Mk 4:18-19, “…the ones sown among thorns…hear the word, but the anxieties of the world…choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.”
1 Pt 5:7, “…cast all your anxieties on Him, because He cares for you…”
Jn 19:2, “…the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on His head…”
In Mk 4, Jesus pictures the anxieties of this world—cares and concerns rooted in mortality, earth-bound loss and gain, etc.—as THORNS that creep in and choke out the fruitfulness of a disciple. In 1 Pt, we are called to cast our anxieties—our THORNS—onto the Lord because He cares for us. And in Jn 19:2, we see THORNS, woven into a crown of suffering and glory, placed on Christ’s head in an ironic display of His majesty. I think we can draw a connection between these three texts.
When the thorns of anxiety creep into our life, restricting our movement, stifling our fruitfulness, and piercing our skin in a thousand places—when this happens, Scripture calls us to cast these anxieties onto the Lord, to breathe them out and release them to Him through the dual embrace of our powerlessness and His omnipotence.
And Scripture calls us to do this because He cares for us. The Lord’s reception of our anxieties is not the disinterested acknowledgment of a judge in an appeals court, rather it is the intimately involved reception of one who loves us so deeply that our suffering becomes His own. And that leads to the final text.
When we offer up our anxious thorns to the Lord, we find that He is able to help us in the midst of them because He has already borne them in Himself in Christ. Yes, in Christ, the thorns of His people’s anxious fears are woven into the crown of suffering that He bears in our place. And, by His resurrection, these love-borne thorns—now wreathed with the crimson blossoms of redeemed sorrow—are revealed to have always been the diadem of His glory.
As we learn to cast the anxious thorns of this life onto the Lord, we will see Him bear them redemptively in our place, turning the very anxieties that would have choked our lives into a crown that declares the splendor of the King.
