How many close friends do you have in your life today? Take a minute and count them. Do you have more or less than you did ten years ago?

One recent study confirms what you might already suspect: many more of us have fewer good friends than we once did. In 1990, just 3% of respondents reported having no close friends. Thirty years later, that number has quadrupled to 12%. In 1990, one third said they had ten or more close friends. That number has now shrunk to just over ten percent. Nearly 90% cannot name a friend for each of their fingers. It’s not the only study to come to the same unsettling conclusion: Despite the tidal wave of new ways to connect and communicate with one another, we’re getting lonelier.

And that loneliness stifles human life. “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!” (Ecclesiastes 4:9–10). If we try to live and work alone, we’ll stumble and fall alone. And when we fall alone, we won’t have the encouragement, correction, and support we need to get back up and press through our failures, sorrows, and trials.

No matter how many years it’s been, no matter how busy you feel, no matter how few your options are, no matter how much it costs you, you still need good friends — yes, even you.

So why do so many of us have so few of them?

Three Great Walls to Climb

It’s never been easier to make new friends and connect with old ones, so what’s hindering and disrupting these relationships? Drew Hunter, author of Made for Friendship, wisely puts his finger on three major obstacles we face today:

Three aspects of modern culture create unique barriers to deep relationships: busyness, technology, and mobility. . . . These unique barriers can weave together in a very isolating way for us. They encircle us like a rope barrier and keep true friendship out of reach. We may overpower one or two of these strands, but as the saying goes, a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. (30)

What keeps us from meaningful friendships? Busyness, because we fill our schedules so full that friendship feels like a luxury we just can’t afford. Technology, because while it allows for a lot more moments of “connection,” the crumbs it offers leads us to pretend we’re more meaningfully connected than we really are (and leave us starving for more). Mobility, because it’s harder to build real, lasting friendships in places where people are frequently moving away and moving on.

Those three emerging barriers to friendship certainly resonate with my experience over the last thirty years, and accurately explain some of the challenges we face in pursuing friendship in the twenty-first century. So how might followers of Christ overcome the hurdles and find some good friends?

1. Cadence: Live at the pace of friendship.

When did we become too busy for friends? At a cultural level, it’s difficult to trace the many factors (work from home, instant messaging and social media, on-demand delivery and entertainment, explosion of youth activities, and more). At a personal level, the disruption often happens somewhere between college graduation and our first child’s newborn diapers. The adult demands of work and family swiftly swell and crowd out the margin we used to have. The time with friends that used to cost us next to nothing now seems far too expensive.

Rather than assuming friendship is simply a casualty of higher callings, what if we assumed that friendship was still vital to those higher callings? Because it is. “Exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13). Of course, if you’re married, your spouse is one valuable voice, but he or she can’t be the only voice. Whether married or single, we need others from outside the home to sing (or shout) reality into our hearts and homes. In other words, we need friends.

“To experience friendship with fellow humans, we need to live at a pace that is human.”

And to experience friendship with fellow humans, we need to live at a pace that is human (which, ironically, may increasingly put us out of step with society). Instead of constantly scrolling by one another, what if we slowed down enough to see and hear and focus on the person in front of us? What if we practiced hospitality, not just with our kitchens and living rooms, but with our time and attention?

How different our lives might be if they were marked by something like the togetherness of the early church:

All who believed were together and had all things in common. . . . And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. (Acts 2:44–47)

Their lives were beautifully full, but not with the tasks, emails, and apps that dominate our days. No, their lives were full with people — with one another. Life was slower in many ways, and yet far more productive for being slow: “And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47).

2. Presence: Find time and space to share.

Technology is not necessarily an enemy of friendship. It can be an unprecedented blessing when employed wisely. Imagine just how much previous generations would have given to be able to talk in real-time, even once, with a far-away loved one (much less actually see them on a screen). The problems emerge when we lean too much on technology — when it becomes a substitute for, rather than supplement to, physical presence. Every human needs food, water, shelter, and regular time with other humans.

