"Christ nailed up might be more
than a symbol of all pain.
He might in very truth
contain all pain.
And a man standing
on a hilltop
with his arms outstretched,
a symbol of a symbol,
he too might be a reservoir
of all the pain that ever was."
--John Steinbec
Today we stand in the middle of the seven last words. Three words have gone before and three words will come after. So today we stand at dead center.
The first word, “Father forgive them…” was addressed to God for us all. It is a word of inclusion because it takes us all in.
The second word, “Today, you shall be with in Paradise,” was spoken to a thief in answer to his cry, “Jesus remember me.” It is a word of compassion.
The third word, “Behold thy son, behold thy mother…” was directed toward his mother and toward John. He gave them to each other, and so this is a relational word.
This fourth word was addressed to God. But I think there is more here than just that. Certainly Jesus spoke to God. It is the only question that we find in the seven words. But it is also a chilling, frightening, bloodcurdling kind of a word. You know it. We’ve all said it a hundred times. “My God, my God why has thou forsaken me.” This is the question Jesus railed out to God. “Why?” It is a word of abandonment.
We’ve all asked this question. We’ve heard many other people ask this question, too. If we have ever lost a husband or a child or somebody who was special or the roof of our lives just caved in we have asked these words: “My God, my God why?”
If you have wandered through some fog of depression, some season in hell when the lights were out and you were trying to feel your way along—you’ve asked this question: “Why?”
If you have ever stood before someone or something that you couldn’t set right or heal or undo or just fix—then you have asked this question.
Just yesterday I had a funeral for a young man who was 34 years old. He died of a drug overdose after years of struggle and pain. I have known him since he was a little boy. And sitting out there were his bereft parents and a sad congregation of their friends and we were all asking that question: “Why?” It really is a word of abandonment.
Does this question have any place in church? Of course I would rather be dealing with something positive and sunny and happy. But I think there is some connection between the awful things that happen to us and this fourth word. Do the terrors and the despair and the pain and the abuse have anything to do with this man called Jesus? Can these words be really uttered by the Savior of the world?
But I think the church did not leave this fourth word out, but put it in intentionally when they wrote the gospels. Even the placement. I think this, too is intentional. When the church sat down and collected his words and wrote them down they knew what they were doing.
Outside the doors where they wrote a storm raged. Injustice raged. Unfairness raged. Hunger and poverty raged. The plague raged. Their little graveyard were dotted with all the names of the children they had lost and their husbands and wives and their neighbors.
And so they put these gloomy words into the book—because they had all asked that question: Why? This word from the cross is a cry of delirium. All of us have a pain threshold and there on the cross Jesus had found his. But I think it is more than just pain. It is cry of desolation and utter aloneness so deep and black that all he could say was: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani ?” My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?
Did you know that these words are found in the 22nd Psalm.? Jesus probably learned them as a little boy from his mother. Like the Psalmist he was calling out a question to his Father.
We have no idea what this fourth word means. But we do know it means that if he cried and really did suffer and if he felt the aloneness that we have felt—then this word really means we have been heard and cared for and, like him, we will find hope in the darkest places in our lives.
Some of our funniest stories have been written by a man named Peter De Vries. He wrote The Tunnel of Love and a great many other books. But sandwiched in between some of his comedies there is this serious book about a man named Wanderhope. He had a little daughter who has been diagnosed with leukemia. The book was written, I guess sixty years ago at a time when there were no cures for leukemia. And so this distraught father, Wanderhope asked his question, “Why?” over and over again. He kept asking why but no answer came. And so one day when her pain was so intense, the father in desperation went into a chapel and knelt down before the statue St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes and hopeless cases. And this is what he prayed:
“I do not ask for her life to be spared for me—but for her. Or give us a year. We will spend it
as we did the last—missing nothing. We will mark the dance of every hour between the snowdrop and the snow: the crocus to tulip to violet to iris to rose. We will note not only the azaleas crimson flower but the red halo at the base when her petals fall. We will prize the chrysanthemums which last so long, almost as long as paper flowers…We will seek out the leaves turning in the fall. Everyone loves the beauty of springtime but who loves autumn after the leaves have fallen? We will. We will note the lost yellows in that bush that spills over our neighbor’s stone wall. We will seek out all the modest subtleties so lost in the blare
of oaks and maples…When winter comes, we will let no snow fall ignored. We will watch again the first blizzard from her window like figures locked snug in a glass paperweight. ‘Pick one out and follow it to the ground!’ she will say again. We will feed the plain birds that stay to cheer us through the winter and when spring returns we shall be the first out, to catch the snowdrop’s first white whisper in the wood. All this we ask, with the remission of our sins, in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Not long after he prayed for his daughter, little Carol went into remission and he knew his prayers were answered. But the remission did not last long. And suddenly everything went crazy and she was so sick and the doctors shook their heads.
In the middle of all this madness on the way to the hospital one morning, he’d stopped and bought a little cupcake to take to her. She loved cupcakes. When he got to the hospital he found she had died and he was not even there.
The father just wandered around, in a daze, not knowing where he was. He still had her cupcake in his hand. He staggered outside and found himself on the steps of St. Catherine’s Church. Looking up, up, up over the door there was a stone carving of the Lord Jesus with his arms outstretched on a cross. He stared at the concrete Jesus for a long time. And then he took the cupcake and threw it as hard as he could. It hit the face of the crucified Jesus. Great blobs of icing began to drip down that face like tears and fell to the ground. And Wanderhope sat down on the steps and cried and cried and cried.
The writer, De Vries comments: Wanderhope had come to that ancient place where we all must come to. The alternative, he wrote, was the muzzle of a gun or the foot of the cross. The novel is autobiographical for the writer, De Vries himself lost a little girl and this story is really his story.
But let’s turn back to our text. We are told that some in the crowd misunderstood Jesus’ fourth word. He had said: “Eli…Eli…” and they thought he was praying to Elijah. And so the gospel says that a soldier, touched by the pain and pathos, took a spear and dipped a sponge into vinegar and sour wine and held it up to the parched lips. But others said, in derision, “Wait. Wait. Let’s see if his Elijah comes.” And they laughed and laughed.
Do you remember what happened next? The text says: “Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.” The Greek reads differently from the English words. The Greek says: “With a great shout he gave up the spirit.” And a soldier standing nearby had heard that shout before. It was the cry of a warrior coming back from battle after the war was over. Jesus died, not defeated and broken but with a victory cry. It was the cry the soldier had heard a hundred times. And that soldier said something so strange that those around him thought he had lost his mind. Looking up he said, “Surely this was the Son of God!”
What is this fourth word that came down from the cross? It is a word for the wounded. For anybody who has asked: “Why? Why? Why? No wonder the church, later linked what happened on that cross to those old words in Isaiah 53. “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried over sorrows…But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made was whole, and with his stripes we are healed.” (Isaiah 53. 4-6)
You see he can take our questions too. Like great blobs of cake we can even throw them at the cross. Jesus takes them one by one. And after all the question and the rage—the outstretched arms of Jesus still remain.
I close with the word of the Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner that commented on these words: “If you prayed like this, O Jesus, if you prayed in such agony, is there any abyss so deep that we cannot call out from it to your Father? Is there any despair so hopeless that it cannot become a prayer by being encompassed within your abandonment? Is there any anguish so numbing that it must no longer expect its mute cries to be heard amidst heaven’s jubilation?
(This sermon was preached at the First Presbyterian Church, {Pendleton, SC, March 11, 2018)
--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com
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