My God, my God, why?

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (18^thMarch) 2018

READINGS:

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Psalm 51:1-12

Hebrews 5:5-10

John 12:20-33

In another place and another time I was frequently confronted by otherwise arguably normal clergy foaming at the virtual mouth and expostulating wildly whenever mention was made in any form of the blood of Jesus. As we sang the classic hymn "Glory Be To Jesus" a few moments ago I wondered yet again: is such powerful, if dark imagery to be excised from the vocabulary of Christianity? Are we to consider Christians so obtuse that we cannot de-mythologise, break open the powerful metaphors of our faith?

As we approach the pointy end of the most solemn time of the Christian year we will traditionally be exposed to much liturgical prayer and hymnody that takes us deep into the language of blood sacrifice and an abandoned, suffering Son of God. Do we therefore close our eyes, look the other way, read innocuous poems about being nice and having nice attitudes to each other?

Or do we engage with the scriptures of our faith and what they actually do tell us?

We could risk knowing to the depth of our souls that the original authors found the concept of a suffering, dying saviour every bit as challenging and offensive as their twenty-first century successors do. Yet our predecessors in faith wrote these things anyway. They did so knowing that such imagery was offensive, foolish, a stumbling block, as Paul poignantly reminded his correspondents in Corinth. Are we, in our cosy, articulate, middle class cathedrals and churches, better than Saint Paul? 

They did so because they believed that in the events we follow over these next two weeks hope was born for humanity and creation. To tell any lesser story is to eviscerate the gospel, to disembowel Good News until it becomes no more than a lame fairy tale. Weak words, weak and watered down pseudo-gospel words, disemboweled words of nothingness are not the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Watered-down words are as evil as the toxic words of escalation so beloved of a different wing of Christianity. That wing is a huddle of the Chosen, that sees the words of Jesus as excluding outsiders, providing excuse to hate those who do not look, speak, act or live as the speakers think people should. Such words are exemplified by many US and US-influenced fundamentalists. 

Politicians, exemplified by Leslie Gibson, who last week mocked a teenage survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as a “skinhead lesbian.” The words of exclusion and hate can never be the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Bland and toxic words alike  words leave us in a world in which cycles of hatred escalate unchallenged. The escalation of toxicity needs no explanation: you bomb my city and I’ll bomb your city with a bigger bomb. As it happens the much-maligned Jewish law of an eye for an eye was designed to correct precisely that escalation. 

As a corrective though, Jesus suggested, it did not go far enough. The stories we encounter this week tell of a deeper corrective: if you attack me then I will enter your deepest fears and there offer comfort, hope and succour. The birth, life, teachings, suffering, death and resurrection – and the future coming that you will address in far-off Advent – these moments of Jesus demonstrate the extent to which divine love enters and transforms the human condition. These moments begin what Jeremiah referred to as a new covenant relationship, written on human hearts.

That passage of Jeremiah follows the bitter scene of Rachel weeping for her children in Ramah. Hers is pain known to every parent who has outlived a child. Hers was pain that is one of the deepest sorrows of the human condition. In Hosea we find it is God’s own tears that are falling, while humanity continues to worship itself and its own imagined importance.

Jeremiah’s words of hope follow portrayal of sorrow because it is precisely to the deepest darknesses of being human that God enters in the event of Jesus of Nazareth. In Hosea, Jeremiah and the New Testament, indeed throughout Scripture, the entrance of God into human darkness – even cosmic darkness – is always an undeserved, unmerited act of grace.

God becomes enfleshed in suffering. Psalm 51, that Christians used to articulate the suffering of Jesus, is another, powerfully poetic expression of the depth to which God in Christ descends. Glimpses like Jeremiah’s covenant amidst bitter weeping, the Psalmist’s “my God my God, why have you forsaken me?", and some would say even the self-restricting act of creating humanity in the first place demonstrate the depths of God’s love. God enters human darkness. God enters the darkest stories of our news cycles. God weeps.

And there the story does not end.

Because, as our Hebrews author and John alike hint, we, unlike the poor disciples, can glance ahead to Easter Day. We can even, in hope, glance to that glorious day, the Dies Irae beloved of Haydn, Liszt, Mahler and others, the day told of in the mysterious Book of Revelation and elsewhere. For, based on their (and our) encounter by faith with the day of resurrection, the early Christians and their successors have been daring enough to believe in that Other Day. Then all shall be revealed and all shall be healed. And all this despite the growing sickness of our planet, economic foreboding, and a general sense that humanity is doing its best to destroy all things living.

John and the Hebrews author alike speak of the glorification of God in Christ. This is when language breaks down, for there is no language to communicate that which is beyond language. This is when, as Charles Wesley put it, we stand, “lost in wonder love and praise.”

But if we denude the biblical witnesses of the brutal language used to convey the depths of suffering to which God’s love descends then we destroy the Gospel. If we do that then we are left on Easter Day with only mumbled meaningless mutterings about nice things: daffodils in spring, chocolate bunnies (however nice they may be), and the well-being or mindfulness or good intentions of Jesus going on after his death.

And if that, like the message of some expostulating ersatz Christians, is all we have, then we as Paul said are more to be pitied then all people.

In the next two weeks we will enact a journey with Jesus. Then, on Easter Day we, and all those who we love and pray, for can burst out of the tomb of suffering and despair and meaninglessness. We can burst out of the tomb of economic and ecological and personal and universal collapse. We can gasp our stuttered amazement at the birth of hope for all who ever have and ever will have wept. We can sing our amens and that word we don’t say in Lent. We can fill our hearts with joy for all who have ever cried out “my God, my God, why have your forsaken me” – even God, when God has cried that out – for those words are not nor ever will be the final words in God’s dealings with Creation and its humans.

TLBWY