"My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Jesus'
dying words on the cross in Mark and Matthew (Mark, and Mark: extended cut) are
perennially poignant on Good Friday. Perhaps, this year they are more important
than they ever have been in our lifetime--for us as individuals living in a
world in crisis, and as the church, reeling as the humans we are, while
simultaneously struggling to both envision and enact a Christlike response to a
literal pandemic.
When we
read these dying words of Jesus as 21st century Christians, it is tempting to
draw the conclusion that Jesus believed that he had been betrayed, even
abandoned by his Father to die. This is an entirely valid interpretation, but I
believe that we stop short of the heart of the matter by leaving it at that. These dying words of Jesus are not a random response of profound human anguish,
but are a quotation of the opening of Psalm 22, one of many psalms of lament in the Psalter. Anecdotally (and I'm sure
academically, somewhere), I've heard that witnesses' to Jesus' death would have
heard him praying these words, and, being commonly devout, would have known
what came next in the ancient prayer. The hearers would have understood the
pattern of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation toward God inherent
in (nearly) every lament. They would have known "but I am a worm, and not
human; scorned by others, and despised by the people" (v. 6) and "yet
it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother's
breast" (v. 9) and even "to him indeed, shall all who sleep in the
earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall
live for him" (v. 29). By losing the context, we lose the lament-dance. We
lose the affirmation of the presence of God in Jesus', and indeed in our own
suffering.
As the
human race, imprinted with the image and fingerprints of our Creator, we find
ourselves in a season where we ought to be lamenting. Thousands have died,
millions are grieving, billions are living in fear and dread of what might
happen and how the world will change as a result of Covid-19. As the church,
the living Body of Christ who has tasted and seen and known the goodness of the
Lord, we ought to be leading the way through lament. Lament, I would argue, is
the vehicle by which we are granted assurance of God's presence in the midst of
suffering. Lament affirms the full range of human experience. Humans negate
human experience by offering platitudes or comparisons that provide little (if
any) comfort, no validation, and cause the sufferer to recoil from connection,
human or divine. Church, we need to do better, and the "better" that
we can do is modelling vulnerability ourselves, and making space for people to
be vulnerable before God with their pain, fears, and failures. God will draw
near to these people, just as he draws near to us--that's his job, and he does
it well, Amen?
Only God
could take the pain and disorientation of Good Friday and have it lead to the
glorious bliss of Easter morning. Let's bring all of our ugly and confusing
feelings to God, press in, and see what he does within and around us.
