Abandoned by God?!

 “Abandoned by God?”  

 Message @ Jericho Ridge Community Church – Sunday, Oct 11, 2020

Text: Matthew 5:43-47 // Series: Say What?! The Hard Sayings of Jesus    

Happy Thanksgiving!  Welcome, friends into this online space or to our in-person watch party at Jericho Centre.  My name is Brad and I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho and I’m so glad you’re participating in our community in this way.

Have you ever paused for a moment and thought about how unusual or odd some of the events recorded in the Bible are?  We love to focus on the Sunday School style highlight stories, but some of the things that happen are just plain weird, aren’t they?  In our text today we are going to see a few of those, and I will give you fair warning… this is a Good Friday message on Thanksgiving Sunday so live into the tension with me, OK? 

We’re in the middle of a series here at Jericho entitled “Say Whay?!” where we are looking at some of the puzzling and hard things that Jesus says.  And today, we are going to look at Jesus’ final words from the cross, which are recorded for us in 3 of the four accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection - Luke, mark and Matthew. 

We may not have sequenced this properly because Pastor Wally is going to lead us through the conversation that happens the night before this next week, but we will be in Matthew 27 today.  Leading up to this chapter, Jesus is arrested, tried before the governor, sentenced to death by Romans who’s mode of capital punishment is crucifixion – placing someone on an upright wooden stake with a cross beam where they were lashed, suspended for all to see as an act of crime deterrence.

Soldiers mock and beat Jesus, He is forced to carry his own cross.  Along with 2 criminals, Jesus is marched up a hill outside the city of Jerusalem called Calvary or Golgotha, he is stripped naked (we put a loincloth on the iconography because nobody wants to see that when you come into a sanctuary for worship).

Then in Matthew 27:41 we read that “The leading priests, the teachers of religious law, and the elders also mocked Jesus. 42 “He saved others,” they scoffed, “but he can’t save himself! So he is the King of Israel, is he? Let him come down from the cross right now, and we will believe in him! 43 He trusted God, so let God rescue him now if he wants him! For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” 44 Even the revolutionaries who were crucified with him ridiculed him in the same way.”

So Jesus’ trust and confidence in the plan and person of God the Father is being put to the test.  What happens in these next moments and what Jesus says is both theologically significant but also should make us pause and ask about our own lives and what our trust and confidence in God might look like and what we expect God to do for us in times of trouble. 

Let’s keep reading in Matthew 27:45 - 45 “At noon, darkness fell across the whole land until three o’clock”. Woah, woah, woah.. say what?!  Can you imagine the chaos and fear it would instill if suddenly today, the sky went black for 3 hours and darkness covered the land for 180 minutes?!

Do you remember the last big solar eclipse in 2017?  Where the sun passed behind the moon and we got partial darkness here in Canada and places along the in places like Oregon and they had 2 minutes and 41 seconds of total darkness on what was called the path of totality? That was eerie?  But total mid-day darkness for 3 hours??? That would freak me out!! 

We went caving this summer on Vancouver Island and part of the caving experience is that you are supposed to turn out all headlamps and experience total darkness.  Some people loved it but I can remember thinking “what if I get stuck here and no one comes to save me?”  Darkness, of the physical, spiritual, emotional kind can be scary for any of us.   

Imagine those 3 hours of darkness for those Roman soldiers who are charged with guarding the bodies on the crosses: If I was them, I am thinking to myself “this must be some kind of trick or ruse.  Darkness is the perfect cover for this rabbi’s followers to sneak in / sneak up and steal a body and claim that he escaped!” 

But Jesus remains on the cross.  And after 3 hours of darkness, around 3 pm, Jesus called out in a loud voice in Aramaic, the local dialect…. ““Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

What a profound and challenging question Jesus asks.  In some ways, this is the hardest of the hard sayings of Jesus!  Any maybe you’ve been there personally.  A loss in your life has prompted you to ask “God, why have you abandoned me?”  Or a prayer that went unanswered for healing or for deliverance led you to that place where you cried out “God, why have your forsaken me?”  Or you look at the evil and suffering in the world and ask “why God?  Have you forsaken us?”  People can lose faith in the dark that anyone is coming to save them.   

But it is important to think carefully about what is going on here and also to be clear about what is NOT going on here.  I love how F.F. Bruce says it in his commentary “it would be wise not to make the utterance a basis for reconstructing the inner feelings which Jesus’ experience on the cross.  What question “why” was asked, but remains unanswered. 

There are some theologians and psychologists, nevertheless, who have undertaken to supply the answer which the record does not give: theirs is not an example to be followed.”  Oh snap! Do not be fooled by the gentle language, that is as close to a theological smack down as these PhD smarty pants people give each other!     

So if this isn’t about how Jesus was feeling, “what is going on here?”  Is Jesus saying that He has been abandoned by God?  Some of the contemporary worship songs of the church certainty seem built upon that premise.  “[sung] “How great the pain of searing loss / the Father turns His face away…”.  It does make for good music – the sense of being left alone, because we can all identify with the angst and anxiety of that. 

