By Glen Greenwalt
A Commentary on the Sabbath School Lesson for February 12–18, 2004, "Darkness at Noon"
Jesus’ lament on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (NEV), has served as the fodder for a great deal of theological speculation. Some have found in the cry doubts of Jesus’ divinity, questioning how God could be forsaken by God. The greatest number of commentators find in the cry substantiating evidence that, in the words of this week’s lesson, Jesus "bore the full brunt of God’s wrath against sin."
Interestingly, only the Gospels of Matthew (27:46) and Mark (15:34) include this jarring cry of Jesus on the cross. The sayings on the cross in both Luke and John focus on the victory of Jesus. In Luke, Jesus’ only words are a prayer of forgiveness for his oppressors, and a loud cry of committing his spirit to the Father—words that draw from the centurion the exclamation, "Surely this was a righteous man."
In John, Jesus’ words on the cross are addressed to a disciple called upon to care for his mother, followed by statement of his thirst, and a final declaration, "It is finished." Lest we read the words I thirst as any hint of weakness in Jesus, the narrator informs us straightaway that Jesus spoke these words "knowing that all was now completed, and so that the Scriptures would be fulfilled"—in other words, Jesus was not a wimp dying of thirst (19:28).
So why this cry? In their telling of the story, neither Matthew nor Mark show any signs of questioning Jesus’ status of being a God or a Son of God—in fact making this point seems to be the whole reason for telling the story (compare Matt. 27:54; and Mark 15:39). As for theological speculations regarding the placing of the sins of humanity upon Jesus, the idea simply isn’t in a straightforward reading of the text. One has to look elsewhere, particularly the writings of Paul, to find language hinting at Jesus as a sin bearer.
My guess is that if you asked a group of kids what Jesus’ haunting cry on the cross was all about, they would get it straightaway—Jesus cried out because he was hurting. Hurting because, as the story makes clear, he was falsely accused by the religious crowd, suffered horrendous torture and abuse by prison guards, and worse still was abandoned by friends and scorned and made fun of by a ruthless crowd of hecklers. And if things were not bad enough, God did nothing to help. Such suffering, quite literally, hurts like hell.
Jesus was not the first to suffer such hell, nor would he be the last. His cry, after all, is a direct quote of David’s Psalm of Lament in Psalms 22. What matters from the perspective of the Gospel stories is that Jesus, unlike David, for example, was a man who was on every account undeserving of the abuse heaped upon him by others, and certainly the last person one might expect God to abandon. The human penchant is to pacify suffering by subsuming it under some heroic cause, or by implicating blame upon the sufferer. But in the case of Jesus, there is no way to pacify the suffering.
In Jesus’ death, we meet evil in its full face, as that which cannot be named or explained; for to give reason or explanation to evil is to accommodate evil as something that rightly belongs to the syntax of reasonable things. In the story of Jesus’ death, an innocent person suffered and no one, not the good people, not even God, came to his rescue. That is why Jesus cried. It hurts to be abandoned in the hour of pain. It hurts like hell to be abandoned by God—"My God, my God, why have you, even you abandoned me?"
Elie Weisel offers what strikes me as profound a commentary on Jesus’ cry as any I have heard. Again, the story begins with a hanging. In this case, the hanging is that of a young Jewish boy, who, too emaciated to have his neck broken when dropped from the scaffold, dies slowly as his life is strangled from him.
Recalling this event in his Memoirs, Weisel describes how the death of this child profoundly changed him. "I have never renounced my faith in God," he writes; but, "I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence.…" Surprisingly, Weisel claims that his protest, yes his anger at God, "rises up within faith and not outside.…" According to Weisel, "Abraham and Moses, Jeremiah and Rebbe Levi-Yitzhak of Berdichev teach us that it is permissible for man to accuse God, provided it be done in the name of faith in God. If that hurts, so be it. Sometimes we must accept the pain of faith so as not to lose it" (84).
Weisel goes on: "I will never cease to rebel against those who committed or permitted Auschwitz, including God. The questions I once asked myself about God’s silence remain open. If they have an answer, I do not know it. More than that, I refuse to know it."
It is this refusal to know that speaks most powerfully of Weisel’s faith, for it expresses a confidence that the evil of Auschwitz, as in the case of all unjustifiable suffering, which is the lion’s share of all suffering, is incompatible with the idea of an absolute Good. So here is the ultimate irony of Jesus’ complaint…only in the name of God can a complaint be made against God. The character of a complaint is that it arises out of the assumption that something better might exist. To insist that justice must always prevail, is to assume that an absolute justice is available.
Odd as it might seem, Jesus’ cry to God protesting his abandonment may provide the strongest grounds presently available in a world of paltry answers and absurd amounts of natural and humanly intended suffering that a higher good in fact exists. To pacify Jesus’ suffering by incorporating it into a rational accounting system of the transfer of debts is to miss the real horror of evil, and thus hide from ourselves our own complicity in the extension of suffering in the world.
In contrast, to badger heaven with our cries and complaints opens the possibility of our imagining a world that is far better than any thus far created. To participate in this creative imagination is not childish, as many have assumed. It is rather, as David Larsen, professor of ethics at Loma Linda University, has written in an unpublished manuscript, "an informed wager that love is more pervasive than indifference, beauty more enduring than ugliness, health more basic than illness, peace more normal than conflict, anticipation more realistic than dread, truth more victorious than falsehood and grace more abundant than sin."
We have no proof that any of this is true. But our complaints, and especially the complaints of the innocent Jesus, suggest that it is almost impossible to live without assuming that such a world is the only true world.
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