Episode Transcript
PRAYER OF CONSECRATION
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Abba, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Abba, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
Mark 15:33–39 (NIV)
At noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).
When some of those standing near heard this, they said, “Listen, he’s calling Elijah.”
Someone ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a staff, and offered it to Jesus to drink. “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down,” he said.
With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.
The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!”
CONSIDER THIS
Crucifixions are slow torture. Its victims languish as they struggle to move the body ever so slightly so that the diaphragm can be released from the weight of the chest momentarily. The lungs are then free to expand in order to breathe. Each breath is both a struggle and an achievement. Weakened by this ordeal, already, Jesus would have to face another round of this torture. His arms, pinned to the cross, were useless to help him in any way. Though it was noon, and the sun would be high in the sky, a darkness descended over the whole land—inexplicably so. All three Synoptic Gospels record this eerie event. The darkness may be reminiscent of the plague of darkness that preceded the first Passover in Egypt, displaying the wrath of God upon the enemies of the Israelites, or it may have been prophesized in the eighth century BC by Amos, who declared: “‘In that day,’ declares the Sovereign LORD, ‘I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight’” (Amos 8:9). This darkness, however it is understood, may actually have been, at least on some level, a blessing in disguise to Jesus. In the midst of his many torments, he would at least now be spared the agony of the glaring noonday sun beating down upon him.
Three struggling and exhausting hours later, Jesus, who had been silent up to this point, gathered his strength and timed his breathing so that he could cry out in a loud voice: “‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani’? (which means ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’).” This was an echo from Psalm 22, a poetic expression of deep lament, a psalm that ended, however, on a ray of hope. Even at this hour, in the midst of his great passion, Jesus was still quoting Scripture. But what did it mean? Had God the Father forsaken his Son at the cross? Or were the very words, “My God, my God,” an expression of a relationship still very much in place, though admittedly obscured by the tragic elements of the cross?
In our text, the Gospel of Mark has posed a question for us that it, itself, does not answer. This, however, should not surprise us. Indeed, all four Gospels have posed several questions, some more difficult than others, that have taken the church literally centuries to reflect upon and answer, especially in terms of two key issues: (1) Who is Jesus Christ, especially in terms of his person and nature? and (2) In what way has Jesus revealed God the Father to us in the power of the Holy Spirit? Indeed, the proper doctrine of Christ (Christology) and of God (the Trinity) would require centuries of the church’s best reflections as it considered not simply the Gospels but the entirety of the witness of Scripture that would include, of course, the writings of the apostle Paul and of others as well.
It is precisely in terms of this perplexing issue—the forsakenness of Christ at the cross—that we must reflect not simply in terms of the small pieces of this puzzle, so to speak, a handful of verses found in our text, but also in terms of the larger picture of this engrossing narrative whereby we can begin to see the connections and the themes that endure. We know, for example, that Jesus was faithful throughout his ordeal—he was and remained an innocent lamb of God being slain. And so, when the apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For our sake he made the sinless one a victim for sin, so that in him we might become the uprightness of God,”1 we understand this verse to mean that Christ became a victim for sin but not as a participant in sin.
Second, the elements of the larger picture, displayed in the entire New Testament, in which the narrative of Jesus is interpreted through the apostolic witness, indicate that when Jesus cried out the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God . . .” this was actually solid evidence that the relationship between the Father and the Son of God yet remained. The Father was after all his God, the God of Jesus of Nazareth, even in this wretched place. Jesus clearly affirmed this in his cry, and we must, of course, take note of it. If this were not the case, then how could the Gospel of Luke express the dying words of Jesus later on as: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (23:46)? The relationship did, indeed, endure.
Though some may conjecture that forsakenness must mean that the relationship between the Father and the Son of God was broken, disrupted, at Calvary, two key considerations indicate just why such a conjecture, offered as an interpretation of our Marcan passage, is false. Please note that we have, by and large, avoided at-length theologizing in our journey so far, but we can do so no longer. The matter before us is simply too important and, therefore, we must reflect more deeply. Indeed, it concerns nothing less than the relationship of Jesus Christ to God the Father. It’s hard to get more important, more weighty, or even more serious than that.
