‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
On Palm Sunday in many towns and cities Christians hold what is called a ‘walk of witness’ when they walk through their town or city centre singing and holding banners or palm fronds, publicly witnessing to their faith. I feel a bit ambiguous about this practice. I have no problem with Christians doing this but I do wonder what people say if anyone asks them what they’re doing and why. I also wonder what they say if anyone asks them ‘What do Christians believe?’ Now I can’t tell you what ‘Christians believe’ because the Christians that I know believe widely different things about a whole lot of things, including the Christian faith. Also, being an Anglican and of English origin, I would dread someone coming up to me and asking me ‘What’s Christianity all about and what’s the use of it?’But if I did have to answer that question I think I would say something like this.
For me, it’s all about the faith of Jesus and the difference that faith has made and is making to the world; and it all starts with what Mark tells us wereJesus’ dying words that we have heard today, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
As I said a few weeks ago, the Palestine of the first century was not a pretty place. It was a place where Jews and other Semitic people, Greeks, Romans and Africans came into contact and conflict. There were religious quarrels and political quarrels, the rich oppressed the poor, the Romans oppressed everyone trying to maintain their version of law and order, and women had no rights. In many ways there is not much difference between the Palestine of the first century and most of the world in most times and places. The world is full of anguish, fear and sorrow, isn’t it? They pervade our readings today. ‘I am in trouble: my eye wastes away for grief, my throat also and my inward parts’, says the Psalmist. And Habakkuk, 600 years before Jesus’s time,cried to God, ‘O Lord, how long shall I cry for help and you will not listen?’ ‘Why are you silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they?’ That is the cry of the millions of innocent people in the world throughout the ages, including today, who are the victims of cruelty, violence and injustice.
And what was the faith of Jesus in response to this question? It was that the apparently natural (because universal) tendency of human beings to believe that ‘my family/culture/nation is superior to yours and my only responsibility is to them and your problems are not mine’ was totally contrary to the will of God. Indifference to the plight of others was a sin. And throughout his ministry he insisted in word and deed that before God there is no ‘us and them’: all are equally loved by God irrespective of their religious affiliation, gender, social status or wealth. He touched lepers; he ate with tax collectors; he constantly challenged narrow interpretations of the Law, he healed Gentiles as well as Jews; he unremittingly criticised the religious authorities for their self-aggrandisement and hypocrisy. ‘Whoever does the will of God’ he insisted‘is my brother and sister and mother.’
His behaviour was so was so dangerously offensive to both the Roman and the Jewish authorities that it was inevitable, and he knew it was inevitable, that they would put him to death. But he did not flinch; he just did what he had to do, to do what Isaiah had said 600 years earlier was the role of a prophet ‘to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted’.Another Isaiah had a fair idea of what this might entail. We heard him say in our first reading that ‘I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.’
Mark tells us how demanding Jesus’faith commitment was in the end. Jesus’ last words tell us that he died overwhelmed by anguish, fear and sorrow and feeling forsaken by God, himself asking the question of the despairing ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
And yet it seems to me that in that cry of Jesus we hear not only the question ‘Where is God in the face of the world’s suffering?’ but also the answer: ‘Here.’ In Jesus’ total commitment to expressing God’s universal love whatever the depth of his unknowing and suffering, he in fact revealed it fully. His action and God’s will were at one. And this is why for us Christians Jesus is, to use that wonderful phrase of Bishop John Robinson, ‘the human face of God.’
Of course, the death of Jesus was not the end of the story; rather it was a new beginning. Almost straight away those to whom he had said ‘Follow me’ began to see him in a new light and to tell others; and so began the Christian church. The bodies of his followers became his body on earth and his faith that before God there is no ‘us and them’ became the faith of the church. And the Christian faith that all suffering and all inequality is of concern to God and that it is our business as the body of Christ to address it grew—imperfectly and unevenly certainly—but surely.
And this faith is unique. I respect the other faiths of the Book, Islam and Judaism; but neither is universalist in this way. I respect many of the tenets of Buddhism but its approach to suffering is individualistic and it does not contain any suggestion that it can or should be addressed.
It is no co-incidence, I believe that all the major advances in thought and action that have been successful in making the world a more equal and just place have derived from societies with a Christian cultural heritage. Six examples. William Wilberforce in England and William Lloyd Garrisonin America led the movements for the abolition of slavery (alas in practice not yet fully achieved).Henri Dunant in Geneva founded the Red Cross.The 7th Earl of Shaftsbury back in England brought in legislation for the safety of factories and for free schooling for children. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence of the United States, asserting that ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’Eleanor Roosevelt was a major force behindthe ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ of 1948, based on the principle that human rights are universal. The principle that human rights are universal itself set in motion the huge amount of social justice legislation we have seen in the last 70 years. More recently we have accepted the principles of the ‘rights’ of the animal world and of the environment itself.
Whether the people who believe in these principles and actions know it or not, and many do not know it, these principles and actions(and they are really statements of faith and acts of faith and not ‘truths which are self-evident’)ultimately derive from the faith of the man Jesus that such is the will of God.
How hard won the full revelation of that will was we will be reflecting on in the week to come. And we will be reflecting too on our own contribution to the suffering in the worldand to the sin which separates us from one another and from God, and how we are being called to mend it here and now. But for today, Palm Sunday, it is enough that we can publicly explain our Christian faith if we have to do so, and in the light of the resurrection to thank God for the faith of Jesus and for the life-changing things it has done and it is doing in our world.
What a faith!What a man!What a God!
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