Forsaken
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
April 10, 2009—Good Friday
Mark 15:33-41

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, "Listen, he is calling for Elijah." And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, "Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down." Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, "Truly this man was God's Son!"
There were also women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.

I. BEGINNING

In the waning days of the Second World War, when the German army was pressing into service anyone who could carry a weapon, a teenager named Jürgen Moltmann found himself fighting in the war. It was not long before this inexperienced youth was captured in battle and wound up in an American POW camp.

In that camp, Jürgen had the chance to reflect on what was happening around him. His country was falling to pieces. The Thousand Year Reich had lasted but twelve and left untold devastation in its wake. And here he sat, a prisoner, caught up in this destructive conflict. And there it was in the midst of that captivity that he was given a Bible by an American army chaplain.

And reading that Bible, he came across the story of Jesus upon the cross, crying out in agony: "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" It was a feeling Jürgen knew well. That feeling of having been forsaken, rejected, cast off by God. It would be this verse, this statement--"My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"--that would shape Jürgen's whole approach to his Christian faith.

Jürgen would grow up to become one of the greatest theologians of the Twentieth Century, and this verse would be central to his understandings of Christ, the Trinity, the Resurrection, everything. This cry of anguish from the cross would be the cornerstone of a Theology.

Because in these four Aramaic or nine English words is a revelation about the deep mysteries of God.

II. The FORSAKEN ONE

For when we hear Christ's cry from the cross, we hear the words of one who is experiencing the most profound separation from God one can experience. The one who was the closest, the one in whom we see God in human fullness, felt as if God was far removed, as if God had forsaken him.

For the cross, a cruel method of Roman punishment and torture, was a shameful way to die. A death for those who were cast off from society--slaves, prisoners. Upon that cross, Christ experiences the full weight of the brokenness and misery of the world and the separation from God cannot be felt more keenly.

"My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"

III. The Forsaken Many

How often have we felt that way? There are often times throughout our lives where we feel the brokenness and misery of the world crushing in on us. Where the challenges of life weigh heavily upon us and we feel forsaken, abandoned by God. Perhaps it is in a time of grief. A time of mourning. After the death of a loved one. After the loss of a job. A crisis of faith. The pressures of work and the world. There are those times in which we feel that God is very far away and we cry out, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"

We know what Jesus was talking about.

We look around and see so many who seem to be forsaken and lost. So many who seem to be on the sidelines, rejected and cast off.

IV. The Death In God

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Paradoxically, those words of profound grief and alienation offer us our greatest comfort and hope. For in the death of Jesus on the Cross, we see not only the death of a human being, not only the death of the Messiah, not only the death of an innocent, but the death of God's child. Jesus understood himself to be the child of God when he prays to God in Gethsemane "Abba, Father." Of this Moltmann would write:

"This contradiction between his experience of himself and his experience of death is so profound that it has to be understood as the Godforsakenness of the Son of God. " [1]

He would understand this as an essential paradox, that the Son of God, one of the persons of the Trinity, should be "Godforsaken". This paradox should not be diminished by lessening the "Son" nature of Jesus, nor the depth of the forsakenness and suffering.

But it opens us up to understanding that at the death of Christ, God Godself experiences death within God's innermost being. This death does not simply happen to the human Jesus--it happens to the Divine Son. God experiences a death within the Godhead. One of the persons of the Trinity dies . This is not something that can be understood, only imagined. But one thing becomes clear, one thing that Moltmann had known for some time.

When Moltmann found himself on the front lines reading Mark's gospel from a Bible given him by that American chaplain, he understood that God is someone who really understands. God really understands grief--the grief of all the living who grieve death and alienation.

V. End

What this means for us today, as it meant for Jesus all those years ago, is that at those times when God seems farthest, when we feel alienated from and forsaken by God, is precisely the times when God is closest. The cross demonstrates to us that God is not removed from our suffering. God is in the suffering, experiencing within God's own self the death that we experience.

For Moltmann, Jesus' profound sense of having been abandoned by God is due paradoxically to the unprecedented closeness of God in the sufferings of Jesus. On one level the Father is distant, on another, he is very near. Jesus in his person, is the revelation of the grace of God, that God is close, not far.

And in that is our hope. God declares her solidarity with us in our living, in our suffering, in our dying. There is no sorrow, no grief, no brokenness that we can experience that takes place apart from God.

The cross looms large. It is the sign of our brokenness and pain. Our sorrow and grief. The sign of everything that is wrong with the world. But at the same time the cross is a reminder of Christ's presence with us, of God in the midst of the brokenness. And we are thus reminded that just as the Cross of Good Friday gives way to the Empty Tomb of Easter, so too can our pain, our brokenness, our sorrow, even our deaths, give way to the promise and hope of Resurrection.

Notes
[1] Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ (1990), p. 165-6.