First of all, given the nature of the being of God, and the relations of the Christian Godhead between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as revealed in Scripture, these very relations are eternal just as God is eternal. In other words, there never was a time when the Son of God, the Word made flesh, was not the Son of God. Arius, an early heretic, had gotten this wrong (there was a time when the Son was not2) and the church fathers, especially Alexander of Alexandria (died AD 326), refuted his erroneous teaching. Moreover, there never would be a time in the future in which the Son of God would not be the Son of God, as if the relation with the Father could somehow or other be interrupted or broken. It cannot. To be sure, if such a relation could be severed—if it was only a temporary relation—then we would not have God in mind (whose essence is to exist) in any of our reflections. We would simply have some figment of our own imaginations in view. Eternity is an essential attribute of God, not an arbitrary or optional one, as the Cappadocian fathers of the fourth century argued so carefully and so convincingly. Simply put, the relations between Father, Son, and Spirit are eternal and, therefore, remain unbroken. Golgotha never changed that. Forsakenness, then, must mean something else here.
Second, if the relationship between the Father and the Son was broken at the cross, if that’s what forsakenness means, then how is Jesus the Son of God any longer—that is, divine—and how, then, is God in this place reconciling the world unto himself as the apostle Paul so clearly revealed in his observation: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them” (2 Cor. 5:18–19a)?
At the end of the eleventh century, in 1094, Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote his very helpful book on the death of Christ entitled Cur Deus Homo, or translated into English, Why God Became Human. In this work, he argued that if the alienation and separation between God and humanity due to sin were to be overcome, then the God/Human would have to come. There could be no other way. He reasoned in the following manner: human beings ought to make atonement for sin but cannot since they are sinners; God, however, can make atonement for sin but ought not since God is not a sinner at all. Anselm then added these two basic truths together and concluded that only the God/Human both can and ought to make atonement for sin.3 This is precisely the work of the Messiah.
According to Anselm, then, no other human being could possibly reconcile humanity to God—not Moses, not King David, not Jeremiah—simply because, as sinners, they were all a part of the problem. As great as these religious leaders were (and they were, indeed, great), they could not do this particular work. It was beyond them all. Jesus Christ, however, could undertake this labor precisely because he was divine and remained innocent. He and he alone was not a part of the problem. As the Word who was made flesh (see John 1:1), Jesus could do what no other human being could ever do: make atonement for sin. Moreover, as a true human being, Jesus ought to make atonement for sin. That is, he could represent the entire race of humanity. Jesus, then, was and remains the only mediator possible between God and humanity, given who he is as attested by Scripture.
Now watch this: strike at the divinity of Christ, eliminate or interrupt or break the relation of Jesus to the Father, even for a moment at the cross, and atonement—the reconciliation of God and humanity—simply cannot happen. God must be in this horrible place, at this lowest depth, for reconciliation to occur. The crucified body of Christ, this torn and mutilated flesh, is exactly the place where both God and humanity meet. Jesus Christ, as truly divine and truly human, has descended to the depths such that “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). His union with both God and humanity remained at the cross, precisely at the cross. This is the distinct work of the mediator, the Messiah, the one who reconciles both God and humanity, as Anselm had understood so well.
In what sense, then, was Christ forsaken by God the Father at the cross? In the sense that he was abandoned to all the evil (physical, emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual) that the Roman soldiers, the religious leaders, and others would do to him on that tragic day. God the Father did not come to his rescue. The Father could have sent twelve legions of angels to deliver Jesus from his troubles, but they never came—for they were never sent. As Thomas McCall, a contemporary theologian, put it: “Jesus, as our high priest, stands in our place, on our behalf, facing our sin and our death while unprotected by his Father.”4 Shorn of protection against the wiles of evil men and women at Golgotha, left to sink into this chasm, this abyss, Jesus remained steadfast. But even here, precisely here, in this darkest of places imaginable, “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Cor. 5:19a).
THE PRAYER
Jesus Christ, you who are truly divine and truly human, thank you that in your body you reconciled heaven to earth, God to people, people to one another, and all of us to creation. Though you were abandoned to suffer the worst humanity conceived of, you offered me your best gift—eternal life. May that life overflow in and through me right here and now.
