Tuesday, April 19, 2011

"Last Words from the Cross" (part 6)

I have been gifted with two wonderful children.  I treasure the memories of watching Ryan and Kristin being born.  There were a couple of problems with Ryan’s birth and they had to whisk him away.  But after a few minutes, the nurses brought him back, all wrapped up like a mummy in warm cloths, and placed him in my arms.  That was 27 years ago, this past March 27th.  I can still remember every detail of that day.

Kristin’s birth was more routine, being born by caesarian.  We set an appointment and had a baby.  Ryan’s birth ended up being a caesarian as well, but Kristin’s was without any problems.  As the doctors worked at stitching her mother up, I got to have some immediate one-on-one time with our daughter.  The instantaneous affection and love for each of my children, when they were placed into my arms, was overwhelming.

A large part of what I felt was that I had just witnessed a holy moment.  I had been entrusted with each of my children, in a holy work.  These two infant lives had been “commended” into mine by God.  To commend means giving something or someone into the care of another.  You are entrusting something or someone to someone else, believing they will treat what is given with the same preciousness you would.

That’s what having a child, or adopting a child, feels like.  It feels like God is taking this child and saying, “He or she was mine.  I was taking care of this little one with all my love and tenderness.  But now I am commending this child into your hands and into your care.  I am trusting you to take care of this child just as I did.”  And then God lays this child into your arms, and the sacred trust is overwhelming.

The act of commending is not easy.  I don’t know what it was or is like for God.  I know what it has been like for me.  Commending my children into the care of a day care worker, a teacher, someone I didn’t know that well, someone I wasn’t sure I could trust, was hard.  There have been awful times when a child care worker, and a coach betrayed the commending trust I gave them when I allowed my children to sit under their influence in their home, or later, on the basketball court.

When Ryan and Kristin learned to drive, commending them to themselves and a coffin-on-wheels was hard for me.  Accidents are capricious, and they can happen so quickly, and be so deadly.  But even if I refused to let them drive, and I relegated myself to being their chauffeur, that still wouldn’t keep someone from running into us.  Or me into someone else.

Part of what I have discovered is that the act of commending is not one big step.  It’s a series of many steps.  In little ways throughout our lives, I have been commending my precious children to others, and, ultimately, to themselves; and finally to their destiny or fate.

Each act of commending is risky.  My natural inclination is to hold on for dear life, to be untrusting, to not commend anything or anyone I value to anyone else.  So, in little and large ways, throughout our lives, we are challenged to be commending with that which is precious to us.  Sometimes the challenge is more of a struggle than we could have imagined.

One Easter season, I arranged to purchase some caterpillars that would spin a chrysalis and turn into butterflies--hopefully right around Easter.  At each children’s message, during worship, all the children and I would look at the progress of the caterpillars and their transformation.

What we discovered--and this became a huge teaching moment for children and adults--is that caterpillars don’t yield themselves to the cocoon at the same time.  When the moment to spin the chrysalis arrives, some of the caterpillars actually resist.  They cling to life as a caterpillar, rather than “commend” themselves to the transformational process.  They put off entering the cocoon until the following Spring, postponing their change to a butterfly a year or more.

In pondering this resistance, this clinging, Sue Monk Kidd, in her wonderful book, When the Heart Waits, wrote:
It seems that at the moment of our greatest possibility, a desperate clinging rises up in us.  Then I ask myself, “What’s behind all my clinging?”

That’s the main question when we think about all the times we are challenged to commend one of our treasures to another, whatever or whoever that treasure might be.  Ultimately, with my children, as I mentioned, I had to be willing to commend them over to themselves.  They have had plans and dreams for themselves that I may not have chosen for them.  But they are theirs.  I had to trust them and their judgment.  I had to commend them to their own choices, wishes, and dreams.

Trust seems to be at the heart of all acts of commending.  Can we trust the person into whose hands we are commending this precious one or thing to?  Can we let go?  Can we stop clinging? Can we trust?

Most importantly, can we do that with our lives and God?

There was a man who was a master at walking the high wire.  To prove how great he was, he had a long wire stretched above a water fall.  The day of his fete came.  He got up on the wire, with a wheelbarrow.  He proceeded to walk from one side over the falls to the other.  When he got to the other side, the crowd erupted into applause that was almost louder than the falls itself.

