Day: May 7, 2023

“My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me”

The fourth word of the crucified is the most intense of all the words of the Passion. It is the cry of dereliction, the sense of utter abandonment in being God-forsaken. Taken from the Passion accounts of Mark and Matthew it shows the real depths of sin and evil without which we can make no sense of the Resurrection. It is, I think, powerfully complemented by the classical Gospel for the Fourth Sunday after Easter which grounds human redemption in the mutually indwelling life and work of the Trinity. Here Jesus teaches us about the coming of “the Comforter” whom he names “the Spirit of truth,” the spirit and bond of the Father and the Son. But he does so by naming the depth and meaning of sin.

How are we to understand this disturbing word? Theologically and psychologically, I think, and by pondering its meaning through the readings for this day.

Christ’s Passion and Resurrection teach us about the radical and essential life of God, something which we come to understand and grow into by the Holy Spirit. In Christ’s comings and goings which belong to his humanity we are opened out to the abiding reality of God, the essential life that is greater than human sin and evil, greater than suffering and death. The Comforter, meaning the paraclete, who is called “another paraclete” or advocate along with Jesus himself, brings to light the radical evil that is overcome in the Passion of the Christ.

That radical evil is shown to us in the fourth word. Christ bears in himself the radical evil of our humanity and the world. We have sadly lost sight of this. We have domesticated sin and evil and reduced it to the sociological and psychological agendas and projects of our day which betray the true meaning of social justice for no other reason than we make it a matter of our doing. The deeper meaning of the Passion and the Resurrection has been co-opted to the managerial and therapeutic culture of our postmodern world and to the particular issues of sexism and racism which belong to the endlessly divisive nature of our culture of victimhood. Instead of redemption in its much more universal and radical sense, we have only guilt and blame; in short, division not unity. It is not that there aren’t real social and political problems. The problem is that we refuse to see these things as essentially theological and spiritual problems and thus reduce them to the politics of self-righteousness and sentiment.

In today’s Gospel Jesus is wonderfully clear about sin and evil, the very things which he takes upon himself on the Cross and especially in this word. It expresses the full meaning of sin which is far deeper and far darker than we can possibly realize on our own power and strength. He experiences the full weight of sin, the fullest expression of the distance and separation, and therefore the contradiction of sin and evil itself. He voices the words of Psalm 22 but this is not mere rhetoric. In his crucifixion we see their deeper meaning which we really only begin to come to understand through the constant teaching and guidance of the Holy Spirit.

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