“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Scriptures:
Psalm 22:1-5; 27-31
Matthew 27:45-54
Out of a darkening despair, out of the tangible terror of a world now growing dim, out of the seeming reality that all hope is gone, comes a cry that grabs us and shakes us to the deepest parts of our innermost hearts. Oh, it’s a cry that we have uttered, you and I. We have shouted it or whispered it when our small child died, when a tsunami or hurricane took away everything we had, when cancer or a heart attack or some other dread disease wracked us with a pain too intense to withstand – then, and at other times each of us could name, we have reached groping fingers of the mind for the nice, warm, gentle image of a comforting God – and we have found emptiness. Then our whispered question becomes a shout that reverberates through time and space, and it is almost as if the blood has refused to reach our hearts as we hurl those icy words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
But even though we have known this kind of despair, you and I, our minds recoil at the thought that Jesus could ever know it. “No,” our rational mind insists, “he knew all about his Father’s purpose. How could he ever feel deserted?” But he does, and our affective mind goes on to know – here, in this moment, Jesus is just as human as us.
The common theme of these last three Sundays of Lent as we have looked at what Jesus spoke from the cross is the humanity of the one whom we also know as the Christ – Emmanuel – “God with us”. Thanks to the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, Jesus Christ became elevated to the Second Person of the Trinity. By so doing the Council affirmed the full divinity of Jesus Christ. Yet, even before that Council some early Christians wanted to believe only in his divinity. I spoke last week about the patripassionists, who taught that Jesus of Nazareth did not actually suffer and die on the cross, but that God substituted Godself so that it was God who died on the cross. Another group were called docetists, and they taught that the Jesus of Nazareth who appeared to be flesh and blood was only an apparition – that the Christos was the Spirit of God who only appeared to us in human form because that was the only way we would accept him.
We still find some elements of this way of thinking today – especially among the mystics. It’s very hard for rational minds to hold together the paradoxical thought that here in this person is both full divinity and full humanity. When John proclaims at the start of his gospel that “the Word became flesh”, this was a scandal and a shock to the logically ordered Greek mind. The Word – the logos – the divinely ordering principle of the universe – could never take on human characteristics, or so the Greek philosophers reasoned. And we today are perhaps still Greek enough to feel this shock to our scientific sensibilities – “the Word became flesh” – the basis for creation takes on human form – an orderly world just doesn’t work this way.
But we are also human, and as human beings we feel, we sense out of our own life experiences, what it is that Jesus is going through on the cross. If we had no other proof of Christ’s humanity, this cry from the cross would be all we would need to assure us that here we do not have a pseudo-Christ, a spiritualized Messiah whose gift of salvation was really worth little because it cost little. German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer was thinking of this moment on the cross when he wrote his book The Cost of Discipleship. The grace that God offers us through Jesus is a costly grace; it comes to us through blood, sweat, tears, and real pain.
Those of us who struggled through watching Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ two years ago certainly have an awareness of the pain it was costing Jesus to die for us. Here is no Warner Sallman’s effeminate Jesus (like his “Head of Christ”) or any other artistic representation that would sanitize Jesus and keep him from being connected with our own suffering. For all his cinematic excesses Gibson got this aspect right: his filmic Jesus clearly is one who would reach the point of crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Forty years ago another filmmaker also helped us know the reality of Jesus on the cross. Pier Passolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew let us hear the agonizing cries that came when very real nails were pounded into very real hands. Here is no stoical Jesus who accepts suffering soundlessly, but here is a Jesus who knows the full weight of agony and gives vent to it. One more cinematic reference: the short film Parable, which played at the Protestant booth of the New York’s World Fair in 1964 and has been seen by countless church groups since. In this film without dialogue the only fully human sound heard in the whole film is the cry of the clown that reverberates throughout the hills and catches up the suffering of all human beings. In his cry from the cross Jesus shouted the question that all of us would shout or whisper or ask in our innermost being at some point in our lives: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
But more than just the physical suffering this cry is really about mental anguish – the darkest of dark nights of the soul. As we know from his prayer in the garden, Jesus did not want to have to face that particular death. He was aware that his disciples were not as well prepared as they should be. He couldn’t know for sure if this death would have its intended effect. Henri Gheon, in his play The Way of the Cross, has caught the meaning of this internal strife and its consequent cry in these powerful lines spoken by an observer on that darkened hill:
No longer now does Jesus see man, no longer behold his creation.
