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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. … But as for me, afflicted and in pain—may your salvation, God, protect me. (Psalm 69:19-21, 29)

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

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.  Says the psalmist: “I looked for sympathy, but there was none.” 

I wonder how many of us have had just this sort of experience.  The language of our faith suggests to us that we should receive all the things in our lives as part of God’s work and will in our lives—both the good and the bad.  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’t know.  Sometimes they just don’t want to be nosy.  Sometimes we have a strong ambivalence: we want them to come and we don’t want them to come at the same time, and folks take the hint and stay away.  But sometimes, more painfully, people just move on and forget.  Or ignore.  Or actively decide to stay away or avoid us so as not to get caught up in our mess. 

More painfully yet, as time passes, people can begin passing words around the community like “shouldn’t that person just move on already?”  “If I were them, I would _______.”  Or, “they should just do this, and it would be fine.”  Each time one of those sentiments catches our ears, it’s another barb in our flesh—another pain to bear. 

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

But Jesus models something different.  Psalm 69 has long been a psalm associated with his suffering.  He is the one who had gall and vinegar offered to him on the cross.  The one who suffered under the will of God and yet was rejected and scorned by the people of God all the same.  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—as the writer of Hebrews puts it—even able to offer forgiveness to his crucifiers.        

We may never suffer with such grace as our Lord.  And maybe we’ll never display the sort of long-suffering grace of Christ to someone who is suffering either.  But even where we fail, or where the Christian community fails us—we 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.  His salvation. 

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