Forsaken?
Sermon for Lenten Service
Bible reading: Mark 15:33-34
The author, T.S. Elliot, remarked once that faced with this great mystery of Jesus’ death and his cry of abandonment, human language fails. He said our words slip and slide and will not stay in place
. Because we are grasping something we cannot put into words, trying to express what it means. But we fail, because this mystery is beyond us. And indeed I too wondered after studying this text, whether the best way to meditate on it is simply to hear it, to listen in silence.
Of course a lot has been said about Jesus’ cry of abandonment; some of it helpful and even insightful. Jesus, we know, was placed under the curse of God’s wrath and bore the iniquity of us all. God visited on him the condemnation of all humanity, and so he turns away and abandons Jesus, for our sake. It is part of the necessary price of the atonement. By his being forsaken we are received and loved as God’s children.
This all helpful, but the problem is that this theologising sometimes gets in the way of us actually hearing the text … in the way of us simply hearing Jesus’ shocking and piercing cry.
We so easily rationalize and harmonise it all – we explain neatly the necessity of it all, enlisting Isaiah 53 to help us tie it all up in a bundle: The Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all.
We know the right catechism answers, maybe even some of the theological explanations. It’s all nicely worked out … too nicely worked out.
Because all these tame and comfortable words of ours do not express the true heart and meaning of Jesus’ cry.
The biblical scholar and Anglican Bishop, N.T. Wright, observes that we Christians have become too well acquainted with this story, and it no longer is new and strange and shocking to us.
We have tamed these terrible words and flattened them so that they can be managed within our comfort zone, and no longer disturb and shake us.
Because disturbing they are. This is violence and bloodshed in the church. It is real life, and it is a real person, the person we call our Lord.
Jesus’ cry shows us a glimpse of the depth of the mystery of the wonder of the love and suffering of God, who abandons himself for love of us. We see Jesus, the Son cursed and left for dead not merely by human beings but by the Father himself.
Make no mistake, this man on the cross is God, the Son. These words of despair and hopelessness are spoken by God the Son, and it is God the Son who is left alone to die.
He, whose very being and life is in the Father, who lives to do the will of his Father, who is for all eternity in the embrace of the community of the Holy Trinity, is abandoned and isolated; alone as no other has ever been alone. This is a living hell.
Our human guessing at what it was like for him cannot come close to what it means for Jesus to be forsaken by his Father. Rather it is Jesus who comes close to us in his suffering and his ultimate forsaken-ness, sharing his deepest and darkest experience, with us, and suffering it for us.
This is not neat and explainable. This is God himself screaming in pain, in that moment unable to do anything but ask his Father ‘Why?’
This was not a piece of pretty operatic suffering, but a loud ugly, distressed cry of a dying man. Have you ever somebody die in pain? It is a sound you never forget – it stay in your heart.
If we are listening to Jesus, and his cries, these words jar on our ears and they will stay in our heart. And if we are listening to our world we might hear these disturbing words echo in the voices of others in our world and in our community:
- the aged and lonely and forgotten, who suffering is not very fashionable these days, but still very real;
- the Muslim woman who holds the bleeding body of her son, killed in an Israeli air raid on Palestine;
- victims of the bushfires in Victoria;
- the mentally ill who live isolated at the edges of our world ;
- those who struggle with depression.
Jesus cried out on the cross with them and for them, not so that he could give them a nice clear and satisfying explanation of why they have to suffer, but so that he could express their agony before God, and give them and us hope, as he take on himself all that is ours.
I said at the beginning that when we try to talk about this mystery our words slip and slide and refuse to stay in place – and these few words I share with you tonight, are no different.
And so there can be no tidy and comfortable conclusion tonight – rather I leave you with a ragged end, with the cry of Jesus ringing in your ears, praying that you will have a heart simply to hear it, here in this worship, here in the world, and here in your own heart.
Amen.