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You know how I am scorned, disgraced and shamed; all my enemies are before you. Scorn has broken my heart and has left me helpless; I looked for sympathy, but there was none, for comforters, but I found none. They put gall in my food and gave me vinegar for my thirst. \u2026 But as for me, afflicted and in pain\u2014may your salvation, God, protect me. (Psalm 69:19-21, 29)

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Psalm 69 holds a lot of suffering.\xa0 It\u2019s a long psalm that outlines detail after detail of how this person has been hurt, scorned, and rejected by their community.\xa0 Not only that, but it also speaks about how their affliction has itself come from the hand of God.\xa0

The writer tries to carry their cross, their God-given thorn in the flesh with grace, humility, and faithfulness only to find that the rest of the community of believers shuns, scorns, and mocks them.\xa0 Says the psalmist: \u201cI looked for sympathy, but there was none.\u201d\xa0

I wonder how many of us have had just this sort of experience.\xa0 The language of our faith suggests to us that we should receive all the things in our lives as part of God\u2019s work and will in our lives\u2014both the good and the bad.\xa0 And yet, a number of us have also had the experience of being abandoned by friends, family, and the church in the midst of our wrestling with God through the burdens he allows that feel too heavy to carry.

Sometimes people just don\u2019t know.\xa0 Sometimes they just don\u2019t want to be nosy.\xa0 Sometimes we have a strong ambivalence: we want them to come and we don\u2019t want them to come at the same time, and folks take the hint and stay away.\xa0 But sometimes, more painfully, people just move on and forget.\xa0 Or ignore.\xa0 Or actively decide to stay away or avoid us so as not to get caught up in our mess.\xa0

More painfully yet, as time passes, people can begin passing words around the community like \u201cshouldn\u2019t that person just move on already?\u201d\xa0 \u201cIf I were them, I would _______.\u201d \xa0Or, \u201cthey should just do this, and it would be fine.\u201d\xa0 Each time one of those sentiments catches our ears, it\u2019s another barb in our flesh\u2014another pain to bear.\xa0

We do not always have a very deep sense of what it means to suffer well.\xa0 To suffer Christianly.\xa0 To suffer with dignity.\xa0 And certainly very little idea of what it means to journey with others who are seeking to bear their suffering in just that way.\xa0 And, if psalm 69 is any clue\u2014perhaps we human folk never have.

But Jesus models something different.\xa0 Psalm 69 has long been a psalm associated with his suffering.\xa0 He is the one who had gall and vinegar offered to him on the cross.\xa0 The one who suffered under the will of God and yet was rejected and scorned by the people of God all the same.\xa0 Jesus was the one who bore his suffering with the sort of grace, humility, faithfulness, and dignity that had been made perfect by that suffering\u2014as the writer of Hebrews puts it\u2014even able to offer forgiveness to his crucifiers.\xa0 \xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0\xa0

We may never suffer with such grace as our Lord.\xa0 And maybe we\u2019ll never display the sort of long-suffering grace of Christ to someone who is suffering either.\xa0 But even where we fail, or where the Christian community fails us\u2014we are invited to place our hope and trust ultimately in the same place that Jesus and this psalm do: not in ourselves or in others, but in God and his vindication.\xa0 His salvation.\xa0

Because the promise we receive through Jesus\u2019 suffering, is that one day, for those who place their trust in him, suffering will be no more.

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