45From the sixth hour until the ninth
hour darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice "Eli
And I'd guess it may feel like that as we stand on the edge of the unknown, as sight, sound, sensations desert us leaving us feeling very much alone...But we are not alone. Not for a moment - and neither is Jesus.
46About
the ninth hour,
Jesus
cried
out in a
loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?”
which means, “My God, My God, why have
you forsaken Me?” 47When some of those standing there heard this, they said,
“He is calling Elijah
This week we
are thinking about the power of last words, how we will hear them, replay them
again and again, to find and make new meanings that will give us strength in a
time of loss or separation.
In particular,
we are thinking about some of those words which the evangelists give Jesus as
they recount his passion. It’s worth noticing, perhaps, that there’s little
uniformity in the narrative as it appears from one gospel to the next...but
that each of the seven sayings which are recorded as Christ’s famous “last
words” has something important to say to us, two thousand years after the
event….just as those sayings made sense in the moment, when they seemed a
wholly reasonable response to the situation in which Jesus found himself.
They may not
always sound like good news but believe me, they are….offering light to travel by as
we walk the way of the cross and strain forward for the joy of Easter morning.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Hearing these
words spoken by Jesus from the cross, for a moment the world lurches and there
is nowhere safe to stand.
He has been so
close to God that he called him Abba – and even suggested that this closeness
was possible for us as well.
But now, it
seems, that God has joined the ranks of those whom Jesus believed were his
friends…Mad himself scarce...slipped off into the night to avoid trouble…
Why have you
forsaken me?
Dreadful,
unanswerable words. What was God thinking of, to desert his own beloved Son,
the sinless One
As Thomas
Morley’s beautiful motet “Nolo morten
“Father, all
things fulfilled and done according to your will I have”…Jesus has done everything right...not a single task left incomplete,and yet, here is
Jesus, forsaken.
If he, who is
one with God, feels so terribly alone, bereft and deserted at the hour of
death, how can we, in our human frailty, approach our own mortality with
anything but terror?
Taking our cue
from St John and St Paul, we would prefer to imagine that Jesus was so intent
on the glory ahead, or so fixed on the joy that was in him, that the actual
process of dying was almost immaterial.
If Jesus
experienced neither fear nor pain, that would offer us hope of an equally gentle transition. But this moment of bleak desolation is hard...hard for Jesus, hard for us.
But of course,
the whole point of the incarnation is that Jesus is not just fully divine but
also fully human.
Dying a
terrible death, replete with every kind of physical and mental suffering (that
state of being that Dame Cicely Saunders dubbed “total pain”) he demonstrates
conclusively God’s solidarity with humanity in every bit of the human
experience. Just as his birth was neither easy nor conventional, so his death
puts him outside society – and, for a time in extremis it feels as if it has
put him beyond even the comfort of God’s presence.
And I'd guess it may feel like that as we stand on the edge of the unknown, as sight, sound, sensations desert us leaving us feeling very much alone...But we are not alone. Not for a moment - and neither is Jesus.
Nothing can separate us from God's love. Neither life nor death nor anything else in all creation.
Nothing can put us beyond his reach.
Nothing can put us beyond his reach.
Not for Jesus,
nor for us...but that doesn’t change the impact of our feelings – nor the
impact of his. Our fears and our doubts are part of the sacrifice that he
offers on the cross, and in so doing he not only declares them acceptable (if
HE can wobble in his faith, then we know that he will understand our own lapses
of confidence, our own free-fall descent into the kind of uncertainty that
proclaims that “this was all folly), he also makes them ultimately powerless
over us.
My God, my God, why have your forsaken me – is a quotation, from
Psalm 22. We hear it, often, as the altars are stripped on Maundy Thursday….as
the tabernacle is emptied, the church’s heart ripped out, and we go together
into the darkness of Good Friday.
However, like
his Jewish hearers, like that crowd that milled around Golgotha, blood-thirsty
or respectful, Jesus knew that psalm moved ultimately from despair to hope and
resolution.
Though the
scornful cries “He trusted in God to deliver him. Let him deliver him if he
delights in him” seem to take us deeper into the darkness and desolation,
reminding us that for many life is indeed nasty, brutish and short; though the
psalm’s graphic images of a wasted body “poured out like water” and a broken
spirit, a “heart turned to wax” seem almost overpowering, yet there comes a
moment when the psalmist comes to his senses again. He remembers that with God,
past performance really does guarantee future results...and so, in a moment,
lament is turned to praise.
And that is a
gift to us all. Honesty demands that the pain and desolation must be
confronted andacknowledged, so that we need never feel ashamed if we feel ourselves cut off
from God at times of crisis.
But even in
the darkness there is a spark of light, though it may be so faint that we can
barely glimpse its gleam. We are never forsaken.This is the God who loves us so much that he allowed
himself to be separated even from his own being, going through those same
feelings of dereliction for us, so that we should never have to go through them
alone.
Dearest Lord,
whose Son endured the loneliness and darkness of the cross, so that we might
enjoy eternal fellowship with you, Grant that amid life’s shadows we might know
that we are never forsaken, but walk always in the light of your countenance,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
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