God With Us

From His first cries as an infant, Jesus fully identified with our human experience.

by Patty Kirk

In the last week of one fall semester at graduate school, I was mugged at gunpoint. After sexually assaulting me, my two assailants took my bookbag and ran off into the dark. It was a defining moment in my spiritual history—my first direct confrontation with evil—and it all but clinched the atheism I had unwillingly succumbed to in my teenage years, when the God who had listened to my childhood prayers mysteriously disappeared. No wonder I can’t see or hear or touch God, I subconsciously concluded. He clearly doesn’t exist.

My assaulters had my keys and IDs, so I couldn’t go home for weeks and had to live at a friend’s house until I could get my locks replaced and windows barred. I was further immobilized by a crippling terror of going outside. But I had classes to attend—both the three I was taking and the two I was teaching—and grades to turn in. So, although I longed for death in the days that followed, I forced myself back into the business of living.

That first week was miserable. Everyone I told my story to said I “should be glad” I hadn’t been killed and was “lucky” to be alive. My students were angry when I explained—while crying in front of them—that since all record of their semester’s work had been lost, they would either need to show me graded papers so that I could average their grades or else retype their final papers from their drafts, if they still had them. They lined up outside my office, each one with a dire account of lost papers, tossed drafts, and enraged parents.

I, meanwhile, worried about my own three papers: the 50-page final productions that would largely determine my grades. All my notes and drafts had been in my stolen bookbag along with the finished papers, which were my only copies in the days before personal computers. Without those three papers, I’d have little to show for an entire semester’s work.

When I went to the first professor to explain what had happened, he didn’t believe me. The paper was due on its due date, he said, the last day of the semester. The second professor gave me an extension until spring semester, effectively eliminating my travel plans for the Christmas holiday.

The third professor—a pale, white-haired emeritus who should long since have retired but stayed on by popular demand—taught Renaissance drama. The class was huge and one of the most challenging I’d ever taken; we students all but despaired of writing anything sufficiently original and smart enough to pique his interest, much less impress him. I approached his office with special dread.

But this old professor, whom I knew only as a scholarly personage lecturing at the faraway front of the classroom, completely surprised me. When I told my humiliating story yet again, he cried—sobbed, actually— until I broke down, too. We shared his box of Kleenex between us, not talking much. He wouldn’t hear of me rewriting the paper.

“You have an A,” he told me. His eyes were ringed with red. “Just forget about it.”

That, too, was a defining moment for me, spiritually speaking. I considered myself an atheist, but it nevertheless struck me—an idea surfacing from my Catholic childhood, as I explained it to myself—that this man was Jesus. Christ Himself was there with me and that dwindling supply of tissues, not telling me that I was lucky or should be glad, but just crying for me, crying with me.

In the decade that followed, I moved from country to country, unwittingly trying out sensory solaces to supply the divine one I craved. Friends. Adventure. My growing confidence that even without money or even the ability to speak the language of those around me, I could survive anywhere in the world. These earthly pleasures were good, but somehow they didn’t satisfy me. Slowly, during those years of wandering, my frustration with God’s obvious absence in this evil world—or at least His imperceptibility—deepened into reluctant longing.

At Christmastime in those years, though still faithless, I found myself humming carols, especially the bleaker ones that I’d hated as a child because they sounded so un-Christmasy. O come, O come Emmanuel! I sang along in my head, unaware that the Emmanuel of the song—“God with us”—was precisely what I lacked. Amy Grant’s song “Breath of Heaven” was popular at the time. Listening closely in spite of myself, I considered the longing of Mary: for God to be near her, for an end to her uncertainty, for the child she carried to be born. Every time I heard that song, I felt despair and hope struggling within me and—unwillingly, wistfully—I cried.

And then, when I was a few years into marriage and had a toddler and a newborn of my own, my longing evolved into the ever more certain hope in God, as defined in Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (NRSV). Coming to rest in that certainty was such a relief.

