H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
March 25, 2001
The Cry: "Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?"
Text: Matthew 26:36-44
There was this cry from the cross, a terrible cry,
perhaps a cry we all of us make, if only to ourselves:
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
It is the cry of despair, of meaninglessness: When we wonder if anything
makes sense, wonder if God is really there, wonder if there is any reason to
keep going, wonder if there is any reason to keep on living by the values of a
God we cannot see, a God who seems terrifyingly powerless or absent when the
worst happens.
Anne Lamott has a friend who says sometimes our mind is like a bad
neighborhood we shouldn’t try to enter alone. Here is the gospel: There is no
part of our mind we have to enter alone. Christ has been there before.
Jesus of Nazareth, who lived in the most extraordinary sense of God-belovedness,
also experienced the darkest of nights, the night of God-forsakenness. Peter
Kreeft writes of the Incarnation:
He came. He entered space and time and suffering. He came, like a
lover . . . . He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives, like
water. Are we broken? He is broken with us. Are we rejected? . . . He
was despised and rejected of men. . . . Do we weep? . . . He was a
"man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." . . . Does he
descend into all our hells? Yes. In the unforgettable line of Corrie Ten
Boom from the depths of the Nazi death camp, "No matter how deep
our darkness, he is deeper still."
This cry marks the deepest pitch of darkness. At this moment he did not know,
could not have known, what would happen with his death: Whether there would be
any vindication of his life or of his cause, the kingdom of God; whether his
death would be part of God’s redemption of the world or whether his life would
become one more nameless body thrown away to rot; whether beyond his last breath
he would land in the arms of God; whether there was anything to this spiritual
hope called resurrection.
He did not know, he could not have known. If Jesus entered fully into our
humanity, he entered fully into our not-knowing. So his cry was a real
cry: "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?" The Lenten sign for today is the crown of thorns, an apt one for this
word from the cross. It depicts not only physical suffering, but also mental and
spiritual suffering.
I
This cry is Matthew’s only word of Jesus from the cross. Today we must
consider it alone, for one cannot make this cry with any other more comforting
words in sight.
The book of Hebrews contains in its earliest manuscripts a phrase which was
later changed because it made us too uncomfortable. Hebrews 2:9 says: Choris
theou "far from God, he might taste death for everyone."
The word choris, "far," was changed to charis,
"grace." It now reads in most translations: "By the grace
of God he might taste death for everyone."
We could not bear the thought of Jesus being far from God, so we changed the
word. But at that moment on the cross Jesus, who had been so close to God,
experienced being far from God and cried, "My God, why hast thou forsaken
me?"
In Matthew the passion account begins and ends with cries, cries like
bookends. The first one in the garden of Gethsemane where Jesus cries: "My
Father, my Abba, if it be possible, remove this cup; but not my will, thine be
done." Three times he cries out this agonized cacophony of a cry: The
intimate address, "My Abba"; the agonized petition,
"Remove this cup"; then the yielding abandonment into the providence
of God, "Not my will, thine be done."
He has taken three disciples to the garden, the same three whom he took to
the Mount of Transfiguration, where they saw him gleaming with the glory of God
and heard God say, "This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased." Now
they see Jesus in agony over his approaching death, and he tells them, "My
soul is crushed to the point of death." They hear his cry; three times he
cried it.
So the passion account begins with a cry in the garden and ends with a cry
from the cross: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
There is a Jewish commentary on Deuteronomy 3:25, where Moses cried out to
God to let him enter the promised land. It says that prayer has ten names, and
the first name is "cry."
II
What can we do with this cry? Is not one of our most primal fears the fear of
forsakenness? Forsakenness by others, by God? It is woven throughout scripture.
I did a computer search on the word "forsaken":
Sixteen times: "God’s people have forsaken God."
Fourteen times; God saying, "If you forsake me, I will forsake
you."
Thirteen times: "If you forsake God, God will bring judgment."
Twelve times; the promise of God: "I will never leave you or forsake
you."
Six times; the plea: "God, do not forsake me, do not hide your face
from me."
Three times; the vow: "Lord, we will not forsake you."
Two times: "The Lord has forsaken us."
One time: "Why do you forsake us?" (Lamentations 5:20).
One time: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
(Psalm 22:1).
One time; from Jesus’ lips: "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?; My
God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?"
How deep our fear of forsakenness, of being forsaken by others and by God! We
are dealing with the profoundest of pain, psychologically and spiritually.
On the cross Jesus entered even into the experience of God-forsakenness so
that even there we will not be alone. He descended even into the hell of
meaningless to be with us there and lead us from that dark prison into the
light.