The apostle Paul used the technology available in his day to communicate with his brothers and sisters in the faith, but he knew that writing was no replacement for eye contact: “I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you — that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine” (Romans 1:11–12). He knew there were graces that ink and paper couldn’t carry. There was a whole class of encouragement reserved for living rooms and dining tables. He knew that something critical and intangible happens when two or more are gathered in the name of Jesus in the same space.

This doesn’t mean friends boycott technology. It does mean we acknowledge the weaknesses and limitations of technology (even the best technology), and love one another accordingly. A good place to start might be to quickly audit your current friendships and ask roughly what percentage of your interactions are physical or digital. The results will vary for people with different personalities in different circumstances and stages of life, but for every stage, circumstance, and temperament there should be some consistent, meaningful presence. It is worth fighting for more regular time to be face to face with at least a few good friends.

3. Permanence: Rediscover the value of staying.

Lastly, perhaps the largest hurdle of the three: mobility. It’s never been easier to pick up and move, which means it’s often much, much harder to find and keep long-term friendships. Just think for a minute about how many of your friendships in just the last two years have been disrupted by some major life change and the accompanying move. We’re the goodbye generation.

The depth of friendships our souls need won’t happen overnight. These gardens of trust require years, maybe decades, of patient attention and tending. So how do we make and keep friends in a day of so many goodbyes? The first thing to say may be hard for many of us to hear: rediscover the value of staying put.

How many people do you know in your circles who would forgo a better-paying, more-satisfying job in a more appealing city for the sake of Christian friendships and community? Building the kind of friendships that really matter and bear fruit requires the kind of sacrifices fewer today are willing to make. In the early church, and for most of history, this kind of permanence was simply a given. Picking up and moving was too costly. Today, permanence is becoming a discipline and a virtue. We might wonder, How many who are uprooting and leaving now will eventually come to realize what they lost and wish they had chosen church and friendships over convenience and job opportunities?

Some friendships, however, will survive moves and time zones, through some serious creativity and persistence, but very few will thrive. A few of my best friends today were once down-the-road friends (or even share-a-bathroom-and-a-kitchen friends), but are now several-states-over friends. We’re not as close as we once were, but we do what we can to stay in touch. The apostle Paul, for one, was a faithful long-distance friend, though it seems he was always planning a visit. He writes to those he knows well, loves more, and yet can’t walk over and see anymore:

“For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:8).
“[Timothy] has brought us the good news of your faith and love and reported that you always remember us kindly and long to see us, as we long to see you” (1 Thessalonians 3:6).
“As I remember your tears, I long to see you, that I may be filled with joy.” (2 Timothy 1:4).

“However faithful our faraway friends are, we all need down-the-road friends.”

Long-distance friendships are possible, and can be precious, but they are a little like walking uphill, requiring extra effort with every step (like writing twenty-eight chapters to the church in Corinth). They can’t be our only close friendships. However faithful our faraway friends are, we need down-the-road friends. And hopefully a few of them are down the road for the long haul.

4. Substance: Brave the depths of conversation.

Busyness, technology, mobility — those are three real and developing hurdles to friendship. We should all be aware of them and make some plan for clearing them. As I wrestled with each of them, though, I couldn’t help seeing a fourth major barrier, one that is by no means modern: triviality.

How many of our potential friendships — real, meaningful, durable friendships — have died on the rocks of sports, shows, or headline news? How many conversations began and ended on the paper thin surface of life? How often was God left out completely? The greatest challenge to friendship today may not be our schedules, phones, or moving trucks, but just how easy it is to peacefully float along above the rich depths of real friendship.

Social media can certainly aggravate the issue, but this temptation isn’t new. Satan has always been seducing us into the shallows of superficiality and distracting us from the depths of friendship. So how do we wade deeper? Through courageous, Christ-exalting intentionality: “Let us consider” — really consider — “how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:24–25).

If we commit to this kind of reflection, this kind of commitment, this kind of encouragement and correction, this kind of love, real friendship will emerge and endure. But we will need to be brave enough to go there, to spend more of our conversations in the deep end.