Looking down at the crowd, he shouted, “Am I the greatest high wire walker ever?”
“You are the greatest!” the crowd shouted back.
Then pointing to a woman in the crowd, he said, “Do you, ma’am, believe I am the greatest high wire walker ever?”
The woman shouted back up at him, “I believe you are the greatest.”
The wire walker then asked the woman another question:  “Do you believe, my dear woman, that I can walk back over to the other side with this wheelbarrow, as I have just done?”
“I believe you can!” she shouted back.
“If you believe,” called the wire walker, “then climb up here and get in the wheelbarrow.”

Believing is not commending.  Believing is simply believing.  Getting in the wheelbarrow is commending.  It is the act of putting your trust on the line.  It is the act of putting that which is precious to you--even your own life, or the life of a loved one--in the wheelbarrow someone else is pushing.

Jesus said, as he died, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”  In little and large ways, throughout his life, through acts of commending, Jesus discovered that God could be trusted.  Commending was not this one, big act Jesus did at the end of his life.  It was the way Jesus lived his whole life, in relation to the Father God.

Jesus discovered he didn’t have to cling.  He was trusting and willing to take the risk and climb into the Father God’s wheelbarrow time after time.  So, as he came to the last breath of his life, with the very last words of his life, he could commend everything he was--his very soul--into his Father God’s arms.  Jesus died the way he lived.

Take the risk.  Commend yourself to God, not just at death, but also in life.  Get in the wheelbarrow.  Live, by commending yourself, and those you love, into God’s hands.

Monday, April 11, 2011

"Last Words from the Cross" (part 5)

When my son, Ryan, was looking at colleges, we took a trip out to California to look at a few schools.  We went to the University of California at Santa Cruz, and that was a bizarre experience.  We were walking around the campus with some other parents and prospective students.  A girl in one of the dorms stuck her head out the window and yelled, “Don’t come here; all the students are on drugs.”  Fortunately, Ryan didn’t go there.

We ate lunch in Capitola, a little town just south of Santa Cruz.  It was a little fish and chips place right on the ocean, called Stella’s.  We sat outside, watching the surf.  The salt air breezes tousled out hair.  The sky was blue.  The seagulls were lifting on the hot air currents billowing up from the warm sand, and then falling back to the beach or the water.

Suddenly a falcon swooped in and struck a seagull out of the air.  The stunned seagull lay on the beach.  The falcon landed on top of it and pinned it to the sand.  The gull tried to fly away.  The falcon kept its huge talons gripped around the seagull’s body.  The falcon pecked at the gull’s neck a few times, keeping a strangle hold until the struggle was over.  Then the falcon lifted into the air and flew away with the dead gull dangling from its scary talons.  In a matter of a couple of minutes it was over.

I felt like getting up from the table and my fish and chips and run out to the beach.  I thought maybe I should chase that predator away.  But there was another part of me that was transfixed, realizing this is the way things are in the world.  The falcon was only doing what it naturally does.  The gull was the hapless prey of the day.  The falcon’s fish and chips, if you will.

As Ryan, Kristin, and I watched I wondered if that’s the way I would have been on the day of Jesus’ Crucifixion.  Would I have looked on, wanting to rush in and do something to help Jesus get out from under the talon hold of the cross and its spikes?  Or would the same transfixion take over, holding my feet to the ground, stunning me into just watching the life and death drama?  After Jesus died, would I have just gone back to my fish and chips?  “It’s all over folks; move along; nothing to see here.”  It is finished.

The scene with the falcon and my thoughts about the dramatic similarities with the scene at the Cross reminded me of the movie, La Dolce Vita.  The opening scene of that movie shows a beautiful panoramic view of Rome’s skyline.  The grand dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral gleams in the center of the postcard-like picture.

Then the sound of a helicopter is heard.  At first it is a speck in the distant skyline.  It is dragging something through the air with guide wires.  As the helicopter flies closer, it becomes clear that what it being towed through the air is a huge stone statue of Christ.

As the helicopter flies over a beach filled with people sunning themselves, they look up and point.  They are clearly annoyed by the intrusion of sound.  They laugh, mockingly as the statue is flown overhead.

Then the helicopter is shown hovering over a slag heap at a rock quarry.  The cables release their cargo and the statue of Christ plummets in slow motion until it hits the rubble below, breaking into thousands of pieces.

