On This Day: A New Year of Comings and Goings

   When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”

After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. (John 6:60-66)

   I’m one of those folks Paul spoke about who sees every day as the same. Today that means that New Year’s day of 2026 is just another day for me far more than it feels like the start of something new.

   However, because our culture does consider it a special day to bring closure to the past year and try to start fresh, I was curious what Scripture would disciple me today. And the one that did certainly has me on high alert!

   I often encourage people to focus more on the daily journey with God than charting where we imagine we are in our travels with him. If our attention is on how we are getting to know God in the moment, we will have the joy of knowing him no matter whether or not we get any sense we have “made progress” in any other way.

   With that in mind, I had lots of “little child” wonderings about what it was like for Jesus to have a multitude of people walk away from him. In his deity, he had a level of attachment with the Father and the Spirit that we can’t even imagine. How much did that affect him in his humanity when people walked away from him? Was that unfailing attachment a comfort to him when his humanity experienced broken relationships of the most personal kind?

   I was reminded of a line from a wonderful old hymn that I have really come to… well, not like! In the song, “I Stand Amazed in the Presence” (Charles Hutchinson Gabriel, 1905), the writer expressed, “He had no tears for His own griefs, but sweat-drops of blood for mine.” Let’s just say that I really don’t think that is accurate!

   In my own heartaches and griefs, I am often drawn to the description of Jesus that “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). How easily my heart is drawn to such a man as this, the God-man, deity in bodily form, the Word who became flesh to live among us. He was despised like we are. He was rejected by men like we are. He had so many sorrows that it characterized him as “a man of” such things. He was acquainted with grief just like ourselves. I don’t see anything of him not having feelings about his own griefs in experiencing all such injustices, and that’s why he is so approachable when I experience such painful things myself.   

   We just passed the fourth Christmas season since I was “renounced” by the people who were closest to me in life. Today I see Jesus “renounced” by people he had fed with a miraculous multiplying of bread and fish. They had seriously considered that he might be their promised Messiah.

   But then the steppingstones to faith turned into the stumblingstones of unbelief. They simply couldn’t attach to a Messiah who was different than their religious expectations. He had to be their way, because there was no way they would think differently about him.

   So, what did they do? They went back to their self-dependent religion. Claiming God’s word as theirs, but not following what God said, or believing in the One of whom he wrote.

   If it means anything at all that we are entering a new year, then I would want this year to be a year of comings not goings. I want to be known by my daily coming to Jesus and growing in him. I want to see “the many” who go away to the wide road to destruction matched by “the few” who come to Jesus and live every day to know him better than ever before.

   And, if the comings and goings of this year add to the heartache and grief of being disowned by people I love, I will rest in the Man of Sorrows to hold me close to his heart, and teach me his love that would bear such things in such greater intensity than I could ever know, and then go and lay down his life for his friends.

 

© 2026 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8

Email: in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)