“Alone”

Good Friday

Friday April 10, 2009

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

Psalm 22

Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9

For the past few weeks, at our Wednesday gatherings through the season of Lent, we have been pondering the seven last words or phrases that Christ uttered from the cross.

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Today, you will be with me in paradise.

Woman, behold your son; behold your mother.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

I thirst.

It is finished.

Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.

During this time, we have been invited to reflect upon the implications of many of these last utterances of Christ – words crying out for the forgiveness of his executors; words of comfort and of reassurance for his mother, for the beloved disciple, and even for the thief who hung beside him; words of his sense of feeling forsaken by God; words of his thirst; words reflecting his confidence that what he had been sent into the world to do had been finished; words attesting to his desire, at the point of his death, for his spirit to be commended into the loving embrace of God.

These seven utterances offer to us so many different opportunities to enter into reflections, both on the nature of our humanity and on the call of the Christian life.

But it is interesting to realize that this compilation of seven words and phrases depends on a combination of the four Gospel narratives.   None of the Gospel narratives, on their own, contain all of these seven phrases.  It is only by stringing the different versions of this story together that we come to the full set of sayings.

While it can be helpful to draw together all four of these narrative sources, it can be equally helpful to divide them as well, and to consider the insights that each of the Gospel writers, uniquely, offers on this tragic scene.

I would invite us, this morning, to narrow our focus to the account as it is told in today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark.  This passage leads us from the moment of his crucifixion, through his death, and ends at the moment when his body has been taken down from the cross and placed into the grave of a friend.  And a horrific and mournful scene it is.

What is interesting to notice is that, in this Gospel account, only one of the seven utterances is placed upon the lips of Christ.  The only phrase that burst from his lips, in this Gospel account, is his cry of agony at having been forsaken by God.

We read, “at three o’clock, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

That is the only cry that Jesus utters in this Gospel account.  My God, why have you forsaken me?  My God, why have you left me alone?

But if we read the text of Mark carefully, we begin to realize that it was not only God who seemed to have abandoned him.  Rather, the account of the crucifixion that we read in Mark’s Gospel account goes to great length to emphasize how he was mocked and derided by everyone around him.  After he had been nailed to the cross, the Gospel writer describes the scene in the following words:

Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, ³⁰save yourself, and come down from the cross!” ³¹In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. ³²Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.

In this Gospel account, there are no words of comfort extended to his mother and to the beloved disciple; there were no words crying out for the forgiveness of his captors; there was no words of defense offered on his behalf by one of the other thieves on the cross – to the contrary, in this account in the Gospel of Mark, even those who were crucified with him also taunted him. 

He was alone.  Betrayed by a friend, abandoned by his disciples, derided by passersby, mocked by his tormentors, taunted by those with whom he was crucified, and even feeling forsaken by God. 

To be alone, in as complete a sense as Jesus was in this text, is a terrible burden at the best of times – but how much more horrible and horrific such a sense of being alone must be at the moment of death – at the moment of our greatest mortal vulnerability, the moment when our journey in this world has come to its end, the moment when life itself seems to be leaving us as well.  To come to that moment so thoroughly abandoned, so horribly insulted and so deeply forsaken – so completely alone – is a terrible thought.   

But that was his reality, according to the Gospel of Mark.   

And why did he subject himself to this crushing and cruel reality?

For the sake of love.  

And, in that moment of self-giving sacrifice, in that moment of complete abandonment by everyone around him, in that moment of being wholly and completely alone, not only did he break the power of death and the seemingly ultimate power of sin and brokenness, once and for all, but he also revealed to us a great and wondrous truth. 

That is, that we shall never be as completely alone as he was in that moment.  By embarking upon that final journey – alone – we can now rest in the confidence that none of us will ever be so completely alone, for he has walked that journey, and promises to be with us, even in those moments when we feel betrayed, abandoned, forsaken – and alone.

We bow, this day, before the One who has tasted betrayal and abandonment, the One who has experienced what it means to feel forsaken, the One who went into the valley of the shadow of death completely alone – so that none of us will ever have to do so.   

The incarnation and the crucifixion remind us, in a very powerful way, that the God before whom we bow knows what it means to be human.  God only knows what it means to feel completely alone.

And what we shall celebrate, only a few short days from now, is the triumphant good news that, though that broken, crucified man may have felt forsaken at the moment of his death, even then he was not alone.

Even though he may not have felt it at the time, there was One who was with him all the time.

Thanks be to God.