Feeling Forsaken
Christ's cry of rejection becomes our anthem of resurrection.
Here's a lightly edited version of my Good Friday sermon from last night's Seven Last Words service. I hope your Holy Week has been blessed and that you can worship the resurrected Christ in worship tomorrow.
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)
In their quest for imperial power, the ancient Romans used terrorizing tactics to subdue the people they conquered. Specifically, they perfected the slow and terrible death by crucifixion. Much like the lynching tree in our own recent history, when it came to death by crucifixion, public cruelty was the point.
Yet despite how often they employed it, the Romans found crucifixion a distasteful thing about which to speak. Death on a cross was reserved for outlaws, rebels, and the enslaved. To a people who valued strength, wealth, and domination, those who were sentenced to this gruesome death were not worth commemorating. The crucified, then, occupied a strange place: on the one hand, their bodies became spectacles, broadcasting the empire’s violent warning far and wide; on the other, their names were deemed too worthless to utter, much less remember. The crucified were thoroughly, intentionally, and purposefully forsaken.
This context makes it highly improbable that we know Jesus’ final words as recorded by Matthew. Unlike the countless others whose dying agony was never remembered, in these verses we learn that Jesus cried out to God from the cross about being forsaken. What does it mean to be forsaken? We could attempt a definition. We could pile up lists of similar words: forgotten, abandoned, betrayed. But forsaken is one of those words which we feel before we define. Is it possible that anyone here does not know the feeling of forsakenness? Forsakenness is a child who leaves, never to come home; a spouse who slowly drifts away despite your best attempts; a workplace which persistently overlooks your achievements; a society built on the lie that some of us are more human than others of us. The feeling of forsakenness creeps up on us unexpectedly and we too cry out as the desperation of our situation becomes clear.
And if we might attempt some honesty on this Good Friday night, we each know what it is to forsake. To be the forsake-er. We have not only been left, we have also been the leavers. Yes, we know what it is to be betrayed and abandoned, but any honest reckoning must admit that we have been the disciples betraying our Lord. If something in us echoes at Jesus’ cry of dereliction as he hangs from that cursed tree, then we must also identify with the many of Jesus’ friends and followers whose fear kept them from hearing these last, gasped words.
Our common experience is characterized by the fear of forsakenness. As a child, when my family would travel from our small town to a large city, I found myself afraid of being left behind in the back seat of a taxi, on the platform of a subway station, in the lobby of a hotel. There was nothing rationale about this; my parents and sister would have never left without me and, on the off chance that we ever got separated, they’d have moved heaven and earth to find me. And yet, the world’s fractures had worked themselves into my imagination and manifested in this irrational fear. Though the experiences show up differently for each of us, the feeling of forsakenness and the remorse over our own forsaking are ones we hold in common with one another. Our sin has fractured our attachment to God making us vulnerable to being forsaken and being forsake-ers.
It is tempting to look away from Jesus’ quivering body. Sweat and blood obscure his sight. His lungs heave and his lips are cracked. Like the Romans, this spectacle embarrasses us, or it should. Why, then, are some of us drawn to our suffering Savior? In part it must be that when Jesus declares his God-forsakenness on the cross, words that history should have immediately forgotten, he is doing far more than narrating his own desolation. His cry is ours. His anguish is ours. His desperation is ours. On the cross, we find that God entered our forsaken state and experienced it more thoroughly than any of us ever will.
How have you been forsaken? Are you walking the path through desolation’s deathly valley? You are not alone. Despite its horror, Jesus’ forsaken cry is one of solidarity. He knows your grief, your loss, your pain. The Savior who suffered the lash, the thorns, the nails, the jeers, this suffering Savior knows your suffering. He is with you in your suffering. You are not alone.
Oh, but Jesus does more than identify with your forsakenness. Though he is a companion in the valley of the shadow of death, he will not leave us there. Instead, Jesus climbed Golgotha’s cross to rescue us from our God-forsakenness by submitting to everything which had separated us from our God and his love. God never abandoned us, but in our sin, we lived as though he had. And so, as the apostle Paul wrote in 2 Cor. 5:21, “God made the one who knew no sin to be sin for us.”
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is the cry of the one person who truly knew the terror of being forsaken. By taking our sin onto his body, by absorbing the devil’s schemes, but succumbing to death itself, Jesus fell into God-forsakenness so that we never would. His cry is more than tender empathy, though it is that and we must never forget it. Even more, in Jesus’ desperate plea we hear the first notes of our salvation. His cry of forsakenness becomes our song of forgiveness. His cry of suffering becomes our refrain of salvation. And at the risk of moving too quickly from Friday to Sunday, his cry of rejection becomes our anthem of resurrection.
So, listen closely to the solitary testimony from the cross tonight. Do not look away. See your brother Jesus draw near. And rejoice, even on this night, even from the shadow of the cross, that your forsaken Savior has rescued you into the arms of your Father who will never, ever let you go.
(Photo: Chris F.)