The “alleylon” (one another) passages in the New Testament, Part 5:

Bear each others’ burdens, and so you will fulfill the law of Christ (Gal. 6:2)

A couple of weeks ago in my previous blog, we were sitting at table with Jesus, the Son of God, having our feet washed in a kind of act of all-around humiliation, Master and disciples all being lowered to serve and be served. The purpose was to allow Messiah to prepare us for his call to bless and care for each other in a spirit of loving self-forgetfulness. This week, instead of taking up the towel and basin of the household slave, we’ll consider the grace of being burden bearers, another unglamorous and lowly expression of mutual service guaranteed to increase our desire to follow Christ while it challenges our self-regard.

Maybe this refrain about pride and its companion vices has become (maybe annoyingly) rather familiar. Maybe that familiarity is simply due to the fact that we are deeply consumed by pride’s demands and committed to its principles and promises. My parents taught their children well. The primary lesson amounted to a defiant declaration of consummate competence infused with a heavy dose of independence. So I have to admit for myself that, as with the call to foot-washing, hearing that we are to bear burdens can tempt me to esteem myself more highly than I ought: I am the helper, the one on whom you lean and rely, the strong and capable. “Ask not,” and all that. In the same way that washing each others’ feet is dependent on first being washed, the antidote to any congratulatory back-patting for burden-bearing comes in the recognition that someone else carries me before I carry anyone else.

Being carried is two-fold. First, of course, is when Christ, the ultimate burden-bearer takes us up and brings us where we could otherwise never go. We find the idea of God carrying us in numerous Scripture verses: Pss, 68:19, 1 Pet. 5:7, Pss. 55:12, Is. 53:4, 1 Pet. 2:24. The ultimate weight that God bears for us is all the disorder and dysfunction of sin in our lives. My good friend Sam Williamson recently blogged about an early life experience of surrendering sin-induced shame to Jesus – allowing the Lord to take away a burden that had robbed him of peace and threatened his sense of connection to God.* His description is an excellent expression of how something that sometimes seems so abstract (the cross and death of God’s Son, an event for which we were not present and that we can at best imagine by our own native ability) becomes a transforming encounter with eternal power and grace. 

Sam’s recounting of deliverance from shame prompted me to consider some of the principles and claims of faith that I address every week. From time to time someone will ask me how and why we can actualize such concepts as grace, the cross, divine mercy, and so on. I think this is a question that deserves more than a cursory Sunday School response like, “Because the Bible tells me so.” I find that, the farther I traverse the landscape of discipleship, the more I sense the Lord slowing me to “taste and see” – to enjoy and linger over a banquet of his goodness, rather than to visit him in some kind of grab-and-go, quick fill up manner.

It occurs to me that we can never overstate the substantiality of the Lord’s presence and the influence of his Spirit in our lives. To know washing or being borne up by the Father is not merely an idea or proposition that we accept as true or reject as false or inadequate. It is an all-encompassing reality that touches and cares for every part of our being; that reveals and changes how we think, how we see ourselves and the world, how we understand our desires and actions, how we have become who we are; that takes the wreckage of our lives and creates beauty and fruitfulness. By taking a more purposeful, attentive, dependent posture toward God, we grow not in familiarity, but in reverence and in true recognition of just how much we are constantly being upheld, strengthened, protected, made whole, unchangeably loved, and provided for with everything that makes life fully happy (hello again, Beatitudes).

Well, that little aside wasn’t planned, but it seems to be pretty important by the way it forced itself into the writing process. Just in the matter of the Lord carrying us, our walk (or maybe I should say our flight) with God becomes so much richer than we might otherwise know when we are aware that we aren’t on our own (to put it in a way wholly inadequate to the reality). A

stronger discovery of the Father’s care can also prepare us for the humility of the second way that we are carried, which is by our brothers and sisters. Although I would like to think that it exaggerates my need for you (in a way that probably unmasks the truth of how much I don’t cherish the position), when I think about a fellow-Christian bearing my burden, or bearing me AS a burden, I can’t help but picture parents carrying their children on their shoulders. Am I really THAT small, needy, incomplete without the supply of your strength?

According to the Scripture and all available evidence from my life, the answer is apparently yes. I don’t have to look too far back into my personal narrative to find a friend, my wife, or a group of brothers providing a demonstrable lift through counsel, prayer, or simply the daily endurance of my “Paul-ness.” Gifts of mercy when I sin, of insight when I have deficient vision, of humor when I am over-relating to a minor inconvenience, of kindness when the Inner Grump has awakened – all these and more are ways in which the Lord uses the saints to relieve me of burdens that would be intolerable to carry on my own.

Next week I want to explore this passage and take on some of its implications a bit more. For now, I think it might be enough just to sit under, and on the gracious eagles’ wings that carry us more deeply into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

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* http://beliefsoftheheart.com/2018/05/02/i-was-ashamed-of-myself/