So, if you find yourself among the overwhelming majority of people without enough good friends, slow down enough to find some, make some regular time to be in the same room, fight harder to stick together longer, and then consistently press through the trivial to the more meaningful and spiritual. Pursue and keep the kinds of friends who stir your heart and life to better know and enjoy Jesus Christ.

Audio Transcript

When you pray, Jesus said, get by yourself, go into your room, shut the door, “and pray to your Father who is in secret” (Matthew 6:6). Sounds pretty straightforward. So we just pray alone, right? Wrong. We don’t pray only in secret; we pray together — something we see all over the book of Acts, for example (in texts like Acts 2:42; 4:31; 12:12; 13:3; and 20:36, to name a few). So, why do we pray together and not just alone? What’s added when we pray together? And what’s lost when we pray only by ourselves?

In 1981, Pastor John took up this question in a sermon on 2 Corinthians 1:8–11. There, Paul writes this testimony of his agonies:

We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.

And then Paul makes this request in verse 11, which is a little complex, so listen carefully: “You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.” Here’s Pastor John.

That’s a hard verse. I noticed Glen this morning had trouble reading verse 11, just like I did. He had to stop and make sure he had it just right because it’s a very complex sentence. I had to read verse 11 again and again, and I could not get the gist of verse 11 until I drew it on paper.

Line of Prayer

Now, follow with me the line of prayer. Keep one eye on the text, one eye on the line, and both ears on me.

The line of prayer begins with Paul, and he feels a need. That’s where prayer begins. His need was probably, “Oh, how I need to rely on God more. Oh, how I need to trust God for deliverance from all my adversaries more.” So what does he do? He sends out a line of prayer, “Help me,” horizontally to the Corinthians. “Help me by prayer.” And that’s stage one in the line of prayer.

Then the line of prayer curves up through the heart of the Corinthians as they hear the plea, and they look up to God and pray that God will, in fact, answer their prayers for Paul’s deliverance and for his faith. That’s stage two: the prayers of the Corinthians heading up to God.

Then the line of prayer enters the heart of God, who is there listening, waiting for the prayers of his people. And in response to the prayers of the many Corinthians, God sends down a gift — or a “blessing,” as the text says — to Paul. What blessing? Greater faith in God, greater dependence on him alone, and deliverance from his adversaries. That’s stage three in the line of prayer.

Now, just as many people heard the plea of Paul to help through prayer, so many people now see the answer to the prayers as they look. “Look: Paul got out. He got out of the Philippian jail. He got away from Ephesus. He made it all the way through Berea and Thessalonica. He’s coming down here to us. He’s going to make it all the way to Jerusalem with that money. He may make it to Rome, to the ends of the earth, and preach to the emperor. Praise God!” And that’s line four.

They see the answer to prayer, and that curves up through their heart in praises and thanksgiving, through many people, back to God. And that’s stage five in the line of prayer. And that’s where the text stops.

Spiraling Delight

But I think there is something implied in the text that’s not explicit, that is just a choice truth that I don’t want to leave out. Namely, if Paul chose to motivate the Corinthians to pray for him by pointing out that it would abound in many thanksgivings to God, then it must be a great delight to Paul to think about God getting so many thanks. And if it’s a great delight to Paul to see God being thanked, then that little dotted line that comes down from God is joy coming back into the heart of Paul as he sees God being thanked in response to the answer to many prayers. So that’s stage six that I’ve added.

In fact, I could go on adding stage seven, because God gets delight in Paul’s delight, and Paul gets delight in God’s delight in his delight. It’s just a great spiral on up into infinite joy someday, when there’s no more sin to clutter up that spiral. That’s the line of prayer.

Let me sum it up just briefly. Paul has a great need, and he feels it. He knows he’s coming into adversity. He said in Acts 20:23, “The Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonments and afflictions await me.” He needs help. “Help me, Corinthians.”

They hear the word, responding, “God, help Paul.” God looks down, “I hear the prayer. Here’s the help, Paul.” Paul is helped. He’s delivered. He’s free. He’s preaching. He’s full of faith. Who sees it? Lots of people see it. What do they do? Praise God. God has responded to our prayers, and the thanks go back to God, and he’s glorified. That’s the line of prayer. That’s what ought to be happening in this church again and again and again.

