Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles: “To My Friends who feel alone,”
One of the Great Consolations of our mortality is that because Jesus walked such a long, lonely path Utterly Alone, we do not need to do so.
None Were with Him
This message is directed in a special way to those who are alone or feel alone, or worse, feel abandoned. These might include those longing to be married, those who have lost a spouse, and those who have lost—or who have never been blessed with—children. Our empathy embraces wives forsaken by their husbands, husbands whose wives have walked away, and children bereft of one or the other of their parents—or both. This group can fine within its broad circumference a soldier far from home, a missionary in those first few weeks of homesickness, or a father out of work, afraid the fear in his eyes will be visible to his family. In short it can include all of us at various times in our lives.
To all such, I speak of the loneliness journey ever made and the unending blessings it brought to all the human family. I speak of the Savior’s solitary task of shouldering alone the burden of our salvation. Rightly He would say: “I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none to help; and me. . . . I looked, and there was none to help; and I wondered that there was none to uphold [me].”1
We know from scripture that Jesus’s messianic arrival in Jerusalem on the Sunday preceding Passover was a great public moment. But eagerness to continue walking with Him would quickly begin to wane.
Soon enough he was arraigned before the Israelite leaders of the day—first Annas, the former high priest, then Caiaphas, the current high priest. In their rush to judgment these men and their councils declared their verdict quickly and angrily. “What further need have we of witnesses?” they cried. “He is [worthy] of death.”2
With that He was brought before the gentile rulers in the land. Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee, interrogated Him once, and Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, did so twice, the second time declaring to the crowd, “I, have examined him before you, have found no fault in this man.”3 Then, in an act as unconscionable as it was illogical, Pilate “scourged Jesus, [and] delivered him to be crucified.”4 Pilate’s freshly washed hands could not have been more stained or more unclean.
Such ecclesiastical and political rejection became more personal when the citizenry in the street turned against Jesus as well. In one of the ironies of history that sitting with Jesus in prison was a real blasphemer, a murder and revolutionary known as Barabbas, an name or title in Aramaic meaning “son of the father.’5 Free to release one prisoner in the spirit of the Passover tradition, Pilate asked the people, “Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you?” They said, “Barabbas.”6 So one godless “son of the father” was set free while a truly divine Son of His Heavenly Father moved on to crucifixion.
This was also a telling time among those who knew Jesus more personally. The most difficult to understand in this group was Judas Iscariot. We know the divine plan required Jesus to be crucified, but it is a wrenching thing to think that one of His special witnesses who sat at Hiss feet, heard Him pray, watched Him heal, and felt His touch could betray Him and all that for thirty pieces of silver. Never in the history of the world has so little money purchased so much infamy. We are not the ones to judge Judas’s fate, but Jesus said of His betrayer, “Good [were it] for that man if he had not been born.”7 ~Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, To My Friends,(Salt Lake City, Deseret Book 2014) Dwarsligger® edition 405-409 (continued)
