Our second reading today, the Letter to the Hebrews, includes this statement: “Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered.”

In other words, the Son of God needed to learn obedience… from suffering.

We have all become accustomed to the notion of an origin story. It’s about our roots, our background and history, and the things that happened to us in our past that shape who we are in the present. Psychologists and biographers are well acquainted with this idea, that is that we become who we are… based on what we have experienced.

We all have an origin story.

So too did Jesus.

Today, on Good Friday, we remember that his origin story was not at all what people had been expecting from their Savior, from their Messiah. Is there any greater visual reminder of the difference between what they had expected and what they got than a crucifix?

He was, after all, born in obscurity, as a fleeing migrant. He lived in a community that was oppressed and experienced poverty and powerlessness. He learned a trade and worked with his hands. He wandered from town to town. He gathered up not the mighty and powerful, but rather, the ordinary and flawed to help him with his mission. 

Why? Why did he experience all these things? Why did he have to? And what exactly did his Father need him to understand?

I once had a job at a Community Health Center with a mission of helping the most challenged, most vulnerable people in its community – a community that has experienced great poverty and despair. I was struck by so many of the people who worked there and I remember them quite well. One woman, named Tracy, is someone I have talked about before. She was from that community. In her life, she had personally experienced abuse, addiction, serious illness, and homelessness. She understood the lives of the people she was trying to help, and she could do so in ways I could not. When Tracy spoke, she spoke knowingly, from personal experience, with understanding, and with a compassion that comes not by imagining what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes, but from actually wearing those same shoes herself.

Jesus spoke of the poor in spirit, the meek, those imprisoned, and the hungry. About those who hurt us.

You see, Jesus wore those same shoes himself.

And then on the day of his passion and death, he found himself betrayed, denied, completely alone, and thoroughly abandoned.

 Why did that have to be part of his origin story?

Remember that when he did return to them, triumphantly so and in a manner no one saw coming, he told them that he would be with them always and until the end of the age. That he would accompany them. That he would never leave them alone and abandoned. Ever. No matter what.

Because he knew exactly what that felt like. He knew those shoes.

So, for us… as we encounter Christ upon the cross – and perhaps as we contend with our own – we can take great comfort in his promise to us that we are never to be alone or abandoned. No matter who we are or what we do. And no matter what our own origin stories might actually contain.

Because he understood … he surely understood.