There are also certain theological systems that are certain that they understand what is going on here.  Their logic goes something like this “God cannot abide or be in the presence of sin.  And since Jesus bore my sins, your sins, the sins of the whole world past, present and future upon himself on the cross, then God the Father must not have been able to be present. 

God must have pulled away and abandoned Jesus, so that, their thinking goes, the wrath of God could be poured out on sin / Jesus and that is how salvation occurred.”  So in this system of thinking about the atonement, God’s absence is required and so Jesus’ question becomes a statement.

But look at the quotation source in your Bible (most have these listed in the footer).  This question that Jesus poses is actually Him directly quoting from Psalm 22:1. This is a common way, both in the ancient world, in the text of Scripture as well as in our day today, of using the part to invoke the whole. 

For example, we say things like “Lest we Forget” which is a shorthanded phrase to invoke all of the memories and imagery and history of Remembrance Day and the First and Second world wars.  So that one phrase unlocks or stands as a signifier for much more than the phrase itself.    

Similarly, Jesus here is using the first verse of Psalm 22 as a signifier of the whole of the Psalm.  And Psalm 22 does not end where it begins. The Psalm has a clear “plot line” as it were, of suffering, and yet of vindication by God.  Psalm 22 is about a Righteous Sufferer (capital R, capital S) who is despised and rejected by people, whose hands and feet are pierced (22:16) whose garments are divided among them and who throw dice for His clothing (22;18). 

The Psalm is about One who suffers, not because He is guilty, but because He chooses to do so on behalf of others.  [sung] “No love is higher, no love is deeper, no love is like your love oh God”. The Psalm ends not with God rescuing the Righteous Sufferer but with the whole earth acknowledging the Lord.  With future generations hearing about the deeds of the Lord and bowing the knee in worship. 

We have to ask a better question: do we have direct data from the biblical witness that God abandoned Jesus on the cross?  And when we frame the question properly, the answer is no.  We can agree that sin = separation from God.  We can agree that Jesus came to bridge that separation.  But we do not have to see Jesus’ quote of Psalm 22:1 as a statement of Jesus’ personal experience of Divine absence. 

What can end up happening here is that we import a theological system or even other texts like 2 Corinthians 5;21 where Paul says “he became sin” which is better translated as “He, Jesus, became the offering for sin” or the sacrifice for sin.   But this is what can happen when we take our theological pre-suppositions and our carefully constructed theological systems and overlay them onto this text: we get a “easy” answer – yup, God abandoned / punished Jesus in order to save you. 

But if we trace the use of the word Jesus uses “abandoned”, in the whole of the Biblical witness (with one exception), God does not abandon or remove God’s presence.  Even when, or perhaps especially when, you and I sin or do things that are outside of God’s good and pleasing and perfect will for you and for humanity.  Note that in Isaiah 53:3-5 that it was US who reject and abandon the Righteous Suffer, not God.     

So taking the cross seriously does not mean having to see it as a place of Divine abonnement.  One thing we have to be very careful of here is somehow splitting up the Trinity into atomized parts and pitting them against each other.  When we ask “Where was God at the moment Jesus cried out in a loud voice the text of Psalm 22:1?”, the answer is “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were, biblically and practically, very much present IN CHRIST, reconciling the world to themselves.”  So I submit that this cry is presented as a question / quote not as a statement of theological or ontological abandonment.      

This does not mean that by emphasizing other models of the atonement (which is the theological phrase for what God did in Christ to accomplish our salvation) we as Anabaptists take the cross or the atonement less seriously.  It is very much still a place where Jesus, the Righteous Sufferer, did what you could not do for yourself.  It is a place of substitution.  It is very much still a place where the penalty of sin was dealt with. 

It is also a place where God, though God knew what would happen, chooses not to intervene and stop the crucifixion.  Instead, God chooses the path of self-sacrificial love in order to break the bondage of sin over the world and open up a way for those of us who are far from God, who feel and know that question deep in their souls: “why are you so far away when I cry for help?” 

And because of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, we can receive the divine response echoed in Psalm 22:24 – ‘For God has not ignored or belittled the suffering of the needy.  He has not turned His back on them, but has listened to their cries for help.”   

In her excellent book, theologian Dr. Holly Carey argues that “Punishment of sin in the Son takes place in that God does not intervene to stop the crucifixion. But this does not mean He has abandoned the Son in the sense of taking His presence away from him. The picture of God as turning His back to the Son is not biblical. God is with His Son, but He is not intervening to stop the crucifixion. 

The triune God is present at the crucifixion. The cross is not an experience for Jesus alone. The cross is possible because the triune God is there. The cry of Jesus at the cross is the cry of the person of Psalm 22, the messianic righteous sufferer, who in the midst of extreme mistreatment claims His innocence and asks God to vindicate Him.”

