On broken hearts...

Have you ever noticed how we describe deep emotional pain in terms of physical fracture? "My heart is broken," we say, pressing our hand to our chest as if we could hold the pieces together. This isn't mere poetic language—something profound happens in that space between our ribs when sorrow strikes. Medical science has even identified "broken heart syndrome," where intense grief can literally cause heart muscle failure.

But perhaps this mysterious connection between emotional anguish and physical pain points to something deeper: that we were made for wholeness, and every fracture in our lives echoes the fundamental brokenness of our world.

In the landscape of human suffering, the broken heart stands as perhaps the most universal experience. Yet for those who seek to follow Christ, this shattering takes on peculiar significance. Scripture doesn't merely acknowledge our broken hearts—it reveals that God Himself knows this pain intimately, and more mysteriously still, that our very brokenness can become a meeting place with the Divine.

 

The Heart of God Breaks

One of the most arresting images in all of Scripture appears when Jesus approaches Jerusalem for the final time. Luke records: "As he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, 'If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes'" (Luke 19:41-42, NIV). The Greek word used here, eklausen, indicates not gentle tears but convulsive sobbing—the kind that shakes the whole body.

Consider the scene: the triumphant king, recently hailed with hosannas, stops his procession to grieve. This isn't disappointment or frustration; this is heartbreak. The one who spoke galaxies into existence, who knows the end from the beginning, experiences the very human devastation of love refused. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem," he cries elsewhere, "you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing" (Matthew 23:37, NIV).

The image startles in its maternal tenderness. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the thundering voice from Sinai—likens himself to a mother bird desperate to shelter her young. Here we glimpse something essential: the heart of God is not distant and unmoved but achingly vulnerable to our choices.

Divine love, it seems, includes the capacity for divine heartbreak.

This shouldn't surprise us if we trace the biblical narrative carefully. From Genesis onward, we see a God who "regrets" making humanity when violence fills the earth (Genesis 6:6), who "relents" from judgment when his people turn back (Exodus 32:14), who describes himself as a spurned husband pleading with an unfaithful wife (Hosea 2). The Hebrew scriptures paint not a portrait of divine impassibility but of passionate involvement, of a love so fierce it accepts the risk of rejection.

 

The Prophecy of the Pierced Heart

If Jesus' lament over Jerusalem shows us divine heartbreak, Mary's experience reveals the human heart's capacity to bear seemingly unbearable sorrow. When Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the temple for presentation, the aged Simeon took the child in his arms and pronounced a blessing that contained a sharp edge of prophecy. After declaring that this child would cause "the falling and rising of many in Israel," he turned to Mary with words that must have haunted her through the years: "And a sword will pierce your own soul too" (Luke 2:35, NIV).

The word Simeon uses—rhomphaia—refers not to a small dagger but to a large, broad sword, the kind used in battle to run completely through an opponent. This is total penetration, complete devastation. And when did this prophecy find its fulfillment? John's Gospel places Mary at the foot of the cross: "Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother" (John 19:25, NIV).

Stand with her there for a moment. This is the child whose conception was announced by an angel, whose first movements in her womb caused her to sing of God's mighty deeds. She had treasured and pondered every mysterious moment of his childhood (Luke 2:19, 51). She had watched him grow in wisdom and stature, had perhaps dared to dream of what his messianic reign might look like. Now she watches him die as a criminal, seemingly abandoned even by the God whose Son he claimed to be.

The sword that pierced Mary's heart was not merely the grief of losing a child, devastating as that is. It was the apparent failure of every promise, the crushing of every hope. Her "perfect Son"—the miracle child in whom everyone was supposed to hope—gasps for breath on a Roman instrument of torture.

The magnitude of her heartbreak is almost incomprehensible. Yet she stands. She doesn't turn away. She remains present to the horror, bearing witness to the worst moment in human history.

Early Christian tradition, particularly in the East, came to see in Mary's suffering a unique participation in Christ's redemptive work. While Christ alone accomplishes salvation, Mary's heartbreak—her complete vulnerability to this sorrow—becomes a kind of offering. As Origen wrote in the third century, the sword that pierced her soul revealed not only the thoughts of many hearts but also opened her own heart completely to become a dwelling place for all who would come to her Son.

