The Road to Bethany
By Henry Ossawa Tanner
“And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple: and when he had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve.”
Mark 11:11
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When Jesus set His face toward Bethany in those final days, He did so knowing that Jerusalem—and the cross—awaited just beyond. The road to Bethany was, in the truest sense, a road toward
ultimate suffering. And yet, it was on this very road and in this very village that Jesus performed some of the most tender acts of His ministry.
He wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He felt the grief of Mary and Martha and mourned alongside them before raising His friend from the dead. He saw and honored the guileless faith of Zacchaeus. He dined in the home of Simon the leper, welcomed the offering of a woman who anointed His feet, and taught those who gathered around Him. Not once did He turn inward. Not once did He say, "I cannot bear your burden—I am carrying My own."
Consider the weight of that. The Savior knew what awaited Him. He knew of Gethsemane, of the scourging and suffering, of Calvary. Yet His awareness of His own impending agony did not diminish His attention to the pain and needs of others. If anything, it deepened it. As Ulisses Soares has taught, “Jesus’s compassionate acts were not occasional or mandated manifestations based on a list of tasks to be completed but everyday expressions of the reality of His pure love for God and His children and His abiding desire to help them.”
C.S. Lewis reflected on the relationship between suffering and service when he wrote that what is good in any painful experience is, for those who witness it, the compassion it awakens and the acts
of mercy it inspires. Jesus lived that truth perfectly. His suffering did not close Him off from the world—it opened Him further to it. This is the example that reaches across the centuries and rests squarely on our shoulders. We, too, walk difficult roads. We carry grief, uncertainty, illness, and weariness. And yet the Savior’s life on the road to Bethany teaches us that our personal hardships are never an excuse to withhold love. As Barbara Thompson taught, “the Savior has asked us to do the things which He has done, to bear one another’s burdens, to comfort those who need comfort, to mourn with those who mourn, to feed the hungry, visit the sick, to succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down.” For, as Adam Miller has written, faith “takes us down and into the unwieldy world, not up and away from it.”
We are each on a journey with an uncertain road ahead. But the call of the gospel is clear: minister as you walk. Heal as you go. Love, even when—especially when—your own heart is heavy. As Jeffrey R. Holland reminded us, Christ's is “the charity that never faileth, that compassion which endures even when all other strength disappears.”
May we, like the Savior on the road to Bethany, never let the weight of where we are headed or what we are carrying keep us from lifting someone along the way.
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