March 6, Girl Scout Sunday, Fourth Sunday in Lent

Lesson: Mark 15.33-34

Sermon Title: My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me

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Introduction:

  1. The text today comes from Psalm 22.

    1. Let us read selected passages.

    2. Read vs. 1-8, 14-15, 19-31.

  2. David is thought to have composed this psalm at Mahanaim.

    1. This is the place where Jacob wrestled with the God.

    2. In this place Jacob was so abundantly blessed with a restored promise and a name change.

    3. David's though may be that if I wrestle with God as Jacob did will not I be also blest.

  3. Many bulls have encompassed me.

    1. Many are mine enemies.

    2. Absalom, Ahithophel and others who rose in rebellion against David.

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MAIN BODY:

  1. We come to the fourth word and hear the tortured cry of Christ "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

    1. Stanley Hauerwas writes on this word:

The Fourth Word: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (1)

The horror! The horror!" Kurtz's words from Conrad's Heart of Darkness sear our souls. We, that is, the survivors of the century past, believe we know horror. World War I, World War II, Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Rwanda, Hiroshima, September 11, 2001. Names for death, endless death, that name our history. We believe that if we know anything, we know horror--the darkness hidden in our determinedly superficial lives, lives calculated to deny the darkness of our death-drenched time.

It is not surprising, therefore, that of all the words of Jesus from the cross, we most identify with "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" We do so because we think we have some idea about what it means to be forsaken. In the face of terror surrounding our lives, God remains silent. Though we are a bit embarrassed by Jesus (whom we thought to have some special relation with God) venting his frustration with being so humiliated, we nonetheless find this cry of dereliction comforting. Maybe God does understand our suffering. Maybe God even suffers with us, which some seem to think is comforting given the fact it is very clear God is incapable of doing anything about our suffering.

    1. Hauerwas mentions one of the most desperate of circumstances which is also emphasized by Eli Wiesel

Elie Wiesel's firsthand account of his own experience in the camps, Night, chronicles a similar failure to make the meaninglessness of the Holocaust meaningful in any standard religious or philosophical way. (2)

A fellow inmate in Buchenwald, Akiba Drumer, whose traditional faith was eventually destroyed by the suffering around him, pronounces, "It's the end. God is no longer with us," and offers himself to the executioner when the selection comes.

The result of Wiesel's own confrontation with the horror of what is being done to him and to his people can only be expressed in a contradiction: "In spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart to that God in whom I no longer believed."

  1. Sometimes we feel like Jesus when he cried on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me."

Richard Foster, in his work, Prayer, comments: "You and I will pray this Prayer of the Forsaken if we seek the intimacy of perpetual communion with the Father. (3)

Times of seeming desertion and absence and abandonment appear to be universal among those who have walked this path of faith before us. We might just as well get used to the idea that, sooner or later, we, too, will know what it means to feel forsaken by God."

Foster continues: "The old writers spoke of this reality as Deus Absconditus - the God who is hidden....Have you ever tried to pray and felt nothing, saw nothing, sensed nothing? Has it ever seemed like your prayers did no more than bounce off the ceiling and ricochet around an empty room?...Sometimes it just seems like God is hidden from us. We do everything we can. And still there is nothing! It feels like we are 'beating on heaven's door with bruised knuckles in the dark' to use the words of George Buttrick...Every hope evaporates the moment we reach for it. Every dream dies the moment we try to realize it. We question, we doubt, we struggle. Nothing helps. We pray, and the words seem empty. We turn to the Bible, and find it meaningless. We turn to music, and it fails to move us. We seek the fellowship of other Christians, and discover only backbiting, selfishness and egoism."

  1. This has not been my experience.

    1. There are times in my life when I have felt abandoned.

      1. Abandoned by a father who died much to young.

      2. Abandoned by a mother who as too much into her own personal grief to spend much time with others who grieved.

      3. Abandoned by a wife who repeatedly said, after two children and 17 years of marriage, that, "She never loved me."

      4. Abandoned by colleagues who questioned my faith a orthodoxy.

      5. Abandoned by church members who wanted to "run the show," or others who could not "stand the heat in the kitchen."

    2. In all of these experiences with all their anxiety, disappointment, and grief there has never been a sense of abandonment from God.