Many Prayers, Many Thanks

There are more lessons in this than I can begin to say this morning, but I want to mention two — two lessons from the line of prayer. The first is this. If you’re like me, you’ve probably asked yourself why it is that corporate prayer is important. Why pray in groups? Why pray publicly? Why not just close the door, like Jesus said — we should many times — and pray alone?

Why does Paul not simply pray, “God, save me from the enemies; God, fill me with faith” — and not write letters and tell other people to pray for him? Doesn’t he think God can answer his prayer? Is he lacking in faith? Are we weak in faith when we ask many people to pray for something?

That’s the kind of question I came to this text with, and I think the text gives a tremendous answer to why corporate and public prayer is so important. Why might God be more inclined to answer the prayers of many rather than the prayers of one? That’s my question.

And I think the answer begins like this: according to our text, the thing that’s different when many people pray — notice “the prayers of many” — is that the stage is being set for lots and lots and lots of thanks. The more people that are earnestly praying for some blessing from God, the more thanksgiving will ascend to God when that blessing comes.

Paul’s argument is very simply this: “You must help me by prayer so that many will give thanks when the prayers of many are answered.” The reason for praying at all is so God might be thanked when blessings come, and God loves to be thanked. God loves to be thanked. That’s the basic premise here for why this prayer becomes so effective. He loves to be acknowledged and praised as the giver of all good gifts.

Therefore, when we urge, when I urge you to pray for some need — four hundred people, say — I’m creating a situation in which the provision of that need will result in many, many, many thanksgivings, more than if each of us was praying privately.

“God loves to be thanked by many, and therefore, there is a power in church-wide prayer.”

And therefore, we tap into a tremendous incentive on God’s part, because God loves to glorify himself by doing what he must do to get as many thanks as possible, and that means answering the prayers of many people. God loves to be thanked by many, and therefore, there is a power in church-wide prayer because the more people there are praying for the spiritual life of our church, the more thanksgiving will ascend when God gives it.

Seeking Blessing Together

Now, the same reasoning that comes straight out of 2 Corinthians 1:11 also shows that we should not only pray in large numbers, but that we should get together in groups to pray. I’ll try to show you how that follows.

Picture two possibilities. One would be a dozen people, privately in their homes, praying for the release of Paul, say, from jail in Philippi. They pray. God answers and delivers Paul. They get word of it. They give thanks. God is honored. Great!

But suppose that those dozen or so people met together in a group, in a room, in a living room there in Philippi, just like the saints did in Acts 12 to pray for Peter’s release when he was in jail. Suppose they got together and prayed, and the fervor of each other’s prayer kindled each other’s fervor up to God. God released Paul miraculously through this earthquake, and they hear about it.

“When you and I experience a blessing that we’ve asked for together, your thanksgiving deepens and heightens mine.”

Then what would happen? The praises and the thanks would ascend, and is it not human nature — see if this isn’t true to your own experience — to feel gratitude more intensely when somebody you love is sharing the experience with you? Is that not human nature to feel the joy of gratitude more intensely when someone you love is feeling it together with you?

When you and I experience a blessing that we’ve asked for together, your thanksgiving deepens and heightens my thanksgiving, because it works like this: When the answer comes, I see the blessing coming from God. I see it, and I’m glad. I rejoice. But then I look down, and I see it reflected and magnified in all your faces, and my joy, therefore, is compounded, and my thanksgiving is greater. And God loves heightened and deepened thanksgiving, and therefore, he wants us to meet in groups to pray.

Therefore, we are setting ourselves up for tremendous spiritual blessing in this church when we gather in groups to seek God’s blessing on our church.

Even death on a cross.

The apostle dares to add this obscenity as the low point of his Lord’s self-humbling. Jesus “humbled himself,” Paul says, “by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8).

Today, with crosses on our steeples, and around our necks, we scarcely perceive the original scandal of such a claim. But to any new hearer in the first century, Jew or Greek, Paul’s words were almost unimaginable. Crucified?

