Christ Church

“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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“Woman, behold thy Son … and to the disciple, behold thy mother”

The seven last words of Christ on the Cross begin and end with the address of the Son to the Father in the Peruvian Jesuit Fr. Bedoya’s ordering of the words. Everything is gathered into the life of God as Trinity. This, too, is the point of emphasis in the Gospel readings for the third, fourth and fifth Sundays after Easter, all taken from the 16th chapter of John’s Gospel with the repeated refrain, “because I go to the Father,” on the one hand, and the explicit teaching of the Son about the Spirit as the bond of truth and love, on the other hand. In every way we are being opened out to the reality of essential life which is the triumph of love over sin and death.

This is profoundly transformative not in the sense of becoming other than who we are but in discovering the truth of our humanity and our world as grounded in the essential life of God. The resurrection stories show us how we are transformed from sorrow and suffering into joy and gladness. Today’s gospel provides us with a wonderful maternal image of that change. “A woman, when she is in travail, hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.” The analogy is made explicit. “You now therefore have sorrow” Jesus says to the disciples in anticipation of his Passion, “but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.” It is joy known in the face of a world of suffering not in flight from it.

What does this mean for us? A new way of thinking that is the birth of new life in us. There is the possibility as the American writer and theologian Marilynne Robinson beautifully puts it, of “acknowledging the miraculous privilege of existence as conscious beings,” and thus a way of engaging the world not only in terms of the power and authority of kings and governors but most profoundly in honouring everybody as 1st Peter 2 tells us. The teaching is transformative and transcends the limited agendas of human rights and identity claims which privilege some at the expense of others and divide more than they unite. Instead we discover a way of seeing ourselves and one another in the embrace of divine love, the love which changes everything. Love gives of itself and is never exhausted.

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