Martin Luther looked at this cry from the cross and sat uncomprehendingly
before it. "God forsaken of God?" he wrote. "Who can comprehend
it?"
In Bach’s masterpiece, The St. Matthew Passion, whenever the
baritone soloist sings Jesus’ words, there is a soft "halo" of
strings surrounding his words, a musical "halo" depicting his divinity
-- all except when Jesus utters "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani." There
the violins, violas and cellos are removed. Here was Jesus completely human,
stripped of all divinity.
All life long he lived in the immediacy of God’s presence.
"Abba," he called God, with the trust, intimacy and confidence of a
child to a perfectly loving parent. Even when he realized his people had turned
against him and his mission was rejected by the leadership of his people, he
prayed this prayer:
I thank thee, Abba, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid
these things from the wise and understanding, and hast revealed them to
babes. Yes, Abba, for such was thy gracious will (Matthew 11:25-26).
Now he is willing to suffer God-forsakenness for us -- not knowing whether
this night would ever turn to day.
There are those who try to soften the agony of the cry saying, He is quoting
Psalm 22, and Psalm 22 ends with an exclamation of trust. By quoting verse 1,
they say, he was returning to all the verses of the psalm. This may well have
been the faith of Jesus at that moment; but it was faith, not knowledge.
At that moment he did not know, could not have known.
Tillich seeks to underline the unbroken trust of Jesus at that moment by
saying Jesus still cried, My God, my God. But that moment he did
not know, could not have known. He, as we all, must walk by faith, not by
sight, by faith without the support of feeling or proof or spiritual experience.
In Psalm 22 the psalmist cries, "I am a worm, not a man." There are
moments in life we can be reduced, feel reduced, to something less than human.
I remember a Sunday morning in Louisville with a man about my age named
David. He was a decorated Vietnam veteran, a helicopter pilot. He had suffered,
as the other soldiers of that war, not only the terrors and traumas of war but
the trauma of coming home to a nation who could not welcome him home because we
were so divided about the war. So thirty years after the end of the war we held
a Sunday morning worship service for Vietnam veterans, seeking to provide a
spiritual homecoming for soldiers and some kind of healing for us all so deeply
hurt by that war.
Our church had been a leader in peace and justice work in Louisville. We had
sponsored peace conferences. We had invited Daniel Berrigan, controversial
Jesuit priest, to speak. But we were a community of reconciliation, and
we wanted also to honor the soldiers who had done their duty to their nation and
had incurred great suffering in the process.
The day before the worship service we had gone to the Veterans’ Day
festivities downtown to give out flyers inviting them to the worship service and
Sunday dinner. There you saw the most amazing collection of humanity: Men on
Harleys and men in wheelchairs, men maimed in body and soul, some with long hair
and tattoos, others crew cut in uniform, all bearing scars of one kind or
another from the war.
We asked David to take part in the service, and if he wished, to wear his
uniform. He came in uniform, bearing his medals, the first time they had been
out of the box in thirty years, he said.
Before the service we walked past the communion table. He pointed me to the
open Bible and turned to Psalm 31 and pointed to verse 11. I read:
I am the scorn of all my adversaries,
a horror to my neighbors,
an object of dread to my acquaintances;
those who see me in the street flee from me.
I have passed out of mind like one
who is dead
I have become like a broken vessel.
That’s how he felt; he had felt that for thirty years. After the service
and after the church dinner which followed, he said, with tears running down his
cheeks, "I’ve been waiting thirty years for this."
I learned last year that a few years ago he committed suicide. Since the war
more soldiers have died prematurely than died in the war itself. Perhaps he
never quite escaped the darkness of Psalm 31.
But I hope and I pray that somewhere in the darkness he met the one who
cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" and that Jesus led
him all the way home to God.
We have in Jesus a Savior who has come all the way, endured everything, to
meet us in the darkest possible night and lead us to day.
It may be pitch black. The night may last far longer than you are able to
fathom. But there’s a hand there in the darkness, the hand of one who knows
the heights of God-belovedness and the depths of God-forsakenness, who cried
"Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" and who has descended into hell to take
your hand.
There are days we are not so much interested in the question, "Is there
life after death?"as the question, "Is there life after hell?" --
the hell we are experiencing here .
I do not know a greater darkness than the darkness of forsakenness, of
despair, of loss of meaning, of being cut off from others and from God. Jesus
has gone even there, endured even that, so that even there he will be with us,
take our hand, and lead us from that dark prison into freedom and into the
light.
First Peter 3:19 says in an inscrutable passage that at his death Jesus
entered into the realm of the dead and preached to the spirits in prison,
leading them from darkness and death to light and life.
He is preaching still.
Return to Main Sermons Page