We grimace today at the thought of nails being driven through human hands and feet. We squirm at a crown of thorns pressed into the brow, piercing the skin, sending blood streaming down the face. And once these violent acts had torn flesh and bone, the pain of crucifixion had only begun. Hours later, many bled out; others died of asphyxiation, eventually too decimated to even breathe. This was not just death, but torture unto death. It was nauseatingly gruesome.

But not only was it calculated to amplify and prolong physical pain; it was designed, almost psychotically, or diabolically, to utterly shame the victim. The horror of the cross was not only that it was done, but that it was done to be seen. It was not only literally excruciating but humiliating in the extreme.

“The horror of the cross was not only that it was done, but that it was done to be seen.”

Some of us might find the tune of “The Old Rugged Cross” too light for the weight of Good Friday, but the second line of George Bennard’s 1913 lyrics captures well the significance of the cross in the ancient world: “the emblem of suffering and shame.”

Device for Disgrace

In his book Crucifixion, Martin Hengel produces examples of “the negative attitude towards crucifixion universal in antiquity” (7). In short, far more than just negative, the whole spectacle of “the infamous stake” or “the tree of shame” was so offensive, so vile, as to be obscene in polite conversation. Hengel observes “the use of crux (cross) as a vulgar taunt among the lower classes” (9). The mannerly did not stoop to such a ghastly subject, whether with tongue or even pen, which accounts for “the deep aversion from the cruelest of penalties in the literary world” (14). Few ancient writers dared to provide anywhere near the crucifixion details we find in the four Gospels.

In the century prior to Christ, Cicero (106–43 BC) called crucifixion “that most cruel and disgusting penalty.” The historian Josephus (ca. AD 37–100) referred to it as “the most wretched of deaths.” Celsus, a second-century opponent of early Christianity, asked rhetorically about a crucified Christ, “What drunken old woman, telling stories to lull a small child to sleep, would not be ashamed of muttering such preposterous things?” Not only was a crucified Messiah preposterous. It was shameful.

In first-century Palestine, Jesus’s contemporaries were haunted by the regular spectacle of crosses — and their manifest pain and shame — and, added to that ignominy, they knew of God’s own curse, in Scripture, of anyone hanged on a tree (Deuteronomy 21:22–23). Is it any wonder, then, that Paul would speak of a crucified Messiah as utter folly, sheer madness, among unbelievers in his day (1 Corinthian 1:18)? The honor of Messiah and the disgrace of crucifixion made the idea nonsensical and disgusting, contradictory and offensive, preposterous and shameful.

And it’s the public shame of the cross — rather than the pain we might be prone to think of first — that Hebrews mentions at the climax of his rehearsing of the faithful: “For the joy that was set before him [Jesus] endured the cross, despising the shame” (Hebrews 12:2).

Enduring the Cross

This crushing shame of crucifixion offers a vantage on Good Friday that few today emphasize. Theologians often have spoken of Christ’s active obedience in life and passive obedience in death. We might find some help in this distinction, but passivity is not the emphasis in Hebrews 12:2.

The image in Hebrews 12 is strikingly active — unnervingly so. We might even call it athletic: a race to be run, surrounded with onlookers, and a prize to be claimed at the end. Jesus’s enduring the cross in verse 2 parallels enduring the race in verse 1, where to finish is irreducibly to achieve.

Which we see in Jesus “despising the shame” at Calvary. As David deSilva comments, to despise the towering, paralyzing shame of the cross “entails more than simply enduring the experience of disgrace rather than shrinking from it” (433). Rather, when Jesus despised the shame of the cross, he scorned it and determined to overcome it. He confronted it. He looked the looming shame in the eye, and disregarded what would have been the final barrier for other men.

But simply knowing himself innocent would not be enough against the extreme suffering and shame of the cross. Endurance to the finish demanded more. Hebrews, memorably, tells us he endured “for the joy set before him.” But specifically, what joy could that have been? What reward could have been powerful enough to pull him forward, to finish this race, with the very emblem of suffering and shame standing in the way?

What foretaste of joy, or joys, could endure the cross?

