ISAIAH 52:13-53:12

PSALM 22:1-11

PHILIPPIANS 2:5-11

MARK’S Passion Gospel

Sermon - April 9, 2006

The Empathy of God

God did not, as it were, sit in the safety and luxury of “the owner’s box” far above the muddy playing field on which we human beings live our lives, looking at us through binoculars.

No.

God got right down on the field with us, in the mud and the glory, with the camaraderie and with the pain and the anguish. Today, we especially remember the pain, the many different kinds of pain our Lord and Savior experienced as part of the fullness of his personal experience of being human.

God does not merely sympathize with us when we experience pain. God empathizes with us.

If you have ever suffered physical pain, Jesus understands. He’s been there.

Mel Gibson’s movie last year reminded us of Jesus’ suffering in excruciatingly vivid ways. We can also pray before the Stations of the Cross and know, really know, that Jesus understands any pain we may experience.

If you have ever suffered the emotional pain of being betrayed by someone you trusted, Jesus understands. He’s been there.

The newly-discovered and self-serving so-called Gospel of Judas would have us believe otherwise – of course – but the name Judas is synonymous with “betrayer” for a reason. If you have had a “Judas” in your life, Jesus understands. He’s been there.

If you have ever experienced the emotional pain of your best fried denying ever knowing you, Jesus understands.

The fact that Jesus knew ahead of time that Peter would “chicken out” didn’t make it any easier to take when the moment came. It never does. Jesus understands. He’s been there.

If you have ever suffered the emotional pain of being deserted by other friends in your hour of greatest need, Jesus understands that too.

How great the crowds had been on Palm Sunday! And how enthusiastic the men closest to him had been just the night before at the Seder. The world loves a winner, doesn’t it? But who is strong and loving enough to stick with you when you are really, really down? If you’ve ever gone through that, Jesus “gets it.” He’s been there.

If you’ve ever experienced the intellectual pain of being misunderstood and bitterly opposed by those who should have embraced you, Jesus understands. When the High Priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah?”, he posed the question not with hope and joy, but with the carnivorous eagerness of a prosecuting attorney who thinks he may get his “perp” to fatally incriminate himself.

If you’ve ever wanted to say to people who deeply opposed you, “You just don’t understand,” yeah, Jesus has been there.

And if you’ve ever been put down and hurt by people who, honestly, are not worthy to shine your shoes, that’s something else Jesus has experienced.

“Hail, King of the Jews,” the Roman soldiers shouted sarcastically after they jammed a crown of thorns onto his head. This was not the world’s elite who were mocking him, but those hardened, cruel executioners unlucky enough to draw duty on the fringes of the Roman world as all-too-busy suppressors of Rome’s most chronically rebellious subjects.

What did they know about the Jews, or Kingship, or Who He Really Was?

If you’ve suffered mightily at the hands of those with far less “class” than you, well, Jesus gets that, too.

If you have ever felt spiritually isolated, devastated, abandoned by God, feeling left to “hang out to dry” when you most needed comfort and strength and the assurance of God’s presence, yes, even that Jesus has also been through. Without that ultimate experience of spiritual isolation, Jesus’ experience of human pain would have been incomplete.

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

You could say, perhaps, that “These are the words they couldn’t keep out of the Bible.”

Is this what you expect the ultimate hero to say at the moment of his ultimate test? Isn’t it easier to look up to the triumphant dying Jesus in John, who says of his mission on earth, “It is finished.” Isn’t it more reassuring to listen to the serene dying Jesus in Luke, who says “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.”

Six of what are known as “The Seven Last Words from the Cross” come from Luke or John. In Matthew’s Gospel and in Mark’s Gospel Jesus is recorded as saying only one sentence while on the cross:

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

All his life, Jesus, God the eternal Son incarnate, as a male Palestinian Jew of 2,000 years ago, had been in instantaneous and profound intercommunion with God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. Even in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus prayed for “Plan B,” the news that there could be no other way to save the world except by his suffering and death was tempered by the One whose non-response was delivered with his tender love.

But now, all the other pains – physical, emotional, intellectual – had been delivered in great, mountainous heaps already, but one more was added: being utterly cut off from the Father Almighty, so that Christ might understand and relate when human beings in anguish merely feel forsaken by God.

Christ really was.

And God the Father had to hear that cry of utter anguish and do the hardest thing he had ever done: nothing.

Only then would Christ’s experience of empathy with suffering humanity be complete.

And it was.

He understands our every pain, every sorrow, every fear. He experienced so many of them.

May we, then, pray with confidence not to some distant, impassive, immovable deity but to the living, passionate and compassionate Emmanuel, God-with-us, who longs to love us, liberate us, heal us, transform us.

And even as Christ experienced our pains and our mortality, may we come to experience Christ’s extraordinary new life and unconquerable Easter love and Easter joy.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church