me too. “No man is an island,” as John Donne so poetically put it means that I do not ask on whom anxiety preys, for I know it preys on me too. So, when I observe Our Lord Jesus “troubled in spirit” I too am troubled. This cannot be happening, I say to myself.

John, the Gospel writer, began his account with a profoundly beautiful and awe-inspiring hymn that picks up the theme set out in the very first words of Hebrew Scripture: “In the beginning” except where we expect to find “God created,”(Genesis 1:1) instead we find, “was the Word” (John 1:1). In the beginning was the Word. We may recall that John told us that through the Word all things were made. Without the Word not one thing came into being. This Word it turns out, came to dwell among us, as a man named Jesus, the Son of God. All of this is most certainly familiar to us who have had those opening lines of John’s Gospel wash over us time and time again. Yet, what is so striking in holding that hymn up against today’s passage is that the same Word that created all things, this very same Word made flesh was troubled.

The Word through whom all things were made being troubled feels impossible to believe. Isn’t God supposed to be all powerful? If a god walks into this earth is he not able to call lighting down from heaven to strike his enemies? Are we not still taught to believe that God will crush all who oppose Him? This is still the prevailing belief about God. And yet, Jesus shows us something different. The Word made flesh that dwelt among us did not just don human skin as though God were in costume. No, Jesus became fully human, warts and all, emotions and all, being troubled and all.

Perhaps the reason I have such an aversion to trouble has to do with not liking being held in suspense, at least not when it is something very personal to me. Yes, I love watching a close football game as long as it is not my team. Sure, I love watching a political drama unfold as long as it is a TV Show and not in real life. But this week we are called off of the sidelines, off of our couches, and out of our homes into the drama and into the trouble.

“Jesus was troubled in spirit,” continues to strike to my core. That the God through whom all things were made would be troubled by his upcoming suffering, his forthcoming Passion, and his impending death indicates that we have a God that came not just to pretend like he was a human, he came to be fully human and still fully God. Our God chose to get into the mess of life, even to get into the trouble of life.

When we feel as though our lives are full of chaos, when we look around and see terrorist attacks, racial violence, political rioting, sexual abuse, economic inequality, and oppression of all kinds we might feel as though our God is like a watchmaker who set this whole thing spinning and chooses to remain back at the clock shop, but that is just not true. Christ Jesus clearly showed that God’s work gets God into trouble, not just long ago, but right here and right now. As we walk with Jesus into the troubling days of the Triduum, we know that God walks with us in all the troubles of our lives.