The message of that movie’s opening scene is clear:  modern society has relegated Christ to the trash heap.  Christ is no more than a piece of old stone--some historic relic, but no longer fitting in with the world’s current scheme of things.  Christ is only worth mocking as the world of technology and modernity carries him away to be jettisoned with the rest of what we deem worthless and are ready to get rid of.  The world, falcon-like, has pounced.  It has carried away its prey.  We go on with our meal and our lives.  It is finished.  And the world thinks it’s finished with him.

Is that what Christ meant when he uttered this anguished cry:  “It is finished!”  Is he simply saying, “I’m a dead man.  I’m being carried away.  The world has won and I have lost.”  Is that what Christ is saying?

I don’t believe so.  I hear these last words of Christ more as a statement of faith.  A three word sermon.  A proclamation.  A shout of acclimation.  It is not as much, “It is finished,” as much as it is, “It is accomplished.”  The word Jesus uses means more than, “It’s over.”  (That’s why the Savior wasn’t a woman.  Because, as the saying goes, “A woman’s work is never done.”)  Jesus is not just saying, “My time in this world is up.  And the world has won.”

If something is finished, as in accomplished, that logically means it had to first be started.  Something can’t be finished that hasn’t been begun at some time.  If something was started and then accomplished, that means there was a plan.  That plan would have certain steps that headed toward a set-forth conclusion.  If something is finished or accomplished, then there has to be intention.  There is a will involved--a will with desires and expectations.

When Jesus said that everything was done, he meant the plan had been accomplished.  He meant that the intentions of God, that had been going on for all of history, were now culminated.  God’s intentions to save the world from sin and from itself had been carried out.  Each step of the way had been taken.  Christ was that final and ultimate part of the plan.

Do we ever feel like we totally accomplish anything?  Aren’t there always loose ends?  For example, artists who seldom feel a painting is totally finished.  A couple of weeks ago I drove to Wichita on my day off to go to the Wichita Art Museum.  There was a couple of special displays that I wanted to see.  Looking at a painting up close is always a kind of tingly experience for me.  This is what the artist was actually working on.  It’s not just some kind of print.  Those are the artists knife and brush marks.

Several of the paintings were done with bold and broad strokes.  But other paintings I looked at used thousands upon thousands of brush strokes.  Van Gogh painted that way.  I wonder, as I gaze at that kind of artwork, if the artist still wondered, “What if I just put a few more brush strokes of color over here, or over there.”  When are they, if ever, fully satisfied, feeling the piece is “accomplished?”

Or authors who work on a poem or a short story for possibly years, still tweaking a word here or a phrase there.  Do they ever get to the point where they feel their work just can’t be edited anymore, and it’s done?

The same holds true for that moment when we know our lives are over.  In a flash, in an instant, we wonder, “Have I put all the brush strokes on my life?”  “Have I written all the story that I wanted to write?”  This is the only chance I will get to live my earthly life.  Can I come to the end of it satisfied, and with a final sense of accomplishment?

A popular movie of a few years back was, “The Bucket List.”  It starred Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson.  It was about a couple of older guys who were oddly thrown together in a hospital room as patients.  After they had gotten to know each other a little bit, they decided they needed to each make a “bucket list.”  That is, a list of things they wanted to do in life before they “kicked the bucket.”  It’s a fairly funny movie, and certainly thought-provoking.  I’m sure there were a lot of bucket lists written down after people saw that movie.

A bucket list has a way of helping you evaluate your life.  What have you done with your life so far?  What are you proud of?  What aren’t you so proud of?  What would you do if you could make a change?  What’s keeping you from making those changes before you die?  What do you have to look forward to?  Those are all huge questions that just this one kind of list forces you to take a long look at.

What happens when time is up?  You have more lists than you have time to accomplish what you’ve written on your lists.  How can you come to the end of life and feel like you have done what’s been on your list--whether it be a list on paper or a list in your mind?

Jesus is on the Cross.  He’s at the end of his life.  Death is but a matter of moments away.  One of the last things he says from that dreadful Cross, and that dreadful death is, “It is finished.”  In another gospel, it says Jesus shouts this out.  It’s a triumphant, shouting statement; not a statement of agonizing woe.  He’s making a bold statement of faith:  “Everything I set out to do, is now accomplished!  It feels so good to be able to affirm this as I die!”

