Thy Word and the Forsaken

Psalms 22 and 27

November 8, 2015

You’ve probably seen some variation on the internet meme about God not giving you more than you can handle. One I saw last week concluded, “If God never gives me more than I can handle then God must think I’m a badass.”

It’s cute as a meme. It is terrible as a theological statement. Not only that, it is destructive and insulting to those who truly suffer and feel abandoned and alone in their suffering.

Consider just the past hundred years of human history, and you quickly understand why such a statement is terrible theology. If you say, “God never gives you more than you can handle,” then, at best, you make God a lousy judge of human character. After all, you don’t have to look very carefully at just the past few years to find countless people suffering countless cruelties far beyond the capacity of any human to endure.

At worst, if you stick with the logic of the meme, you make of God a divine sadist who thought that the Holocaust would be a good test for the Jews, and for everyone else caught up in the Nazi death machine.

No. God does not hand out suffering to test our faith or our capacity for suffering. God is not the author of our pain.

But dismissing poor theology is not the same as articulating an alternative, and it falls far short of doxology – that is to say, a proclamation of praise. What, then, can we proclaim about the difficult word that arises in Psalm 22, and that is repeated in Matthew’s account of the crucifixion in which Jesus’ final words are, “My God, my God – why have you forsaken me?”

As theologian Douglas John Hall writes in the preface to his book, God & Human Suffering, “God … and human suffering! Perhaps the most difficult combination of words in the Christian vocabulary – in the human vocabulary!”[1] It is, of course, far from a recent combination. Indeed, as Hall notes, the suffering of the community of the church is a predominate them of New Testament writings.[2] The older testament testifies, as well, to the universality of suffering as part of the human condition.

As the dread pirate Roberts told Princess Buttercup, “life is pain, princess; anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.”

Of course, that is not all that life is. Life is also joy and laughter, and anyone who tells you otherwise is also selling something.

Scripture, on the other hand, testifies to the fullness of life from the joy of new birth to the grief in response to life’s ending, and everything in between – laughter at unexpected good fortune, joy in triumphs, pain at defeats, suffering in oppression, determination in the struggle.

Scripture confronts honestly the experience of sorrow and suffering, and expresses more than once the feeling of abandonment. Nowhere is that feeling articulated more powerfully than in Jesus’ cry from the cross. What do we make of that troubling word?

It’s worth noting again that the gospels are not journalism, they are theological testimony and proclamation of good news. That is to say, who knows if Jesus actually said these words?

We do assume that the first readers of Matthew’s gospel would have been familiar with the words. The scholarly consensus holds that Matthew wrote to an early Jewish-Christian community that would have been intimately familiar with the Jewish texts cites throughout the story.

The larger question, though, is why put these words on the lips of the dying Christ? What does it mean to proclaim this, to include this passage in your proclamation? What does it tell us about Jesus? About God? About suffering? And, if this is gospel, then what is the good news in it?

Some interpreters suggest that the line is evidence that Jesus lost his trust in God, and, in that moment, believed his life had been a total failure, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. Others insist that the line – which quotes the first stanza of Psalm 22 – can only be understood in the context of the entirety of that psalm which ends with praise and the profession of deep and abiding faithfulness.[3]

Personally, I think the truth runs through an uneasy middle place for most of us, and, perhaps, even for Jesus. That is to say, in the midst of our suffering and sorrow, most of us experience a mix of loss and longing, despair and hope, abandonment and comforting presence. Both ends of the struggle are real, and both are true.

The journey of faith is not a straight line, but rather a tortuous route that swings – sometimes wildly – between deep doubt and utter trust. That is why, for followers of Jesus, the cross stands at the center of the community of the church.

The Protestant reformers insisted that the marks of the true church – one, holy, catholic, and apostolic body – include also, at the center, the cross. As Douglas Hall put it, by this “Luther certainly did not mean the presence of crosses, jeweled or roughhewn, with or without the Christus figure, but some real evidence of Christian participation in the sufferings of Christ in this world.”[4]

But why? It’s not for the sake of martyrdom, though surely there have been martyrs. Rather, throughout the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, the call of God to the people of God is always a call to serve in God’s world. The church is called today just as the people of God have always been called – elect of every nation, yet one throughout the world, as the old hymn puts it.

As Hall notes, “there is a profound blessedness in its election. But the blessedness is not of the sort that human nature usually cherishes; so the prophets must ceaselessly remind the people that its shalom is inseparably linked with a vocation within history which will lead it again and again into wilderness, exile, rejection, defeat, and other forms of suffering.”[5]

Or, as my preaching mentor said to me when I called him immediately after being asked to resign my first pastorate, “David, if we are doing our jobs there will be scars.”

There will be scars, my faith tells me, because we live this side of the Promised Land. There will be scars, my faith tells me, because we live in a broken world, and the power of evil is real. There will be scars, my faith tells me, because we are called to resist evil and work for healing and reconciliation in a wounded and divided world.

The promise of the Messiah, that story we will soon celebrate again, retains its power only because we understand that the world stills needs saving. The words of Isaiah, which Matthew used so effectively to interpret Jesus’ life, indicate the peculiar salvation Jesus will offer: “In all their affliction he was afflicted. … In his love and in his pity he redeemed them” (Isaiah 63:9).

As James Cone put it in God of the Oppressed, “Israel’s suffering is redemptive because Yahweh is present with it, bearing the pain of sin so that liberation will become a reality among all people.”[6] Cone’s work underscores the significance of the African-American experience of suffering for understanding the depth of the promise of faith:

Although the continued existence of black suffering offers a serious challenge to the biblical and black faith, it does not negate it. The reason is found in Jesus Christ who is God’s decisive Word of liberation in our experience that makes it possible to struggle for freedom because we know that God is struggling too.[7]

Cone’s work reminds us powerfully that while the experience of suffering is universal, it is also particular, and is particularly felt in the context of injustice and oppression. After all, the God of the oppressed first show’s the divine face upon hearing the cries of the oppressed struggling under the hand of their taskmasters in Egypt.

We hear that reminder and no doubt think first of Moses, the great liberator of the Exodus, the first true hero of the faith. Perhaps, in recalling Moses – especially having just quoted James Cone – we might think also of Dr. King, sometimes called black Moses.

That is all well and good. Heroes and role models can be powerful. But what I hope we also hear in this is the call to the church – to the community of faith. For if we are to take seriously the call to be the body of Christ in the world we must understand both the call and the cost of discipleship, both the reality of suffering and the call to heal it, both the inevitability of feeling forsaken and the invitation to live for the sake of the forsaken.

Nowhere in this should we hear anything like a “celebration of suffering,” or a call to martyrdom for the sake of making martyrs. To such I can merely say, climb down off the cross because we can use the wood to build something better.

No, as Hall concludes, “The object […] is to identify oneself with the suffering that is already there in one’s world, to let oneself be led by the love of Christ into solidarity with those who suffer, and to accept the consequences of this solidarity in the belief – the joyful belief – that in this way God is still at work in the world, making a conquest of its sin and suffering from within.”[8]

Friends, there is a balm in Gilead, and the great joy of our faith comes in the invitation to participate in that very balm. For we all live in Gilead. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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[1] Douglas John Hall, God & Human Suffering (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986) 13.

[2] Ibid. 123.

[3] For a review of perspectives see Douglas R.A. Hare, Interpretation: Matthew (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1993) 321-25.

[4] Hall, 123-4.

[5] Ibid. 125.

[6] James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1975) 159.

[7] Ibid. 178.

[8] Hall, 145.