by CCW | 30 March 2021 20:00
We are never more the community of the broken-hearted than in our contemplation of Christ crucified in each of the four Gospels. There is something heart-rending in each of their accounts but especially in the one solitary word from the Cross which Matthew and Mark alone provide out of the seven last words of Christ. “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is the cry of dereliction, an agonizing and haunting cry from the heart of the son in his brokenness on the Cross. To hear it is to be broken in our own hearts. He voices the empty dereliction of own hearts and yet what he says is more than simply a quote from another psalm, Psalm 22. It is a prayer to God.
He cries out to God in the truest and deepest meaning of human sinfulness. It is the realization of our utter and complete separation from all that is good and true and holy. He voices the distress of our broken-hearts to God in the empty desolation of his aloneness. But it is addressed to God. Therein lies the great wonder of redemption. Everything is turned back to God, even and, perhaps, especially our sense of utter estrangement. “Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord,” Psalm 130, another one of the Penitential Psalms, prays. Here in the heart of Christ’s Passion and agony in the continuation of Mark’s Passion is the truest and fullest meaning of human sin, the most complete expression of separation and alienation. As G.K. Chesterton astutely remarks, “it seems as if for a moment that Christ was an atheist.”
Christ calls out here not to his Father but to God. It is as if the personal relation has been eclipsed and hidden from view, even stripped away. Yet it is a cry to God as all prayer and thought really is. That is, I think, the real power of this word. It convicts us of the radical nature of sin more powerfully than any other word. It expresses the real meaning of the depth of sin, the real meaning of sin’s folly in its attempt to eclipse God. It is in the form of a question. The ‘why’ of the sense of desolation and abandonment highlights the nature of sin’s folly. Sin is the denial of God and yet it is a parody of God by us. We forsake God. Such is the power and pretense of human sin. We presume to be God, as it were, in forsaking God only to discover our alienation and separation from God. This troubling word confronts us with the ultimate form of our brokenness as complaint. The Psalmist’s complaint takes on a whole new force of meaning as voiced by the Crucified. Nothing can highlight more forcefully the profound sense of sin as alienation and denial.
Yet, as a prayer to God, even with the absence of the term Father, it signals the radical truth upon which our humanity depends even in its contradiction. The extreme form of broken-heartedness here is the sense of being God-forsaken. In calling out to God, there is the recognition of our separation, of our having forsaken God. It is the ultimate cry of the broken-hearted, the ultimate expression of human sinfulness. It is voiced by Christ who expresses here what belongs to the depths of our brokenness and its meaning. Our brokenness is our God-forsakenness. We have forsaken God. This prayer to God captures precisely that truth in all of its agonizing awareness. In joining this prayer to the Penitential Psalm prayer of Psalm 51, we glimpse something of the wonder and mystery of redemption. “A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” That, too, is simply a prayer to God.
Fr. David Curry
Tuesday in Holy Week, 2021
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2021/03/30/sermon-for-tuesday-in-holy-week-11/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.