Wouldn’t it be great to feel the same when that moment arrives for us?  Maybe that’s what we call “dying a good death.”  We can say, as our Lord did, “It is accomplished.”  All my lists are taken care of.  I haven’t left anything unresolved or undone that I was meant to do.  I have used my life well, and accomplished all that I hoped for with this life.  I wouldn’t ever wish to have another life, because my lists are done.  The time has come when I don’t get to have any more choices--but I’m good with that, because I have taken care of all my choices.  And all is well.

The British Parliament abolished slavery in the West Indies on August 1, 1836.  The decree, though, was not valid until the following year.  So, on June 30, 1837, twenty thousand slaves united in Jamaica.  At 11:00 p.m. of that day, all were dressed in white gowns.  They knelt down.  Faces were turned up in anticipation as the clock ticked towards midnight, and the beginning of the new day of July 1, 1837, the day of their emancipation.  As the clock struck one second after midnight, those twenty thousand people rose to their feet as one, and joyously shouted together, “We are free!  We are free! We are free!”

In the same way, but on a global and historic level, God established a decree thousands of years prior to the Cross.  At a certain time, on a certain day, the arms of the Cross, not of a clock, would set the world free.  The power of that old slave owner sin would be no more.  At the same time Christ shouted out in triumph his last words, “It is finished,” a responding cry goes up from millions of people--past, present, and future:  “We are free!  We are free!  We are free!”

What a great acclimation of faith.  That which ultimately and most importantly needs to be accomplished, is done so by Christ on the Cross.  It’s not something we can do for ourselves.  We can’t include it on our bucket list, because we can’t accomplish it.  Only Christ can do that for us.  And if it’s not done, we are still lost, we are still slaves to sin.

If something is finished, that means there is nothing else that can or needs to be done.  What was set out to be done, has been accomplished.  No further acts of salvation are needed.  No further saviors need to be sent.  No other words need to be spoken.  Everything God intended to be done, in order to free the world from sin, has been accomplished in Christ.  There was an evangelist who was asked by a young man, “What must I do to be saved?”
To which the evangelist replied, “To late--it’s already be done.”

It is finished!  We are free!



Prayer
O God,
Thank you, thank you, thank you,
that, in Christ,
our salvation is finished--
it is complete
it is accomplished and fulfilled.
We need that same sense of accomplishment.
We want to come to the end of our lives
knowing that we have done
all we were meant to do.
Give us the faith,
by your Holy Spirit
to do that.
We know that unfaith builds no cathedrals,
unfaith sings no songs,
unfaith never reaches,
never hopes,
never dares.
Unfaith walks alone,
weeps alone,
dies alone,
and leaves a life unfinished.
Give us the accomplishing kind of faith of the Savior:
a faith that stares into the shadows
and sees the form and shape of hope;
the kind of faith that peers into the unknown
and sees the promise of meaning in accomplishment.
We want the kind of faith that can only come from the Savior,
that liberates and sets us free to live,
fully
and abundantly.
In Jesus name,
Amen.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Last Words from the Cross (part 4)

"Last Words from the Cross" (part 4)
Matthew 27:45-46


Abandonment.  We're looking at some pretty tough words from Jesus on the Cross.  But then, I guess we need to remember that he was nailed to a Cross.  We usually don't know how we will feel about some horrible situation until we're in the middle of it.  We think about it.  We imagine how we would react.  We fantasize about what we might feel.  But we never do, really, do we.  Until such a time arrives.

As close as Jesus is to God, you might think abandonment would not be something that Jesus would feel.  In those Cross kinds of situations, I guess you are allowed to feel what you are feeling.  Nothing is more grating than to be hurting, deeply, and then have some well-meaning person tell you, "You shouldn't be feeling that way."  When you're on the Cross, you get to feel however you're feeling.  As well as any other critical experience in life.

In a sermon by the Scottish preacher, Frederick Robertson, he said this:
There is a world of untold sensations prodded into that moment when a man realizes his hour is come.  It is all over--his chance is passed, and his eternity is settled.  None of us know, except by guess, what that sensation is.  And to every individual, that sensation, in its fulness, can come but once.
We don't know, do we.  We don't know exactly how we will feel when we get to that point when we realize our one chance is passed.  Certainly Jesus must have felt the flood of human emotion that we feel when we blew a chance:  I could have done better; I could have done more; I could have done different.  Maybe not for Jesus.  I'm not sure.  If the Bible is accurate, and he was like us in every way, maybe he had those thoughts.