Primeval chaos, ere the Holy Spirit breathed form and life upon the world!
To nothing the word is returning.
Christ is alone and powerless.
‘My God, my God,’ he cries with a loud voice....
‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’
For one terrifying moment out of all creation the nothingness that was before creation has opened to receive the Word. This was not simply evil, but annihilation, holocaust, non-being, the whole of creation evidently conquered by nihilism, what James Weldon Johnson expressed in describing what was before creation: “Blacker than a hundred midnights/Down in a cypress swamp.”
The true pain, you see, is not the physical. It is the anguish, which we share, that our efforts are not enough, that evil wins out in the end, that God has in fact deserted us. And in this moment on the cross Christ identifies with all of our anguish and anxiety. It is his supreme moment of being human. “To nothing the word is returning,” says Gheon. The Word – the logos which has participated in creation – that which has become our flesh and blood and has been part of the joys and sorrows of this world – this is what reaches out toward the darkness. And God, it seems, is powerless to stop it. Remember that we spoke last week about how the cross represents the powerlessness of God. We know what it means to feel helpless, and God is right there participating in that helplessness with us. Had the Christian gospel ended with this cry from the cross, the Christian world-view would have been the most pessimistic one imaginable, certainly going nihilism one better. “To nothing the word is returning” means that the whole of God’s purpose as expressed in creation is meaningless, chaotic, irrelevant. The echoes of this cry from the cross far exceed the awe it inspired in those who heard it. But, of course, as an old radio commentator liked to say, that’s not the end of the story. Come back in two weeks when we find out how the resurrection puts an exclamation point where the forces of darkness would place a period.
When Gandalf is snatched up by the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings and dragged down, evidently to his doom, into that fiery abyss at the bridge of Khazad-Dum in Moria, it seems to Frodo and his companions that all hope is now gone. They have lost their leader. It is not until several chapters into the second book of the trilogy that Gandalf re-appears, now transformed from Gandalf the Grey into Gandalf the White. But the important point is not that here is yet another resurrection story of a revered and somewhat supernatural being returning. The important element in the story is that Frodo and his companions continue on. They have no way of knowing that Gandalf is not in fact truly dead. And yet they persevere. Through the betrayal of Boromir, through attacks by the orcs, through fear of the black riders – they persevere. And then beyond all hope, Gandalf is there. We are thrown a bit, I’m afraid, by that short time frame of three days between crucifixion and resurrection. Maybe it should have been three months, or even three years before Jesus came back to them. Maybe the lack of hope should have become all-pervasive before the presence, beyond hope, beyond belief, of the One who meant everything to them was made manifest once again. Then we could have seen what it would mean to persevere in the face of that loss.
We, too, are called upon to persevere. We who are constantly working through our anguish and agony, our doubt and despair, our pain and our powerlessness, know what it means to feel that God has finally forsaken us. And yet we keep on. And we do so because we now know that Christ experienced all of this as well – even to the point of feeling himself forsaken – and yet he was willing to follow through with his part in fulfilling God’s will. For one brief moment his trust in God faltered, and the doors of nothingness opened wide. But the final end was not to be found here. We who lose trust so easily, who give in to the darkness and the despair so often, who are ready to curse God and find God faithless so quickly – we can understand and empathize with that moment of feeling forsaken. But are we also ready to understand and accept the God who does not forsake us – who waits patiently for us on the other side of despair and lack of trust – who is always willing to resurrect hope within us. Our faith leads us beyond the cry, beyond the death, to the resurrection. This, too, is the faith that Christ had – a faith that becomes all the stronger in the face of a momentary loss of trust.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
“In order to find you, my son, my daughter; if you will but look, in faith, for me.”
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
April 2, 2006