Good Friday ... A World Without God

Reflections on Mark 15:34

It did not begin with the absence of God.  It began with good news of God’s kingdom come near.  Good news for the poor and the blind and the sick and the weak.  It began with light and life and God was not absent.  But in this last moment, as the story appears to be coming to an end, the light goes out and the miracles cease, no power is left, there is only a cry … a cry so painful that it is hard to hear for what it is.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

In this last moment, God was absent.  Jesus was abandoned.  Through Jesus there had been miracles for the sick, the lame and the blind.  There was power to calm the sea and to heal the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years.  There were words to confound the self-righteous and feed the down trodden, but on this day there were no miracles for Jesus.  There was no power to escape this end or ease his suffering.  There were no words to make sense of it.  No words for those who mocked.  No words for those who grieved.  No words to make it all better.  There was only a cry, a cry of abandonment.  My God, my God … why?

There is something very human about wanting to know why.  We are cause and effect people with the intellectual capacity for reason.  And so we push beyond the bounds of our immediate circumstances and we look back and we look forward and we wrestle with the why, so that we can make sense of it all.   That’s all we want really.   We want everything to make sense.

In that moment, Jesus wanted his pain, his suffering, his torment to make sense.  And we want that too.  Why God, would you turn your back on an innocent man, a man whose life was given in the service of you?  Why would you be so fully present in Jesus, only to abandon him in that last hour?  It is not how I would have done it, if the script were mine to write, but of course that is silly.  It is neither my script to write, nor yours and so we sit uncomfortably at the foot of the cross wanting to know why.

I have no answer for that question.  The why of God’s abandonment is left to dangle before us like a moldy carrot on a stick, one that we would like to do away with and be done with it.  I do not know why.  I only know the affect that the anguish of that moment caused on those gathered around the cross and those who through out the centuries have dared to take a long hard look.

Matthew says that the light that had dawned with Jesus arrival had gone out.  He writes that darkness fell over the whole land and with Jesus’ cry the earth shook and rocks split as if the whole created order felt in that moment the absence of God.  It was as if the rejection of Jesus was the rejection of God.  And in that moment we were given a glimpse of a world without God in it.  A world where miracles cease and words fail and humankind is left to grope alone in the darkness and how great is that darkness. 

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I remember as a young child when things weren’t going my way.  I would fantasize about running away.  I would pack a small bag and leave.  I would be free to do as I wanted.  Free to play when I wanted and eat what I wanted.  I would just go.  I must have dangled that carrot out in front of my mother a time or two too many, because one day my mother had had it.  “If things are that bad” she said, “so bad that you feel you need to leave, then I will spare you the trouble.  I will go.”  And she did go.  She packed up a small bag and walked out the front door.  She got in her car and she left.  And I got a little taste of life without my mother in it.  Before you bring my mother up on charges of neglect, my father was home at the time, but that was of little consolation.  I was devastated.  I experienced a rush of emptiness that took my little breath away.  I dissolved on the spot and was inconsolable. 

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The affect of God’s absence, God’s abandonment of Jesus, in that moment was so palpable that all of creation felt the loss.  The weight of that loss came crashing on all those around.  So great was the terror of that moment that the Roman centurion was heard to say, “Truly this was God’s son.”  As if to realize what they had done.  As if to realize what they had lost.

No doubt, I realized what I had done as a child.  My father was on the phone to my mother within minutes.  She was at the neighbor’s waiting for the signal to return.

This last moment, this last cry from the cross was, thank God, not the end of the story either, but to embrace the end of the story, to find the true wonder and joy in Easter morning, you have to sit in the darkness of Good Friday in a world without God in it. 

It did not begin with the absence of God and it will not end with the absence of God.  But in that dark moment, when God was absent, the whole world changed.