In his masterpiece work, Imitation of Christ, Thomas a'Kempis wrote:
I never yet found any religious person so perfect that he did not experience at some times the absence of grace or some diminishing fervor.
I guess that holds true for the most perfect religious person in the history of the world, Jesus Christ.

Abandonment.  Feeling abandoned.  Being onlookers at the Cross, we're having to look at some tough stuff.  Russell Baker was a New York Times columnist.  He wrote an autobiography titled, The Good Times.  I read it a long time ago.  One of the most gut-wrenching pieces in his book was when he told about his mother giving him away.  This was during the Great Depression.  She couldn't afford to feed her children.  So she gave a couple of her children away to shirttail relatives.  Russell was one of her children she gave away.

Baker told how he was sobbing as he was hauled away by his arm.  His mother standing silently on the porch, watching him go and doing nothing.  Baker wrote of that moment:  "I never cried again with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost dearly in pain."

I have, sadly, heard a number of stories of similar abandonment.  Adults, who as children, were left behind.  One of my dearest friends, as a child, came home one day after school, and her mother had moved from the house.  Gone.  Didn't tell her grade school daughter where she had moved to.  Never saw her again for years.

My friend talked to me about having little trust for/in others, especially those who tried to get close to her.  She became a loner, because it was safer that way.  She was self-reliant and (on the surface) self-confident.  But inside she was so afraid.

One of the main emotions that drives people who have been abandoned is self-doubt.  Or self-punishment.  The nagging question that rips at their spirit is, "There must have been something about me."  Certainly Russell Baker asked that question.  Why was he given up, but other siblings got to stay with their mother?  What was it about him that his own mother was comfortable giving him away to someone she barely knew?

Psychologists have found that we are born with only a couple of innate fears.  One of them is the fear of abandonment.  It is as if we are born knowing how hopeless we are.  How utterly dependent.  It's like we know, as infants, what would happen, if those into whose hands we've been entrusted, would suddenly abandon us.  What it would be like to have our life-line totally cut off and leave us to ourselves.

Jesus, being fully human, got to come to a personal, and terrifying understanding of that basic, human fear of abandonment.  Certainly, part of what lays behind that fear is an expectation.  It's the expectation that the one who is supposed to take care of us, will.  That the one we have been entrusted to, or entrusted ourselves to, will always be there for us.  A lot of the anguish of being abandoned, is not just the abandonment itself, but the anguish over having a pivotal expectation dashed.

Jesus' words on the Cross may have been a recital of something he remembered from Psalm 22.  There the psalmist cries out:
My God, my God, why have you deserted me?
Why are you so far away?
Won't you listen to my groans
and come to my rescue?
I cry out day and night,
but you don't answer,
and I can never rest.

And then the psalmist expresses the expectation he has for why God should listen to him:
Our ancestors trusted you,
and you rescued them.
When they cried out for help,
you saved them,
and you did not let them down
when they depended on you.

That's the expectation the psalmist, and Jesus, voice behind their sense of abandonment:  You did it before, God; you took care of me before; you were close before; why are you being inconsistent and leaving ME alone?  That's the expectation:  that God has consistently watched over, and taken care of his people.  So why, now?  Why has God become so suddenly inconsistent?  Why has God chosen not to act for me?

Corrie ten Boom, survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, wrote that she learned to hold everything loosely in her hands.  When she grasped things too tightly, it would hurt when God would have to pry her fingers loose.  Maybe one of the things we grasp so tightly onto is our expectations about how we think things should be.

Like the little girl with the polka dot dress.  The expectation is that polka dots are supposed to stay on your dress.  They are supposed to be permanent.  They are supposed to always be there.  The polka dots were always there to share life with the little girl in the past.  Why, now, are the polka dots going against their apparent nature, jumping off the dress, rolling away, and leaving the little girl alone?  It's so much harder when those expectations are about God, and how we think God should be.  Especially if you're hanging on a Cross.

Chaim Potok, in his novel, In The Beginning, tells about a Jewish family living in New York City.  Everything is going wrong with them, and seemingly with the world.  Listening to all the bad news one night on the radio, the father blurts out, "It is God doing his usual bad job."  Maybe when things are going so wrong, and you start out with low expectations, you aren't disappointed when it seems God is messing up.