So how do we know that God vindicated Jesus’ as the Righteous Sufferer?  Well, look at the following verses.   They start with a bit of a comedy of errors – 27:47 “one of the bystanders misunderstood and thought he was calling for the prophet Elijah. 48 One of them ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, holding it up to him on a reed stick so he could drink. 49 But the rest said, “Wait! Let’s see whether Elijah comes to save him.”

You see, there was an ancient story that Elijah, the OT prophet who was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire, would re-appear in times of great need to help and save those in crisis.  But earlier in the Gospels, Jesus has identified that John the Baptist was His Elijah – the one who was sent by God to call for repentance and to prepare the way for messiah.  So “Elijah” aka John’s role has already been played (and you, might recall, John was also killed for a righteous stand that he took against sexual immorality of those in power). 

So the vindication doesn’t need to come in an Elijah appearance or Jesus being taken down from the cross by God.  Keep reading… it gets even more “say what?!”.  Matthew 27:50 “Then Jesus shouted out again, and he released his spirit. 51 At that moment the curtain in the sanctuary of the Temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.”  The temple busted open!

This was a sign that the presence of God was no longer confined only to religious spaces & places and people.  God was, in essence, providing an answer to Jesus’ question of abandonment: In ripping that curtain, God was essentially saying “there is NO PLACE in all of God’s creation where God is not present”.  Again, in the language of Psalm 22:27 ‘ The whole earth will acknowledge the Lord and return to Him”.  

Let’s keep reading: Verse 51: “The earth shook, rocks split apart, 52 and tombs opened. The bodies of many godly men and women who had died were raised from the dead. 53 They left the cemetery after Jesus’ resurrection, went into the holy city of Jerusalem, and appeared to many people.”  Say what?!  Dead people coming back to life!?

Popular folk religion, both in ancient Jerusalem as in many places in the world today, venerates the tombs of saints or righteous people.  And in a twist of irony, the very people who plotted the death of Jesus built those tombs!  But the raising of dead persons upon the death of Jesus reminds us that “by refusing to save himself, Jesus did save others.’ 

This is a kind of preview of coming attractions.  Like a movie trailer.  Not only of Jesus’ own resurrection from the grave 3 days from then but also of the final resurrection that all who are part of God’s family will be participants in as we too are raised one day from the dead.  (but can you imagine the stir that caused in the city of Jerusalem that weekend?!).  Psalm 16:10 comes to mind “you will not leave my soul among the dead or allow your holy one to rot in the grave. You will grant me the joy of your presence, and the pleasures of living with you forever”. 

And then the final vindication comes on the lips of the most unlikely or sources: the Roman commander overseeing the execution.  Matthew 27:54 “The Roman officer and the other soldiers at the crucifixion were terrified by the earthquake and all that had happened. They said, “This man truly was the Son of God!” 

To be fair, it is not clear what this commander is saying here – he may not be uttering a salvific statement.  He could be saying “this man is a son of the gods”, in other words, a human upon whom Divine favour of some kind rests in that the gods would do stuff like send darkness and earthquakes and a reverse zombie apocalypse upon his death.  But clearly, he was struck by the events of the afternoon in a way that those who are over familiar with the story miss due to our proximity to the text or our easy answers for what happened. 

So God’s answer to the question of abandonment was to send the sign of Elijah.  The sign of the Temple curtain, access to the Holy of Holies being not the prerogative of the few but of the many.  The dead being raised to life. The cry of a hardened soldier that God was at work in the world…  These are the signs that Jesus was far from abandoned by God but rather the Righteous Sufferer was fully vindicated.  Even prior to God raising Jesus from the dead! 

But notice, friends, as we close, that God vindicated Jesus but did not deliver or spare Jesus from suffering and even death.  That is a hard place to live into because it does feel profoundly lonely.  And some of you are being called to those places. 

You are crying out and asking “God, I feel forsaken!” and God may well not swoop in an “save you” from the circumstance of your life or fix all the problems in the world.  Cure your mental health challenges, take away your debt, make the bullies be nice to you…. You may still be walking through the valley of the shadow of death, to again use the language of the very next Psalm.

Friends, there is something paradoxically powerful about looking abandonment straight in the face on a weekend where we are practicing Thanksgiving.  Because I don’t know that we can actually experience genuine and deep thanksgiving without plumbing the depths of lament.  And so as we move into a time of responding to what God has done and is doing, I want to pray over you the words of Psalm 23: “for you, o God, are close beside me and every one who is watching or listening right now. Like a good Shepherd, Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me. 5 Like a loving and wise Parent, You prepare a feast for me in the presence of my enemies. Like one who sees me as beloved, You honor me by anointing my head with oil. My cup overflows with blessings. 6 Surely your goodness and unfailing love will pursue me all the days of my life, and I will live in the house of the Lord forever.” 

Let’s thank the Lord by responding together in worship.