Good Friday: It is Finished

As I was writing this homily, I was thinking about the millions of people in Gaza, in the Ukraine, and in the Sudan, for whom I have been praying daily: Lord do not let these little ones be beaten, tortured, raped, shot, or blown apart. Lord do not forsake them. Save them. Save their lives. Why won’t you save them from those who see them as expendable, casualties of a war, of violence they think is somehow justified. Was it not you, Lord, who said of those who harm people whom you made in your own image: “what they do to others, they are doing to you, Lord.” To kill is a sin. It is a violation of the commandments for Jew and Gentile alike: thou shalt not kill. Do you not see what they are doing to your children? Do you not see what they are doing then, to you?

My God, My God why have you forsaken me. Jesus quotes Psalm 22 that we read this morning, when he hangs on the Cross. We don’t read this in our Gospel lesson from John. Only Matthew records Jesus saying this. It should be abundantly clear from what we heard in John though, that Jesus was fully aware of what was coming: John writes, “Jesus, knowing everything that was about to happen to him came forward and said to those coming to arrest, torture and crucify him …” I know you are looking for me. Let my people go. I will willingly submit to you for I am here to do what I came here for: to proclaim my Father’s love as something anyone can receive if they are willing to follow me, to open themselves to me, to be transformed by my Spirit. 

If Jesus knows the end game; if he is aware of his resurrection, aware even that all who desire it, even if they can’t name their desire Jesus, will share in relationship with God, why does he recite these agonizing words uttered first by King David: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me. Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night but find no rest.”

For Jesus, although God, is truly human. And as both truly God and truly human, yet with no sin of his own, he willingly took on the sin of every single other human being - those who maim and kill, those who get lost in their own fear and anguish who seek and enact revenge, time and time again for all of history. In taking on our sin, he bore the judgment that is ours: death. Eternal abandonment to our own devices. Can you imagine living permanently in war torn Gaza, the Ukraine, the Sudan, Rwanda, a Nazi concentration camp, wartime London, 17th century French or English Religious wars, facing Hun invasions? To whom would you go? They are killing our doctors, our nurses, our teachers, our grandparents, our children. 

My God, my God why have you forsaken me are the words of a man, even though God, who knows the physical pain and agony of nails being driven through his skin and bones, shattering, and ripping, distorting what is God given, but almost worse, from the Cross, the despair of soul, the hollowing out of his core, when he does not just go to suffer his own agonizing death, but being God, he knows - because he sees the full experience of every single human being that he has made - that he is bearing the only hope of those whose lives will be filled with horrific suffering: violent torture, rape, imprisonment, gassing, being blown apart, shot, losing family and friends. He is bearing the only hope that the horrific, dehumanizing acts we foist on one another, that the diseases that ravage our bodies, and minds, the slights that we experience that cause us to feel worthless and useless, the loss of capacity and loved ones, on the cross he is bearing the only hope that our lives are not summarized only as statistics of what happens to us here in this very broken world.

When Jesus cries out with David: “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” he lifts up to God the voice of every man, woman and child who, knowingly or not, cries out for relief, if not their own, of those who they love whom they see suffer. My God do not leave me here. 

“It is finished,” we hear Jesus proclaim. A soldier pierces his side and water and blood rush out. What is finished? Jesus’s life? Well yes. But this act of the condemned, a soldier who kills the God man Jesus, is symbolic of Israel condemned to wander the literal and metaphorical desert without God: strike this rock with your spear, God tells Moses. And out poured abundant water, endless water, the very drink needed to sustain life. Paul calls that rock struck by Moses’s spear, Christ. For out of Christ’s body, at his death, would come life, and life abundant. In willingly bearing our sin, Christ destroyed death and opened the way to God for those who desire it. 

When I pray then, my hope is not grounded in worldly relief. I rarely see worldly relief, however, and so I would easily grow in feeling angry, bitter, cynical and retaliatory, if my hope were grounded in there. Instead, my hope is grounded in the cross. Jesus experienced his own, and our forsakenness from God and prevented that from becoming our reality. And so nailing my own sin to his cross I am compelled to pray and to act in the light of his all revealing grace: to give relief where I can; to love those who love, and who curse me; to speak God’s truth in the face of violence and a betrayal of God’s love for all whom he made. It is then with courage bonded to hope, that I, and that we all who count ourselves children of God, can face into this world of ours. AMEN