Last
Sunday, many of us heard the Passion of Jesus according to the Gospel of Mark
which included this,
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. (Mark 15:33-37)
Christian
Choate’s body was discovered near Gary, Indiana one summer day. He was buried
in a shallow grave under a slab of concrete behind the trailer where he once
had lived. He had actually died two years earlier. He was only 13.
Those
were thirteen years of misery. Years of isolation and neglect. Years of verbal
and physical abuse at the hands of his father and step-mother. He lived with
them because his mother and her boyfriend had been accused of molesting him.
He
was kept home from school and home schooled. The essays his step-mother asked
him to write are heart-breaking. She asked to write about "Why do you want
to play with your peter? Why do you still want to see your mom? Why can't you
let the past go? What does it mean to be part of a family?"
Christian
spent much of the last year of his life locked in a three-foot-high dog cage,
with little food and drink and few opportunities to leave. He was let out
briefly to clean and vacuum. And he endured savage beatings from his father.
One
night in April of 2009, Christian was too weak to keep his food down. His
father beat him to the point of unconsciousness, then locked his limp body in
the cage. The next morning, his sister Christina found him dead.
Christian
wrote of why nobody liked him and how he just wanted to be liked by his family.
He stated that he wanted to die because nobody liked the way he 'acted.'
Christian's writings detail a very sad, depressed child who often wondered when
someone, anyone, was going to come check on him and give him food or liquid.
Christian often stated he was hungry or thirsty.
But
Elijah did not come for Christian. And we have no knowledge of his hearing God
or being aware of God’s presence. Given the constraints on his life, we don’t
even know if he knew enough to cry out, "My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?"
It's a story that haunts me and has become a sort of test case or talking about God. Any god-talk worth the trouble has to take this story and the myriad other stories of human suffering into account.
"My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
They are the most disturbing of the words Jesus spoke from the cross. But, for me, they are also hopeful. The truth is I often find it hard to believe in God.
Much god-talk strikes me as little more than sentimental fancy. Talk of god in
a baby’s smile or the beauty of nature doesn’t quite cut it. Generic talk of
“the Holy” or “the Sacred”? I don’t know what that means. Even talk of god as
love, by itself, seems to me to too easily slip into sentimentality. All such
talk falls flat in the face of the horror of Christian Choate’s story. Or the
realities of Syria, the Congo, or Parkland, Florida.
But,
this is different. From the cross Jesus cried with a loud voice, "My God,
my God, why have you forsaken me?" What are we to make of that? I want to
suggest that there are at least a couple of things we can say.
Jesus,
in the fullness of his humanity, experiences the horror of being betrayed,
denied, and abandoned by his friends and rejected by his people. Jesus
experiences all the torture, terror, and tragedy that humanity inflicts upon
itself when it turns from God.
And,
mystery of mysteries, Jesus, who knew such intimacy with the One he called
‘Father,’ experienced the awful, bewildering silence of God. Even as we
remember that Jesus cried out using the worship language of his people as found
in Psalm 22, there is no escaping that it was a cry of anguish. We dare not try
to get around that.
But
there is a second thing. In Jesus, we affirm that God’s very self entered into
the darkest depths of human experience. As Madeleine L’Engle wrote,
For Jesus, at-one-ment was not only being at-one
with the glory of the stars, or the first daffodil in the spring, or a baby’s
laugh. He was also at-one with all the pain and suffering that ever was, is, or
will be. On the cross Jesus was at-one with the young boy with cancer, the young
mother hemorrhaging, the raped girl [and at-one with Christian Choate and his
sister. And even with the broken tortured spirits of their parents]. We can
withdraw, even in our prayers, from the intensity of suffering. Jesus, on the
cross, experienced it all. When I touch the small cross I wear, this, then, is
the meaning of the symbol.
The
cross is what makes it possible to believe in God at all. That is on of the
reasons this Friday is good.
William
Temple, who was Archbishop of Canterbury during the first years of WWII, wrote
in Christus Veritas,
The revelation of God’s dealing with human sin
shows God enduring every depth of anguish for the sake of His Children. . . All
that we can suffer of physical or mental anguish is within the divine
experience. . . .He does not leave this world to suffer while He remains at
ease apart; all suffering of the world is His.
Temple
goes on to claim, “Only such a God can be God of the world we know.” Only such
a God can be God in a world that includes multiple stories like that of
Christian Choate. Only such a God can be God of our own stories.
"My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Let’s
be clear. This is not Jesus vs God. This is not God the Father torturing Jesus
so he won’t have to torture us. The God we know through Jesus is not like
Christian Choate’s father. This is God, the Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit – working in harmony to address the deepest, darkest depths of
human need to bring forgiveness and healing and the promise of restoration.
And
we know – thanks be to God, we know – that whatever Jesus experienced in his
cry of dereliction, he did not despair and God did not abandon him. We know the
rest of the story. We do not need to pretend on Good Friday that we don’t know
what happens on Easter Sunday. We know that God was in Christ reconciling the world.
Through the cross and resurrection God has come to transform the torture,
tragedy, and terror.
(To
be continued on Saturday with Of First Importance)
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