a homily for Good Friday

Text: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

[This was my reflection for Word 4 in our eccumenical Good Friday service using the last 7 words format.]

Perhaps no line in scripture is more troubling than this. It is the single audible cry in Mark (and Matthew): “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Here, Jesus quotes psalm 22 in what seems like a pretty appropriate way.  It sounds at once like a prayer for help and an authentic cry out for saving. It forces us to wonder about Jesus. Did He lose faith on the cross? Did He think GOD would save him? Did He not know what was happening? For the Modernist, this line of questioning is frightening. Because it inevitably leads to doubts about Jesus and the foundation of their faith: that Jesus is in fact definable.

For others, hearing Jesus’s cry is actually natural and comforting. It is, essentially, our cry of confusion and frustration. Where do our minds go in tragedy but to “Where is GOD?” What has GOD done—or in absence, what has GOD neglected? “Haven’t I been faithful?” we ask.

How incredible that Jesus asks these same things, feels that same way: frightened, confused, angry, and a little bit selfish. Isn’t that the nougat center? That it is at least a little bit selfish to ask this of GOD? That in asking “why me?” we reveal our own selfishness?

I for one am comforted by Jesus’s question: this moment, much like those outbursts of irritation or pity that come throughout Mark’s gospel betrays Jesus’s apparent stoicism and reveals His true humanness.

And most human of emotions is fear.

That Jesus may have felt afraid gives gravity to His repeated refrains that we “fear not”. His most common statement is, after all, that. “Don’t be afraid.” Now we know that he knows fear. And to know fear is to know the human condition. And to know the human condition is to know us.

The flip side of this is that we might better know GOD in sending Jesus among us! But it carries with it wider knowledge. To know someone better is to increase our love for them. And one of the teachings at the Temple on Tuesday night is that the Great Commandment is to love GOD and our neighbor: that Torah hangs from these two.

So Jesus, in coming to know us, increases our knowledge and love of Him and our neighbors! His cry, that seemingly selfish and fearful cry reveals how very important Jesus is to GOD’s reconciling plan, and how important our common humanity is to it as well.