Sunday, April 8, 2012

ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI?


On Good Friday Christians gathered in churches all over the world and reviewed the story of the Crucifixion of Christ. If it were not for the fact that we know the story and have heard it so many times, we would certainly be horrified at the violence and injustice of it all. But it’s a harmless pageant now, a formula like the lyrics of an anthem. “We stand on guard” doesn’t make us think of real danger, killing and dying; “bombs bursting in air” conjures up no real bombs with flesh and blood casualties, and “they crucified him” is simply the next and obvious line in the story. And then we hear, or read, those few lines that there’s just no getting used to.

At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"-which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Mark 15:33-34

What on earth is this about? Did God really abandon his own son at the time of his deepest need? Is this really the act of child abuse the New Atheist accuse us of delighting in? Is the God we worship really the heartless monster they say he is?

There are preachers who passionately insist that Jesus really was abandoned by God on the cross. They proclaim that God, being utterly holy, cannot look upon sin. So, when “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us,...” Corinthians 5:21, he withdrew from Jesus because, in his holiness, he could not associate with sin.

There are only two things I can say in favour of such an interpretation. First, it is a clever bit of theological gymnastics if all you want to do is explain away a difficult passage, and don’t care what you end up saying about God. And second, it should be outrageous enough to awaken even the most inattentive churchgoer from his repetition induced stupor.

The notion that God is unwilling or unable to look upon, touch, handle, or wade through an ocean of sin and filth for the sake of any of his children, let alone his only Son, is an appalling slander. And, what is more, it does violence to the entire story of the incarnation. The Good Shepherd is a good shepherd precisely because he is willing and able to go to when the sheep has gone in order to rescue it. The father of the prodigal son is a godly father precisely because he runs to his son and embraces him pig-stained clothes and all. And the incarnation is “God with us” sin-sick and wretched though we are.

So, what am I saying? Was Jesus just depressed, confused or mistaken when he cried out in this way?

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is not a simple cry of pain – though it is certainly that – but the first line, and title of Psalm 22 in the Hebrew Bible. I believe Mathew and Mark may actually be saying that, with his final breaths, Jesus recited the whole psalm. But even if not, he was surely making reference to the psalm in it’s entirety. Now, if we consider the psalm, we find that it begins with the agonizing cry of one who feels utterly abandoned by God, but continues with the declaration:

For he has not despised or disdained

the suffering of the afflicted one;

he has not hidden his face from him

but has listened to his cry for help. Psalm 22:24

A few weeks ago I watched a wonderful and inspiring interview with an American poet named Christian Wiman. (Click on the link and then on the Christian Wiman video. It is profoundly worth watching.) At one point he talks about his cancer and the suffering he has experienced through it. He talks of how excruciating pain “islands” you from everyone and everything. But though he is driven to faithlessness and utter despair by the event of suffering, reflection upon the experience, he says, has become for him an experience of the presence of God.

I believe it is this “islanding” and finding, in reflection, an experience of God, that Psalm 22, and Christ's reference to it, are about. The incarnation is God entering into all that is human and earthly, including the island (abandonment, forsakenness, and faithlessness) of suffering.

God did not abandon, forsake or break faith with Jesus on the cross, he entered into these experiences of suffering with all of us. Indeed, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,... 2 Corinthians 5:19


Friday, April 6, 2012

Journey to the Centre of the Earth


It’s hard to imagine that I’ve been back from Israel for almost two weeks now. It was an amazing time that will require a good deal of pondering to get my head around.

We left North Bay March 11 and flew to Toronto, arriving about noon. We had a few hours before our travelling companions from Calgary were to arrive, so we just wandered around the airport, read, had lunch, and generally relaxed.

Suzanne and I are fortunate in that neither of us have any particular flying anxieties. Strapping ourselves into a metal tube and hurtled through the sky at 2 kilometres a second (two thirds the speed of sound) doesn’t bother us a bit. This is the miracle of modern flight; not that a 250 ton plane can fly through the sky eight miles high, but that 200 otherwise normal human beings can be convinced to get into it. But clinging to the preposterous modern superstition that flying is somehow safer than walking, and to our seat cushions as flotation devices, we cheated death twice in two weeks.

As our friends arrived from Calgary, along with a few from other places in Western Canada (a group of about a dozen), someone in the group asked a young woman waiting to board our flight, if she would take our picture. She happily obliged, and in a few minutes we discovered she was on her way to Jerusalem University College to take part in the same two week program we were bound for. She had watched us approaching and had been wishing she was travelling as part of a group. Well, there you go. God answers prayers we haven’t even prayed yet. When you wish upon a star and all that.

I always thought that the ancient notion that Jerusalem is the centre of the world was just silly medieval piety, but when you’re in the place, reflecting on the geography of the place, you realize that it’s an historical, geopolitical fact. This tiny land of Israel is situated at the crossroads of Africa, Europe and Asia, which is to say: Egypt, Persia, Babylonia, Assyria, Greece, Rome. As a result, it has been run over countless times by the great empires of the earth. This territory, if unfortunate, is certainly not obscure. Judaism, Christianity and Islam grew up in a cultural vortex of three continents amid the almost constant turmoil of war, travel and trade.

Landing in Tel Aviv was like landing in Toronto. It’s a beautiful, modern city. But the hour long bus ride to Jerusalem reminded us that this is an ancient place. There were ruins and camels and ruined camels here and there, but it was the names on highway signs: Shiloh, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jericho, Mount Carmel, etc., that kept turning my head. It was a bit like my first trip to Disneyland. How strange to see these places I’d heard about all my life. These are book and movie places, yet here they are as big as life.

We were very tired when we arrived and Suzanne was sick. Our hotel, the Gloria, in the Old City of Jerusalem, had no running water, and didn’t get it working until the next day. But these little problems in Jerusalem are different than the same problems would be in North Bay. When you have these problems in Jerusalem, you’re in Jerusalem!!!

How cool is that?