      1. Why is this so?

      2. What do the scriptures say?

        1. Nehemiah 9.18-20; Hebrews 13.5: I will never leave you nor forsake you.

        2. John 10.27: My sheep hear my voice and follow me. No one will snatch them out of my hand.

        3. Romans 8.35-39: What can separate us from the love of God?

      3. In all of my life I have never been abandoned by the God who loves me and the Christ who died to save me! Thank You!!!

    3. So, what is going on here?

    4. Is there a way to understand that does justice to Christ and the plan of salvation.

    5. The Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world.

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  1. Much of the Psalm applies to David, some is messianic.

    1. Do the verses to which I cling also apply to Jesus on the Cross.

      1. Some were written before his life.

      2. Some where to be written after he ascended.

      3. Does it make a difference.

      4. The principles if they apply to you and me apply in all time, for they are timeless.

    2. But in all of there is in no sense a sense of abandonment.

      1. This is clear from vs. 19 to the end of the Psalm.

      2. What we have is not abandonment, but a cry that comes out of a set of circumstances.

    3. I have struggled with this passage, perhaps, more than any other.

      1. The Commentaries have not been that helpful

      2. In Adam Clarkes Commentary on the New Testament I discovered a possible alternative to abandonment of forsakeness.

Some suppose "that the divinity had now departed from Christ, and that his human nature was left unsupported to bear the punishment due to men for their sins." But this is by no means to be admitted, as it would deprive his sacrifice of its infinite merit, and consequently leave the sin of the world without an atonement. Take deity away from any redeeming act of Christ, and redemption is ruined. Others imagine that our Lord spoke these words to the Jews only, to prove to them that he was the Messiah. "The Jews," say they, "believed this psalm to speak of the Messiah: they quoted the eighth verse of it against Christ--He trusted in God that he would deliver him; let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him. (See Matthew 27:43). To which our Lord immediately answers, My God! my God! etc , thus showing that he was the person of whom the psalmist prophesied." I have doubts concerning the propriety of this interpretation.

Some have taken occasion from these words to depreciate the character of our blessed Lord. "They are unworthy," say they, "of a man who suffers, conscious of his innocence, and argue imbecility, impatience, and despair." This is by no means fairly deducible from the passage. However, some think that the words, as they stand in the Hebrew and Syriac, are capable of a translation which destroys all objections, and obviates every difficulty.

The words, taken in this way, might be thus translated: My God! my God! to what sort of persons hast thou left me? The words thus understood are rather to be referred to the wicked Jews than to our Lord, and are an exclamation indicative of the obstinate wickedness of his crucifiers, who steeled their hearts against every operation of the Spirit and power of God.

Through the whole of the Sacred Writings, God is represented as doing those things which, in the course of his providence, he only permits to be done; therefore, the words, to whom hast thou left or given me up, are only a form of expression for, "How astonishing is the wickedness of those persons into whose hands I am fallen!" If this interpretation be admitted, it will free this celebrated passage from much embarrassment, and make it speak a sense consistent with itself, and with the dignity of the Son of God.

That the words could not be used by our Lord in the sense in which they are generally understood. This is sufficiently evident; for he well knew why he was come unto that hour; nor could he be
forsaken of God, in whom dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. The Deity, however, might restrain so much of its consolatory support as to leave the human nature fully sensible of all its sufferings, so that the consolations might not take off any part of the keen edge of his passion; and this was necessary to make his sufferings meritorious. And it is probable that this is all that is intended by our Lord's quotation from the twenty-second Psalm. Taken in this view, the words convey an unexceptionable sense, even in the common translation.

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CONCLUSION:

  1. Deity is restrained.

  2. Humanity feels the brunt of the awful separation that will one day take place between the rebellious and the God of the universe.

  3. It is a difficult passage.

    1. I believe that we have wrestled with it honestly and have gone as far as we can, at this moment, go.

    2. Just remember that you are never abandoned nor forsaken.

Amen.

1. Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ, Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI. pp. 59-60

2. As quoted in Robert H. Hopcke, There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997), 247.

3. As cited by Ken Gire in Between Heaven and Earth (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 268.

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