By Such Stripes Are We Healed
by Jack Shaver
©The United Church of Canada, 1985
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-88622-196-X
7M/12/85/APL
Used with Permission
The Third Sunday of Lent
God is in God-forsakenness
Mark 15: 33-39
Throughout this Lenten study we keep talking about reversals and contradictions and things that turn into their opposites. Yet they are central to the Christian faith. We need to keep talking about them because any old contradiction is not an expression of the Christian faith. Nor is the Christian message gibberish. There is one Christian contradiction, and it is profoundly meaningful. All the Christian contradictions are variations of one hasic paradox. A summary formulation in words is found in the prologue to John 's Gospel.
"The Word became flesh."
- Today's text from Mark's Gospel contains the same profound message in dramatic form. Early in the history of the church it received its own name - "The Cry of Dereliction".
- And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
- Mark and Matthew are the only Gospels which record it.
Throughout the history of the church this cry of dereliction has received a great deal of attention. Why did the other evangelists not record it? How seriously are we to take it? The line is a quotation from Psalm 22. Throughout the whole psalm the mood changes from urgent supplication to grateful assurance. If the crier knew the psalm, does this mean the quote is not an expression of radical abandonment? From earliest times the church had trouble with the notion of radical abandonment. How can God's chosen one experience being abandoned by God?
Now and again in the history of Christianity, the original central message of the Gospel has been recovered just at the point when the cry of dereliction was allowed its most radical interpretation.
It came to mean such to that monk, Martin Luther, who for years vainly strove to be reconciled to God through work and penance, only to discover that the saving message of the Bible was that God was in God - forsakenness.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theologian who profoundly influenced Christian thought in the 1960's. He wrote the following lines from prison shortly before he was executed for taking part in the conspiracy to assassinate Adolph Hitler:
So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15: 34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.
He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.*
Who can number the pilgrims, down two thousand years, for whom the cry of dereliction came to be the vehicle of salvation?
God-forsakenness is no mild state. Only someone who has never been there would count it so. The thing about such an abyss is that there is no footing, no light, no landmarks, no directions, nothing to provide a transition to anywhere else. If you want to learn the meaning of "slight healing", try some cheap cures for Godforsakenness. Any cure for it needs to be radical.
Let no human reason take all the nonsense out of the Gospel or it won't be able to save anybody.
Benediction- Gracious God,
We bring our lives before you to receive your blessing.
We bring our striving to be good and to do good. - We do not succeed at being good, and our striving to be good gets in the way of our doing good.
- Bless our hunger and thirst for righteousness.
We bring our joys and sorrows. - So much of our fun is at the expense of others, or made possible by the hardening of our hearts. We hide from the pain and sorrow of the world and indulge in bouts of self-pity.
- Bless our rejoicing and our grieving.
- We bring our loving.
- The more powerful our love the more it can hide our enslavement of the ones we love.
- Bless our loving that it might be genuine.
We bring our weariness. - We are worn out carrying the burdens of life or fleeing from them - some burdens of our own making and some that you call for.
- Bless our rest.
Receive us into the true rest of him whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light. - Amen
* Reprinted by permission of SCM Press, London, extract from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, The Enlarged Edition, 1971