A Father's Grief

Bread and Wine Reading: "A Father’s Grief", Martin Luther

Scripture Reading: 1 John 4: 7-10
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Does God grieve? Does God feel pain? Martin Luther claimed that “into God as God, no pain, grief, or dislike can come.” But, he continues, “[grief] occurs when God is in man or in a divine man.” This is an interesting thought. It implies that as God becomes human, fully human as we say, God sort of surrenders a piece of the Divine, if only for awhile. God enters not just our humanness but also our sin. And there, God grieves, God despairs, God feels pain. As Luther said, “for God feels more pain over our sin and it gives [God] more grief than his own torture and death.”


Fully human…that is a hard thing for us to get our minds around. “Became one of us”…on some level, that is even more difficult. But God in Jesus Christ became one of us, walked as we walk, and entered our sin in order to show us what it means to be “fully human”. Jesus, the fullest of all humans, shows us how to be human, how to be made in the image of God, how to be who we are called to be in this life and on this earth.

God despairs when we are less than that which God created us to be, when we are less than fully human, when we act and think and believe in inhumane ways. Luther said that “sorrow over sin does not finally belong to us humans; we ourselves are not capable of it. Wherever God can bring it about in us, it the most pleasing and most appropriate but at the same time the most bitter and heavy undertaking on which we can enter.” Essentially, God became one of us to show us ourselves, to bring us to an understanding of those places where we fail to be who we were created to be. It is the true Light that illumines this for us, the light of God reflected through Jesus Christ.

Our sin can no longer be dismissed as “only human.” Sin, rather, implies that one is less than human, that one is “inhumane”, if you will. God’s entering of our humanness in Christ shows us that sin does not belong to us because we are made in the image of God. And it is only when we are not human, when we are not who God made us to be that God grieves.

Discussion Questions:
1.) What difficulty do you have with God entering our humanness or becoming “fully human”? What does that mean for you?
2.) What do you think of the idea of God grieving or being in pain?
3.) What is the meaning for you of your being made in the image of God?

So go forth and become fully human, who you are called to be by God!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli