Forsaken Together (Apr 7, Good Friday)
Readings
Psalm 22
Matthew 27:11–56
Silent Reflection
Remarks
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” … And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.
Matthew 27:46, 50 (ESV)
W H Y ?
Why is there suffering in this world? Why is there evil? Why do bad things happen? Not just in the abstract as a philosophical question, but in the particulars of our own lives: Why did my child die? Why did my dad leave? Why was my wife unfaithful to me?
Of all the questions, it is perhaps most distressing when unanswered, and yet least likely to have an answer.
Why questions for God litter the Scriptures.
Why do you look the other way? Why do you stand far off? Why do you cast us off forever? Why have you done evil to this people? Why do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts? Why are you sleeping? Why have you brought us here to die?
Asking why expresses our confusion, but also thickens it. Wouldn’t it be simpler if we just let it be? We ask anyway. We can’t seem to let it be. Maybe we’re not looking for an answer at all; maybe we’re making an accusation. Maybe we’re not asking a question. Maybe we’re pointing the finger. YOU, God…
Jesus (in)famously asked this question at his crucifixion.
Why have you forsaken me?
He’s quoting Psalm 22. But why quote this one? Surely he would have been aware of the witness of the other Scriptures. He had options.
“He will not leave you nor forsake you.”
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
Or why not Psalm 46?
“God is a very present help in trouble.”
I don’t think either the psalmist or Jesus expected a response when they said, “Why have you forsaken me?” The point wasn’t to get an answer, but to express anguish. Or anger. Or both. Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that the worst predicament the Jewish mind could conceive of wouldn’t be to suffer the wrath of God, but to be forsaken by God.
The significance of Jesus asking “Why have you forsaken me?” may not have a once-and-for-all answer, but there are postures we can take toward it.
We can approach it triumphantly, with idealism and optimism. God is omnipresent, as we know, so the forsakenness must be an illusion. He has conquered suffering and the only thing is to acknowledge it and it will dissolve like a bad lozenge. From a purely objective point of view, it may be true that there is nowhere that God isn’t. The trouble is that people aren’t objects; we’re subjects, and when we’re in the middle of subjective terrors like cancer or inexplicable sorrow or total disconnection from God, the experience of being forsaken really is very true and can’t simply be wiped away. The triumphalist approach to forsakenness is like telling someone in the middle of an asthma attack, “Hey, there’s air everywhere!”
We can also approach the question nihilistically, with cynicism and despair. It’s God that’s the illusion. Forsakenness is the only reality, so we should stop trying to make such a big deal of things that ultimately mean nothing. That’s fair enough, and it’s probably something that all of us at some point have sincerely wondered. But the danger of this approach is that if forsakenness is all there is, it may drain the significance and intensity of suffering, but it drains the significance and intensity of joy, as well.
I think, finally, we can approach it incarnationally. The suffering and grief and the experience of God’s absence are real, and yet so is the God who is there. And these are met up in the person of Jesus himself, hanging there on the cross, crying out “Eli, Eli!” The incarnational approach insists that what ultimately matters is that God suffers with you. In the incarnate crucifixion, God shows us He does indeed intimately know our suffering, our grief, and even our experience of forsakenness.
The incarnational response is not an answer in the sense that it explains these experiences. It explains nothing. But there are accounts everywhere that it has been a deep comfort for those who believe—God is with me. “I know,” he says. “I know. I suffered beside you. I know. I know. I love you. I know.”
The word that God has spoken in Jesus is divine sympathy. We see it and hear it throughout the Gospels: when he brought out wine at a wedding, when he had compassion on the tired, hungry, castaway crowds, when he insisted on the kids not being shooed away, when he got between an adulteress and her accusers, when he wept at seeing his dead friend, when he said “I thirst,” and when he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
The psalm continues, “But you, O Lord, do not be far from me!”
The question of why becomes a plea for where. In the face of anguish and suffering, the confused why on the lips of the psalmist becomes a prayerful yearning for what matters most: nearness. Maybe beneath the accusation “Why have you forsaken me?” we detect a more sensitive longing: “Where are you?” Why may never be answered, but where might.
For us, the answer to Jesus’s question is in his asking it. Where is God? He is here, suffering with us.
Silent Reflection
Response
When have you experienced God’s absence in your life? What was that like?
How have you experienced God’s nearness in your life? What was that like?