“Foxes have their dens, and birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” How lonely must Jesus have been to have said this.

Or should we read it theologically, as a comment on the Son of Man (or Jesus) holding his true nature in the heavenly realms? Or perhaps here “the Son of Man” refers to all humans, as it sometimes does, and therefore we should read it as a comment on our true home, which is in heaven? Or perhaps – but wait. Let us stay for a while with Jesus’ apparent loneliness.

Christians like to theologize Scripture, and certainly this is just fine. Scripture was written and preserved, and it is read, for our edification and direction. It reveals to use some of the nature of God Almighty as seen in Jesus Christ. We look to the Bible as our guidebook. In my tradition (Anglican and Episcopal), the Bible readings during the liturgy are called “lessons.” We meditate on Scripture and discern, through the Holy Spirit, how it might affect our lives and how we live them. But at its base, the Bible (and especially the New Testament) is a collection of stories about people. No matter what we do with the Bible and its interpretation, we can’t forget that we are being told stories about normal human beings just like you and me.

What happens when someone in our lives tells us a story about themselves? How do we listen? How do we listen to these stories differently than we might listen to stories in the news about, say, the political discussions of Congress or about wars in various parts of the world? We listen with the same ears, but our hearts and our spirits change. We are turned or oriented in a specific way when we listen to human stories.

Listening to the Bible in this way requires us to see the humanity of Jesus. For some of us, this may be hard. We are often concerned with Jesus’ divinity: how he is like God? What does he reveal to us about the first person of the Trinity, the one who he invites us to call Abba, Father? How do his teachings, life, death, and resurrection affect our relationship with that Father in Heaven? We tend to de-humanize Jesus by making him merely an image of the Father. But Jesus was (and is) fully human as much as he was fully divine, and so we can’t forget that, as a human, he may have felt many things. And feeling lonely is no sin.

For others of us, especially in my tradition or in the secular world, it may be all too easy to think of Jesus as a human. There is a strain of thought going around that sees Jesus as merely human. He may teach important lessons, but he himself only reflected God’s nature as much as any other human being. This view loses the divinity of Jesus, whereas Jesus was just as divine as he was human. We really can’t lose either.

And so when we look at the human stories in the Bible, especially those about Jesus but also those about the apostles and the tidbits of biography we get in the epistles, we have to remember that there is a holy humanity to them. Jesus may have felt loneliness when he said what he did about foxes and birds and the Son of Man, but if he did, it was a sort of holy loneliness. Yes, in this loneliness he did not sin, but it’s more than that. His loneliness revealed to us something very important about God and very important about humanity. And anything that has to do with humanity has to do with suffering, and anything that has to do with God has to do with healing.

Jesus Christ, as a person, is about the healing of suffering. Now, don’t take this as a theological statement; take it as a description of a human being. Surely you have met someone whose presence is simply healing. Right now, as I type, I sit next to a very close friend and my daughter. In their presence I feel healed from hurts that I didn’t even know I had. I taught with a Buddhist priest in Japan who sometimes felt like perfect calm (though it was an intellectual calm, which is a really fascinating thing to think about). These are people whose company we seek out because we can exist more clearly. That’s a weird way to put it, perhaps, but it’s the truth. And it is not just that they have this aura around them that makes life more holy, but it is interacting with them that we find some sense of the holiness of God. So when I write that Jesus Christ, as a person, is about the healing of suffering, think of him in this way.

Similarly, the loneliness of Jesus Christ is about the healing of suffering. This may also strike you as a bit strange. How can loneliness be healing? One of the best examples of this is from the children’s books Frog and Toad. The stories are all rather charming in themselves, but they’re also often poignant. The last story, “Alone”, tells of a time when Frog is sitting on a rock, looking at the sea. Toad is anxious that, perhaps, Frog no longer wants to be his friend, and he does all sorts of things to get his attention. Finally, he swims out to the rock, all a bundle of nerves. He finds that Frog wanted to be alone because he wanted to think about how wonderful it is to be a frog and how wonderful it is to be Toad’s friend. The two then sit side-by-side together and watch the sun set over the water, neither of them speaking but knowing that they are together.

In my mind, this is the kind of loneliness that Jesus must have felt when he talked about foxes and birds. It was a sad loneliness, and one that may have made him want to go out into the desert places to be by himself, but it was also a way that he felt connected to other people, who are also alone and lonely. It was a bittersweet loneliness. It is the kind of consolation that J.R.R. Tolkien writes about in fairy stories, which he says is connected to the “joy beyond the walls of the world, as poignant as grief.” It is a loneliness that leads us to understand our true humanity, and what being a human really means, which is both a grief and a joy and both mingled together as one and the same.

And all of this, importantly, comes from knowing the person of Jesus – and in seeking after that person, not a lesson to be learned. I don’t seek a lesson about companionship and love when I sit in the presence of my friend and my daughter. I seek out them. So do we seek out Jesus, and from that seeking we are healed.

The pictures included here are my own, taken while living in Adogawa Japan.