When is faith and trust in God hardest?  When are we tempted to blurt out, "It's God doing his usual bad job?"  Maybe when a person is under excruciating physical pain.  Chronic pain that doesn't let up.  Pain, that looks like it's not going to go away, has a way of getting us to ask God some tough questions.

Or maybe when life turns dark.  There just seems to be a total absence of light in any corner of your world.  I remember a Frank and Ernest cartoon.  They are standing in front of three mail boxes.  One mail box is labeled "Local."  The second is labeled, "Out Of Town."  The third is labeled, "Forget It!"  That's when life is the darkest: when you feel like just saying, "Forget it!  Nothing's going to work anyway.  Nothing matters.  Whatever I do, it's not going to work."

I was a double major in college, and one of my majors was philosophy.  I remember reading one modern philosopher who said that our feverish activity is without meaning or purpose; that all the great empires and all the great human ideals count for no more than an anthill crushed by a heedless traveler's foot.  Now that's fatalism.  That's the kind of thinking that takes over when life turns dark and there seems to be a total absence of light or meaning.  That's the time when a person begins to wonder where God is.

Or maybe faith and trust in God is hardest when death is close, and it doesn't seem timely or fair.  There was another cartoon that showed a deep-sea diver who was walking around on the ocean floor investigating a shipwreck.  Above him was the mother ship to which he was connected by a life-line and an air hose.  He looks up and sees the mother ship he is connected to sinking towards him.  Imagine the questions that race through the mind in an instant:  I'm doomed.  It's not fair!  Why me?  How could this happen?  etc. etc.

If these are the kinds of situations where faith and trust in God are hardest, maybe we also need to ask the opposite question, which is:  What creates trust and faith in God?

Certainly, as I have already mentioned, predictability has to be a part of trust.  It's the anticipation that life should go a certain way based on past experience.  That can be either negative or positive.  If life has been a bugger all along, than you might predictably expect that life is going to continue to be that way.  But if life has been good, and God has been good, then you would expect life and God should continue to be trustworthy.

Dependability also must be a characteristic of trust.  You trust, and have faith in those who have been the most dependable.  If someone has been reliable when it counts--and even when it doesn't--then you certainly grow to trust those people.  Conversely, people who are chronically undependable are people we have the least faith in.

And, thirdly, part of building trust is faith itself.  Faith, as the writer of Hebrews tried to describe is finding a sense of security beyond any available evidence, history, or experience.  When writer, Katherine Mansfield was battling tuberculosis at age 34, she wrote in her journal:
I should like this to be accepted as my confession.  There is no limit to human suffering.  When you think, "Now I have touched the bottom of the sea--I can go no deeper," you go deeper.  But I do not want to die without leaving a record of my belief that suffering can be overcome.  For I do believe it.

That's the kind of faith that builds trust:  believing even when believing doesn't make sense.  Seeing what cannot ultimately be seen.  Knowing for sure, even though you can't prove it, logically.  That kind of faith has to be a part of what it means to trust.

So, where does Jesus' statement come from?  In all that predictability, dependability and faith that we've been looking at--where does it break down for Jesus in that one awful moment:

"My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"
"My God, my God, can I trust you anymore?"
"My God, my God, why have you left me in such a pitiful and painful condition?"
"My God, my God, don't you care about me at all?"
"My God, my God, why have you left me so utterly alone?"
"My God, my God, can't you just be with me when I am most dejected?"
"My God, my God, I thought I was your beloved Son?"
"My God, my God, how can you treat me as if I don't even exist?"
"My God, my God, why have you become so unpredictable, so undependable, and so faithless?"

Did you notice God didn't answer Jesus' question?  So much has been written in defense of God, and what God was up to at that moment, and why God couldn't respond to his beloved Son.  I'm not going to do that.  Jesus agonized that question out there as one of the last things he said.  God let it come, and let that agonizing question be carried about, to and fro, on the wind.  But no one can really answer that question, save God alone.

And that's where I'm going to leave it this morning.  A question.  No answer.  That's part of the experience of the Cross.  We must force ourselves to gaze upon it, to ask our own questions.  Only by being willing to ask God those questions will what is to come make sense.