Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
We know these words, don’t we? They are the last words out of Jesus’ parched and wizened mouth before he dies on Golgatha. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The words are familiar, yes… and sometimes when things are familiar, we imagine that we understand them. Or have learned all we can from them. Or that we just don’t want to hear them anymore.
Yet if we listen anew, what might we hear? These words so filled with anguish were uttered by the One who seemed never before to have had a moment of doubt. The one who before called “Abba” and who now cries out to His God. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Here, in these words, we experience the profoundly human Jesus as He experiences profoundly human suffering. Here, in these excruciating words, Jesus seems utterly abandoned. There have been times in my life when I’ve felt utterly abandoned too. The feelings have been real and deep and profoundly painful, just like I imagine Jesus’ feelings were. But those profoundly painful feelings are never the end of my story. They weren’t the end of Jesus’ story either.
God’s story never ends in abandonment. Time after time, the people of God feel abandoned (or have abandoned God), yet God never forgets us. In the midst of Holy Week, in the midst of God’s story there is Good Friday, filled with suffering, deep sadness and even Jesus’ horrible death on the cross… but that’s the middle of the story, not the beginning, and not the end. The day before, this same Jesus stoops at the feet of his friends, tenderly teaching that our greatness comes in loving and serving God and God’s created, and calling us to watch and pray. Holy Saturday, the day that follows, is set apart for prayer and meditation on the whole story of our own salvation history, culminating in the Great Vigil of Easter where the newest Christians are baptized, showing us our continuing place in God’s great story. God’s story is a story of Easter resurrection, not just for Jesus, but for us too.
As real as our suffering is, suffering is not God’s final word. God’s victory of life over death is as real in our earthly lives as it will be when we’ve gone from this life to new life. Every act of love we offer serves to overcome all of the hate and fear and suffering and abandonment in the world. And while the God who loves us does indeed suffer when we suffer, we can absolutely know – without any question – that God will turn all our suffering into love.
— Karen Haig
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