Right off the bat, I want to tell you a secret. The hardest of the 7 last words is always the one you have to preach on. My God, My God, why have you forsaken me is probably really the hardest though, and not just because I’m preaching on it today.
Because one of the things I think we secretly believe is that Jesus was somehow immune to feeling truly alone. After all, he’s one with the Father, he’s part of the Trinity, he’s “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the word WAS God.” He’s never alone, for Pete’s sake. It’s like those movies where two kids try to impersonate one adult in one set of clothes, one on top of the other. We suspect if we were to look inside, we’d see God and Jesus both walking down the dusty road under the same big overcoat. We’re always being reminded in the gospels of Jesus’ hidden divinity, so obvious to us, so cloudy to those dimwitted disciples of his. Example of Lazarus—where Jesus says, “I know you’ve done this already, Father but I just thank you that you are helping these idiots see it.” Or words to that effect.
I think there’s a part of us that prefers the Jesus as superhero model. Sure he looks like Clark Kent but really, he’s superman. Sure, he’s the word who took on flesh and walked among us, but he never really was one of us. He was sort of God wearing a mask. In the world, but not of it. His every conversation is laced with hearing from God, after all—even his words are in a different color ink in some Bibles. Lest you forget that he’s really just God in disguise.
And then sometimes…we get glimpses of some other side of Jesus. The Bible verse everybody can remember—Jesus wept—is one example, when Jesus weeps because Lazarus is dead. Surely, Divine Jesus knows he’s going to raise him up, we just went over that. But he wept because he loved him. He loved his whole family. And when we see love we wonder, because if Jesus LOVED someone, then Jesus can HURT. Because love and vulnerability go hand in hand. You cannot have one without the other. Simon and Garfunkle said, “If I never loved, I never would have cried.” Someone else put it like this…”Everybody plays the fool…sometimes…no exception to the rule.” When you say “love,” you say “vulnerability,” you say “sacrifice.” So when we read that God so LOVED the world that he sent his only begotten Son to save it, our eyes should get wide, because if our God is going to LOVE us, our God is going to open Godself up to hurt and pain. (As hard as that is to get our heads around).
And this day, Jesus sounds the most like one of us that he’s ever sounded. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Good Jew that he is, Jesus is quoting Psalm 22. Scholars will tell you that one way to think about this Word is that, quoting the first line of a psalm was a way to invoke the whole thing (a shorthand). And if you read all of Psalm 22, you see it doesn’t end with the Psalmist being forsaken. It ends in praise, with all creatures, living and dead, bowing down before a living God.
But, I know you’re saying…that’s cheating Preacher. So just taken on its own terms, Jesus’ crying out to God teaches us some important things. First, and most importantly, it tells us that when we fall on our knees in pain, when we get the phone call about our child at 3 a.m., when we hear about the plane crash, the doctor’s report, it tells us that when we cry out, we are acting like Jesus. We are being Christian. We don’t serve a keep it together and get over it kind of God. When we are backed into a corner and at the very end of our rope, we are acting like Jesus when we say, My God, My God, why?
Second, we learn that Jesus was not just impervious God wearing a human mask. This is proof that when God came to save us, He took on real pain, real hunger, real desperation, real loneliness. He felt it, for real. He’s not a god in disguise. He became one of us in every way so that he could love us in every way and save us in every way.
God knows what we are going through and he is going through it with us. Where was God when Jesus was suffering on the cross.? God was suffering on the cross too! Where is God when we feel god-forsaken? Suffering with us, catching every tear we cry, absolutely with us.
Jesus went to every God-forsaken place so that when we get there, we’ll find it’s not God-forsaken after all. When we get to our good Friday, in whatever awful form it takes, we will find our God has gone on ahead of us, setting a table in the presence of our enemies, God is right there too. This word says to us, no matter WHAT we are going through on our Golgotha, we have a God who completely knows how it feels. Who doesn’t just say, “Buck up, and get over it.” When we shake our fist at God in our very darkest hour, and we say, my God my God, why have you forsaken me? Why have you turned your back? we have a God who knows even what it feels like to be abandoned by God. We have a God who knows how it feels to be God-forsaken. And that’s how God can say, with a straight face, staring deep into our eyes, “Beloved, I will NEVER leave you or forsake you.” Amen.
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