Good Friday, 2004

The Fourth Word from the Cross

The mightiest empire in the history of the world was about to destroy a man who was convicted of aspiring to be king of perhaps 1 or 2% of its territory, as easily as a man might squash a bug which was sitting motionless in plain sight in the middle of the floor.

That was the charge hung over his head: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” more than enough of a charge to get the wandering preacher from Galilee stepped on by the Roman Empire. In fact, it was far easier than most of these executions: his own religious hierarchy had its goons arrest him, with only fleeting resistance from just one of his followers, and turn him over to the Roman authorities as a threat to the established order.

They were right about that.

In fact, he was not only a threat to the established order, Jesus of Nazareth was also a threat to the established ways of challenging or dissenting from or separating oneself from the established order.

In contrast to the Zealots, guerrilla warriors trying to push the Romans out of the Holy Land, Jesus was a pacifist. That perplexed people. In contrast to the community in Qumran which wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, he did not form an “elite” company of the “purified” and hole up in a commune in an isolated area waiting for “the war of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness;” he wandered around the countryside with an eclectic band of followers and reached out to and hung out with—people who were anything but elite or purified or in isolated areas. That angered people.

In contrast to the Pharisees, he did not get legalistic about the letter of the religious rules and set up a hierarchy based on education, and he emphasized grace and second chances. All that astonished people.

Unlike John the Baptist, he emphasized the good news of God’s liberation of humanity more than judgment and wrath. That left even John wondering if Jesus really was the One John had been sent to prepare for.

Unlike all of them, he spoke on his own authority and had what seemed like the ultimate chutzpah: to forgive sins. This appalled people.

And also unlike all of them, some of his best-known words were not words of self-confidence which trumpeted his sureness of God’s favor towards him.

In fact, his only words while dying, according to the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, were ones which must have profoundly puzzled and saddened the very few of his followers who were brave enough to be near the cross and hear them.

After all the sublime, glorious, inspiring, powerful things he had said, his only words from the cross according to those two Gospels were these: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

If we only had Mark and Matthew for Gospels, today’s service would be a lot shorter. And maybe a lot more depressing without the words of pardon, of invitation, of comfort, of accomplishment and of peace we hear from Jesus thanks to Luke and John.

Or, maybe this cry of desolation is not so depressing after all. Maybe, in fact, it is in this word from the cross that we can experience the Savior, the Son of God, as one to whom we can truly relate—not as a king in the clouds in a stained-glass window, but as a human being about to die while experiencing the deepest spiritual anguish a human being can feel.

This fourth word from the cross has Jesus at his most vulnerable, at his most human. You or I could never promise paradise to someone. If we announced while dying, “it is finished,” it would sound grotesquely arrogant. We could pray for forgiveness of our enemies and assign someone to care for those who survive us, but those words show a person who still has power and initiative. You or I could say, “I thirst” and show vulnerability, but mainly at the physical level.

To say, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” shows complete and utter spiritual and existential vulnerability.

Many people, perhaps some here today, have felt this way, however they have expressed it—perhaps only to themselves.

Jesus said it out loud and to the world.

Anyone who has experienced spiritual despair and depression can hear or read these words and say, “Jesus understands what I’m going through (or what I’ve been through) because he felt it too! Jesus won’t tell me just to ‘get over it’ or ‘pull myself together’ or all the other easy clichés spouted by those who don’t understand. Jesus understands.”

And that, I think, is the point. Christians believe that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human. For him to experience the fullness of humanity, Jesus had to experience the “lowest lows” of human life emotionally (betrayal, denial and abandonment by his friends), physically (the excruciating pain inflicted on him by the Romans as so exhaustingly documented in Mel Gibson’s movie)—and spiritually.

After being inextricably connected to God the Father not just for his lifetime as Jesus of Nazareth but since before the beginning of time, God the Son suddenly experienced being “out of contact with Headquarters” for the first and only time, unsupported by the Source of Life, utterly, terrifyingly isolated.

For us, who are only aware of God’s care for us and desire to communicate with us periodically, unless we are one of the great mystics, experiencing spiritual desolation and depression is devastating. How much more must this desolation, this isolation have shocked and devastated Christ who was one with God 24/7? This was not an “eclipse” for Jesus, as it might be for us, the spiritual equivalent of the sun’s light being blocked for a time. This is more like an earthquake which tears apart an entire planet. Analogies are puny when trying to describe what the spiritual isolation of God the Son from the rest of the Holy Trinity was like. But it happened. However long it lasted, it happened, and Christ experienced the depths of spiritual despair.

And on the third day he rose again.

How much more will Easter mean to us if we understand the depth from which he rose? How much more Easter can we experience by his grace if we appreciate there is no spiritual depth we can fall to which Christ cannot understand or will not reach down into so as to bring us up and out?

This is a Savior who has suffered in every way. This is a Savior who can empathize with us in any suffering we can experience. This is a Savior who will not forsake us.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church