The Christmas season remained a grim time for me, though, as an emotional legacy of the assault; the Christmas of 2001 was especially hard, coming as it did on the ashy heels of September 11th. To my family’s dismay, I did little else all December but listen to sad songs and cry. Yet sometime during that wretched month, it occurred to me that Jesus had cried too. Not only in front of Lazarus’ tomb as John famously recorded in his gospel, but from the very moment of birth. Indeed, the first utterance to emerge from the mouth of Jesus—whom John referred to as the living Word—was a newborn’s cry of woe.

For the first time, I considered that, in suffering the consequences of evil, we share the experience of Jesus—from the very moment of His birth. Having “emptied Himself” to become human, as Philippians 2:5-11 attests, God’s Son entered the human experience of suffering completely. Born to parents unable to find or perhaps afford a decent room, He was cast into a world so unwelcoming as to offer a woman about to give birth no more comfortable shelter than a dirty stable. His first whimpers and wails at the pain of entry into this world were heard only by His weary parents and the animals standing around. His first bed was a crude feed trough. From infancy, Jesus was already the victim of a death threat so malicious that other Jewish babies would be killed in the process of looking for Him. One of Jesus’ earliest childhood memories may well have been fleeing to Egypt with his family, refugees from violence.

Jesus knew firsthand what it meant to be a “poor, wayfaring stranger,” as the old spiritual¹ laments. He chose to be one, even (it occurred to me the next Christmas season, when I found myself listening over and over to Natalie Merchant’s raw-voiced recording of that song). Jesus suffered from all the pains of human existence—not only the normal discomforts of emerging cold and helpless from the birth canal to take in His first lungfuls of harsh air, but also the indignities of a harsh, cold, and broken world. God’s first human cries, I concluded, would have had that knowledge in them too: the wayfarer’s grim understanding of this world’s cruelties.

I find odd comfort in knowing that we worship a God who cries—as babies do from the moment of birth. God cries for our loss and suffering, as that old professor cried for mine. He cries in frustration and love and hope for us, surely, as Jesus later wept for the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And Jesus, although He was Himself God incarnate, cried in agony and forsakenness on the cross.

As believers, we often focus on the end of Jesus’ life on earth, perhaps because His death and resurrection so succinctly reveal God’s response to our dilemma. Although created in our Creator’s image, we humans soon became so brutal and mean that, as He tells Noah, “the earth is filled with violence because of them” (Genesis 6:13). Nevertheless, God loves us so much that He sacrificed His Son for us. This sacrifice, we say, is the gospel—the good news! And certainly it is good news.

Overlooking the very beginning of Jesus’ life shortchanges the full meaning of the gospel. The good news that the angels proclaimed to shepherds at Jesus’ birth was that God Himself was joining us, becoming one of us, and sharing all the suffering that goes along with that undertaking. From the very beginning of Jesus’ earthly existence—His entry into this world as a crying baby—God was already addressing the problem of human violence and suffering. God Himself suffered not only torture, crucifixion, and the weight of all the world’s sins, but the ordinary pains and humiliations of our earthly existence as well. The newborn crying in that mucky feed trough encapsulates the good news in its entirety: God Himself is with us, bringing us hope in our suffering.

He no doubt cries for joy too. The Father likely cried at the birth of His Son, as any parent would. And He may well cry at the reunion we will one day experience when we finally return home, where we belong. Perhaps He will sing with us then—simultaneously remembering His past pain and celebrating His present joy—that sad-happy spiritual I listened to during my season of sorrow: “I’m only going over Jordan! I’m only going over home.”

¹ “I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” traditional

Patty Kirk is the author of Confessions of an Amateur Believer, a compelling collection of inspirational, gritty, challenging writing that follows an unwilling atheist's first encounters with God, her ensuing struggles and progress as a reluctant believer, and her ultimate discovery of contentment and rest in faith.