Jesus Understands Your Loneliness

White Sheep of the Family

His parents knew who he was and loved him deeply. But they wouldn’t have fully understood him. How could they? Nor would they have been able to protect him from others’ stinging remarks or cruel mocking over his strangeness.

I wonder how much of that came from his siblings. His brothers and sisters (Matthew 13:55–56) would have grown increasingly self-conscious around him as they aged, aware of their own sinful, self-obsessed motives and behavior, while noting that Jesus didn’t seem to exhibit any himself. And they couldn’t have helped notice the unique way their parents deferred to him. What kind of sibling resentments grew? We know that all was not harmonious because Jesus’s own brothers didn’t believe in him (John 7:5), possibly not until after his resurrection (Acts 1:14).

“No one has experienced or understands loneliness like Jesus.”

Jesus was a sinless person living with sinful parents, sinful siblings, sinful extended relatives, sinful neighbors, sinful countrymen, sinful foreigners, and sinful disciples, not to mention the sinful spiritual entities he would have had an unprecedented awareness of and sensitivity to.