Pleased to Be Crushed

The Gospel of John, written by Jesus’s closest associate, gives us the best glimpse into his mind and heart as he readied himself for the cross. Two particular sections, among others, speak to the substance and shades of his joy as he owned and embraced the cross in the hours leading up to his sacrifice.

The first section is John 12:27–33, sometime after Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Previously, Jesus had said “his hour” had not yet come (John 2:4; 7:30; 8:20). Now he owns that it has:

“Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” (John 12:27–28)

Whatever we uncover of Jesus’s joy, it will not be trouble-free. Three times in these climactic chapters, we read of his being troubled (John 11:33; 12:27; 13:21). But the presence of trouble does not mean the absence of joy. In fact, the reality of such trouble demonstrates the depth and power of his joy, to move into and through the trouble, rather than flee.

Here we find a first source of his joy: the glory of his Father. When Jesus owns the arrival of his hour, this is the first motivation he vocalizes. He had lived to his Father’s glory, not his own (John 8:50), and now, as the cross fast approaches, he prays first for this, and receives the affirmation of an immediate answer from heaven: “I have glorified it [in your life], and I will glorify it again [in and through the cross].”

Next comes a second joy: what the cross will achieve over the ancient foe. “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out” (John 12:31). Satan, whom Paul would call “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4) and “the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2), would be decisively unseated as “ruler of this world,” and Jesus would experience the joy of unseating him, and being his Father’s instrument to “disarm the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them” (Colossians 2:15). The tree of shame, in time, would shame the foe.

“The tree of shame, in time, would shame the foe.”

Jesus then mentions a third joy: the saving of his people. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). He would be lifted up from the earth — first in being lifted up to the cross, as John immediately adds (John 12:33). Make no mistake, in the “joy set before him” was the joy of love. He had come to save (John 12:47), and on Thursday night, he would wash his disciples’ feet to show them the love that, in part, sent him to the cross: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1).

‘My Joy in Them’

The second passage — Jesus’s high-priestly prayer in John 17, on the very night when he gave himself into custody — echoes two of the joys already introduced, and adds one further “joy set before him” that brings us back to Hebrews 12.

First, Jesus prays explicitly about sharing his own joy, and that (again) as an expression of his love for disciples: “These things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves” (John 17:13). Jesus’s joy — deep enough, thick enough, rich enough to carry him to and through the cross — will not only be his, but he will put it in his people, through both his words and sacrificial work: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11).

Second, Jesus also prays in John 17 in anticipation of his Father’s glory. He recalls that his life has been devoted to his Father’s glory, to making known his name (John 17:4, 6, 26). But now, in the consecration of prayer, and on his final evening before suffering and shame, he prays, third, for his own exaltation:

Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you. . . . Now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. (John 17:1, 5; see also verse 24)

Misunderstand the utter holiness of Christ, and of this moment, and we will misunderstand this culminating joy: returning to his Father, and taking his seat, with his work accomplished, on the throne of the universe. The joy of being enthroned in heaven — glorified — at the right hand of his Father, will not come any other way than through, and because of, the cross. And his exaltation and enthronement will mean not only personal honor but personal nearness. “At the right hand” is the seat of both honor and proximity to his Father. He wanted not only to have the throne but again to have his Father.

This coming exaltation, and proximity, is the particular joy, among others, that Hebrews 12:2 points to: “For the joy that was set before him [Jesus] endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

Foretaste of Glory — and Joy

We return, then, to the honor that overcame the “tree of shame.” Good Friday tells us of the cosmic war between honor and shame. At the cross, that obscene emblem of shame,

God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. (1 Corinthians 1:27–29)

Good Friday is the great reversal. The utter humiliation and imponderable disgrace would have kept lesser souls from choosing Calvary. But Jesus willed it, for joy. Even as horrible as it was, it pleased him. Knowing his innocence, he anticipated the joy of glorifying his Father, and defeating Satan, and rescuing his people in love, and these joys set before him came together in his victorious return to his Father’s side, now as the exalted God-man.

As Isaiah had prophesied seven centuries before, “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied” (Isaiah 53:11). In the agony and ignominy of Good Friday, he saw. He saw the joy set before him, and began to taste it, and he was satisfied enough to endure.

Even death on a cross.