Why on Earth Bear the Burdens of Others?

“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” – Galatians 6:2

My daughter, Ellie, is not old enough to form the interrogative sentences that begin with, “Why?”  However, I am looking forward to the natural onslaught of such questions that come when the mind of a child is developing. It is very normal for a parent to become overwhelmingly tired of the question, “Why?” when we seem to have reached the bottom of our knowledge. So we resort to the usually unsatisfactory answer, “Because I say so.” When we come to such a burdensome command from Paul, we must be like the child who digs so deep that it tests the depth of Scriptures’ wisdom. Asking, “Why?” uncovers that this command didn’t float down from Heaven without purpose or reason behind it. We don’t hear God say, “In the beginning, I told you so.” Asking, “Why?” takes us deeper, into the very nature of God.

Paul’s vision of life in Christ is rooted in the justified reality he describes throughout Galatians 1-4.  It’s the same reality we see in the grand narrative of Scripture. Therefore, we must break the surface and dig deeper, flipping back to the creation account of Genesis 1. We find in this account that God created mankind uniquely “in the image of God.” Man and woman were created to be image-bearers of the One who created us. This is a matter of being and doing that reflects the glory of God to His created order.  In other words, as humans we are created with the special dignity to represent all that God is toward the created order. However, this special dignity is quickly disrupted and troubled by the corruption of sin. Sin has so severely broken the image of God that God, in some ways, became hidden to the created order. Sin had disrupted the image of God in humanity, breaking the self-identity, the relationships between others, and the relationship humanity had with its Creator.  The image could no longer rightly reflect and represent God toward the created order.

But God did not sit back as the chaos grew. Rather, He pursued His creation and the image bearers whose way of being was so crucial to the world. His pursuit took different forms, but it culminated when “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). God Himself became a human being so that we could see Him sitting, standing, working, laughing, and crying before us. He entered our world so that we could see His glory. Paul calls Him “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). God was no longer hidden; His glory perfectly displayed by the perfect image. What glory did this image display? Paul says in Philippians 2:6-8, “because [Jesus] was in the form of God…he humbled himself…he emptied himself…being obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Here is the “radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3). This is the glory of God that image bearing is all about. The image of the invisible God is a radical self-giving love that takes the form of the cross.

In Galatians, Paul is giving us an understanding of what it means to be a restored image bearer of God in Christ Jesus. We are justified through faith in the faithfulness of Christ. He took on flesh and was crucified, so that we may know and be reconciled to God. Yet, we are justified to participate. He became like us, so that we might become like Him. In other words, through faith in the faithfulness of Christ we are saved to burden bearing. This is why Paul defines our freedom as Christians as a freedom to exercise cruciform love. We are “called to freedom” not to serve ourselves, but to “through love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13). This is “faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6). Christ didn’t usher a law like Moses; He lived a life. Thus, this is a faith that fulfills the life of Christ.

Like a child, we need to ask over and over, “Why on earth should we jump into the mess of others?” We discover that burden bearing is a restored image bearing of Jesus Christ, the glory of God. Burden bearing is being Christ for one another.

Jon Yeager