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.