DAY THIRTY-NINE – Friday, April 7, 2023 (Good Friday)
Mark 15:1-41
My God, my God, look upon me; why hast thou forsaken me
These are challenging and heartbreaking words we hear from the cross. Alone on the cross that Friday, Christ was left to die outside the city walls, on Golgotha, the Place of the Skull (John 19: 17) on a site used for the execution not only of common criminals, but of rebels, heretics, disobedient and runaway slaves, thieves penitent and impenitent, those who refused to pay their taxes and those who were deemed to be society’s deviants. When the crucified Christ calls out on the cross those words from Psalm 22, “My God, my God, look upon me; why hast thou forsaken me,” he cries out for all we place outside our city walls today, all we refuse to count in, all we force to the margins of our society.
Furthermore, on the Cross, it would have been natural, not just second nature, for Christ to draw on the psalmist’s question to God when he felt completely worn out in his suffering. The “Why” he addresses to God expresses a pained bewilderment at that suffering which can find no mere human explanation. Yet Christ, in finding full solidarity with suffering humanity, had to experience in himself a feeling of being abandoned by God. If we do not, at some stage, feel abandoned by God, do we need salvation, no matter what we mean by salvation? Can we truly understand the sufferings and feelings others have of being abandoned? And if Christ does not share those feelings, those insights, those understandings, how could he possibly have become fully human, how could he possibly fully identify with my human condition? Without this last feeling of abandonment and isolation, his humanity would still appear to be an illusion, that Christ identifies with my humanity, but does he take it on. In that feeling of being abandoned, in that cry, in that “Why” addressed to heaven, Christ expresses a new solidarity with us when we so often raise our eyes and words to heaven and express, complain, cry out in desperation and desolation.
But remember too that Psalm 22, which he perhaps continues to mutter in muffled prayers and to recite to himself in silent tones as his passion is prolonged, moves on to become a hymn of liberation and an announcement of God’s salvation of all:
The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the Lord.
May your hearts live for ever!
All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the Lord;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him (Psalm 22: 26-27).
This experience of being abandoned is passing pain. It gives way to personal liberation and to the hope of salvation for all.
Peter Comerford, Anglican theologian
Mark 15:1-41
My God, my God, look upon me; why hast thou forsaken me
These are challenging and heartbreaking words we hear from the cross. Alone on the cross that Friday, Christ was left to die outside the city walls, on Golgotha, the Place of the Skull (John 19: 17) on a site used for the execution not only of common criminals, but of rebels, heretics, disobedient and runaway slaves, thieves penitent and impenitent, those who refused to pay their taxes and those who were deemed to be society’s deviants. When the crucified Christ calls out on the cross those words from Psalm 22, “My God, my God, look upon me; why hast thou forsaken me,” he cries out for all we place outside our city walls today, all we refuse to count in, all we force to the margins of our society.
Furthermore, on the Cross, it would have been natural, not just second nature, for Christ to draw on the psalmist’s question to God when he felt completely worn out in his suffering. The “Why” he addresses to God expresses a pained bewilderment at that suffering which can find no mere human explanation. Yet Christ, in finding full solidarity with suffering humanity, had to experience in himself a feeling of being abandoned by God. If we do not, at some stage, feel abandoned by God, do we need salvation, no matter what we mean by salvation? Can we truly understand the sufferings and feelings others have of being abandoned? And if Christ does not share those feelings, those insights, those understandings, how could he possibly have become fully human, how could he possibly fully identify with my human condition? Without this last feeling of abandonment and isolation, his humanity would still appear to be an illusion, that Christ identifies with my humanity, but does he take it on. In that feeling of being abandoned, in that cry, in that “Why” addressed to heaven, Christ expresses a new solidarity with us when we so often raise our eyes and words to heaven and express, complain, cry out in desperation and desolation.
But remember too that Psalm 22, which he perhaps continues to mutter in muffled prayers and to recite to himself in silent tones as his passion is prolonged, moves on to become a hymn of liberation and an announcement of God’s salvation of all:
The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the Lord.
May your hearts live for ever!
All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the Lord;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him (Psalm 22: 26-27).
This experience of being abandoned is passing pain. It gives way to personal liberation and to the hope of salvation for all.
Peter Comerford, Anglican theologian
