God's Absence

I just returned from our local, ecumenical Good Friday service. We followed the same format as last year (my first at the service) where pastors from various congregations reflected on the "seven last words of Christ." We each were assigned a verse relating something Jesus said from the cross. My verse was the one where Jesus quotes today's  morning psalm, Psalm 22. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

I can only imagine that what Jesus experienced was a terrifically amped-up version of something many of us have felt, the absence of God. I've certainly experienced it, as have many I've talked to: those moments when life seems to be falling apart, when everything has gone wrong, when the world seems hopeless and hell-bent on self destruction, and God is nowhere to be found. When it happens to me with enough force, it can make me doubt my previous experience of God and make me wonder about the faith I profess. But how about Jesus?

Jesus' sense of God's presence, his intimacy with God, surely made the experience of God's absence even more terrifying. Given who he was, could he doubt God's very existence? And if he could not, what conclusion did that leave. Had God abandoned  him? Was he now alone and on his own? As I said, I can only imagine what might have gone through Jesus' mind, and I don't care to experience such depth of suffering myself.

Who wants to suffer or wishes suffering on themselves? Certainly much suffering is pointless and destructive, but by no means all of it. I've been touched of late by David Brooks' NY Times column "What Suffering Does," as well as Barbara Brown Taylor's recent work on darkness. Add to that  books such as Richard Rohr's Falling Upward and the writings of other spiritual giants who do not wish suffering on anyone but who also know its potential to be grace filled. As Julian of Norwich once wrote, Firsts there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!"

As David Brooks says, we live in a culture obsessed with happiness, yet we know, deep in our bones, about the power of suffering to shape and mold us, to help us "fall upward." I don't know if any of this applies to Jesus on the cross, but I find such a notion much more palatable than some of the brutal, substitutionary atonement posts by some of my Facebook friends. If Jesus had to suffer and die - and it seems he did - I hope it was not because God had to kill someone. Even if Jesus did jump up and take the bullet for us, we're still left with a terrible sort of God who must have blood.

And so I find myself looking upon Jesus, reflecting on the abandonment he felt, the suffering he endured, and wondering about if or how it changed him, wondering about its necessity and if that is so far removed from the fact that all human life entails suffering.

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We'll have our own Good Friday Tenebrae service at this church tonight. We'll hear once more the story of betrayal, arrest, trial, and execution. We'll sing mournful songs and sit in silence, reflecting on the deepening darkness. ...And we'll hope, as does the psalm Jesus quotes from the cross, that all this leads somewhere good.

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