Final
Words: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Mark
15:29-36a (Matthew 27:46)
March
15, 2015
Mark
S. Bollwinkel
In our Lenten study book Final
Words from the Cross (Abingdon 2013), Pastor Adam Hamilton reminds us that
those in the crowd who mock Jesus had just the night before celebrated
Passover. Passover, of course, was the
essential annual festival of the Hebrew people as they remembered the God who led
them from the bondage of slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. They went from an evening of joyous
celebration, songs of praise for the steadfast love of the Lord to become a
screaming mob hurling insults and taunts at an innocent man crucified by their
enemies.
These were the good and pious people
of Jerusalem who frequented the Temple.
They prayed for the coming of a messiah who would lead a revolution to
drive out the Romans from the occupation of the Holy Land. They put their trust in power and might and
expected their God to act accordingly.
That Jesus would be dying in shame and humiliation as a common criminal
was scandalous.
Are we so different? Don't we want God on our terms? And when God isn’t, we turn away?
Pastor Hamilton asks, "Do you
see yourself in the crowd?"...."it wasn't Jesus who was on trial, but
the human race...." (Hamilton p.
69)
That Jesus would quote from the
scriptures shortly after a brutal beating, leaving him just inches from death,
speaks of the depth of intimacy he had with the Hebrew Scriptures. It also describes his understanding of, and
shared experience with, the anguish of the deepest human pain.
Broken bodies and dreams are bad enough
but abandonment might be worse.
Institutionalized children will fail to
thrive if they do not come into regular human contact. Prisoners can only take so many days of
solitary confinement before they break emotionally. Most marriages do not end in divorce because
of violence or anger but the weight of growing isolation between two good
people that cannot be overcome.
Jesus will share birth, childhood, work,
laughter, tears, frustration and joy as a human being, but it may be in this
moment when he shares the deepest longing in abandonment that he might be most
human of all.
“Commentators have observed that the
record in Matthew and Mark is one the strongest proofs that we have an authentic
account of what took place on the cross.
For what reason would the founders of a new religion put such despairing
words in the mouth of their dying hero…unless that’s precisely what he said.” (Philip Yancy, The
Jesus I Never Knew, Zondervan, 1995, p. 201)
Even today we still think of someone
who dies a criminal’s death as a failure.
Yet those who knew the apostle Paul would later reflect about Jesus,
“Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of
them, triumphing over them by the cross.” (Colossians 2:15)
“The racist sheriffs who locked Martin
Luther King Jr. in the jail cells, the Soviets who deported Solzhenitsyn, the
Czechs who imprisoned Vaclav Havel, the Filipinos who murdered Benigno Aquino,
the South Africans who imprisoned Nelson Mandela, all these thought they were
solving a problem, yet instead all ended up unmasking their own violence and
injustice…” (Yancy p. 203)
In September 1940, during World War II,
Adolph Hitler’s German Luftwaffe air force mercilessly bombed civilian
populations in the United Kingdom, the city of London in particular, killing
43,000 in only nine months. The purpose
was to prepare England for invasion by demoralizing its people and defeating
their will to fight back. The result was
just the opposite.
During twenty years of what we call the
Vietnam War, the United States and its allies killed somewhere over 2 million
southeast Asians; Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians. Our air force dropped millions of pounds of
armaments in that war and on North Vietnam in particular, hoping in part to
demoralize its people and defeat their will to win. The result was just the opposite.
Two thousand years ago, agents of
one of the greatest empires in history colluded with local authorities to
crucify a threat to their political status quo. Pontus Pilate and the Sanhedrin thought that
the execution of the carpenter from Nazareth would be the end of his story. That it would finish off his movement. They put their faith in power, might and
force. The result of their violence was
just the opposite.
Here we are two thousand years later
honoring the death of that one single man.
And where is the Roman Empire?
Where is the South African empire of racial apartheid today? What became of the Third Reich, the
dictators of the 20th century?
Those who worship power, might and force are doomed to fail.
‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that
is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
Why?
That through his life, suffering and
resurrection Jesus would do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, remove the
last illusion of our separation from God which is what we call death.
“What changed history was the disciples’
dawning awareness (it took the Resurrection to convince them) that God himself
had chosen the way of weakness. The
cross redefines God as One who was willing to relinquish power for the sake of
love...Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called
Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.” (Yancy pp. 204-205)
Adam Hamilton reminds us that by
quoting the first verse of a hymn, what we call Psalm 22, everyone in hearing
distance would have also known how the song ended:
For he did not despise or abhor
the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me,
but heard when I cried to him.
The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the Lord.
May your hearts live forever!
All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the Lord;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him. (Ps
22:24, 26-27)
The song that Jesus quotes while
dying wasn't just for the crowd. It is
also for us. For anyone of us who is at
the end of our rope, for whom the pain is too much, for each of us who lives
with heartbreak. God understands the
darkness we walk through.
But it does not get the last word.
Maybe it takes those moments when
our resources are exhausted and everything we have tried has failed to finally
reach out to God on God's terms, not our own.....and in so doing discover the
power of love in our lives and for the world.
“God is not greater than He is in his
humiliation. God is not more glorious
than He is in his self-surrender. God is
not more powerful than He is in his helplessness. God is not more divine that He is in his
humanity” Jurgen Moltman (Crucified God,
Harper & Row, 1974, page 205).
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