 

The Necessity of the Broken Heart

But why? Why must hearts break? Why does the path to resurrection pass through crucifixion? Why must even the Mother of God experience this devastating sword?

The answer lies partly in the nature of love itself. To love is to make oneself vulnerable to loss. The heart that never breaks is the heart that never truly loves. C.S. Lewis captured this paradox perfectly: "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal... The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell" (The Four Loves).

There's something deeper at work in heartbreak.

In the economy of grace, our broken hearts can become openings rather than merely wounds. The mystics speak of compunction—from the Latin compungere, meaning "to prick" or "to pierce." It's the piercing of the heart that allows grace to enter, like light streaming through a cracked vessel. St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote that the tears of compunction are "the overflow of a soul that has been pierced by the arrow of God's love."

Consider how brokenheartedness works in our actual lives. The spouse whose partner walks away from decades of marriage doesn't merely lose a relationship but faces the shattering of an entire imagined future. Parents watching their child struggle with addiction experience not just fear but the breaking of every dream they held. The believer whose community splits over doctrine or scandal feels the very ground of faith shake beneath them. These experiences break us open, often against our will.

Yet in that breaking, something remarkable can occur.

The false self, with all its illusions of control and self-sufficiency, cracks apart. We discover, often with shock, how much our identity was built on what we've lost.

And in that terrifying emptiness, we may for the first time encounter the God who dwells precisely in such devastation—the God who knows what it is to be betrayed by friends, abandoned by followers, and seemingly forsaken by heaven itself. A God whose heart breaks for us.

 

Divisions That Pierce

Among the most acute heartbreaks are those that strike at the very places meant to be sanctuaries of love: our families and faith communities. Jesus warned that he came not to bring peace but a sword, that households would be divided, "father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother" (Luke 12:53, NIV). He spoke from experience—his own family thought him mad (Mark 3:21), and his closest brethren/kinsmen didn't believe in him (John 7:5).

These divisions in the home and in faith communities carry a particular anguish.

When those who should understand us best become strangers, when shared faith becomes a battlefield, the very foundations of our world seem to crumble.

Parents grieve children who abandon the faith of their upbringing. Children ache over parents whose rigid certainties leave no room for questions or growth. Sometimes even spouses have profound differences in belief that feel like a wedge, like the very thing they love the most (our Lord) is compromising the very thing that's supposed to show us God's heart... our marriage.

After all, the profound mystery of spousal love is the same love that is reciprocated between Christ and His Church (Eph. 5:32). Should we expect anything less than heartbreak? Should we think of heartbreak during such difficulties in our marriage as an end? In Christ, heartbreak is a beginning. It's an invitation to fall deeper in love.

Such heartbreaks can embitter us, building walls where there should be bridges. Or—and here is the severe mercy—they can teach us that our ultimate security cannot rest in any human institution or relationship, no matter how sacred. We can turn our own marriages, our own romance, into an idol. Heartbreak reforms our relationships, our marriages, into the image of Christ and His bride.

 

The Meeting Place of Broken Hearts

So where does all this leave us? In the valley of our brokenness, we find ourselves in a strange and sacred space. It is here, in the place of our greatest pain, that we discover we are not alone.

Our pain is a shared pain, known intimately by God and by His Mother. It's a pain anyone who truly offers their heart to Jesus will experience. Because the closer our hearts are to his, the more we feel His pain. It's a pain wrapped up in infinite love.

It is here that we can cry out to a God who understands and who promises to bind up the brokenhearted. Our brokenness becomes the very means by which we enter into a deeper, more profound relationship with the One who was broken for us all.

The tears of our grief water the soil of our souls, preparing the ground for the seeds of compassion, wisdom, and an unshakeable hope that can only grow from the ashes of what was lost. Our broken hearts are not the end of the story; they are the starting point of our healing, a testament to a love that is stronger than any sorrow.

 

In Jesus' name,

Judah