MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY….?

A Good Friday Meditation based upon Matthew 27: 45-46
First Baptist Church, Yadkinville, N.C.
12 Noon,  April 6th, 2012

“If you only have one word from the cross, this is the one to have,” says Flemming Rutledge. 

It’s the only word remaining in Jesus’ mother tongue: “Eli, Eli, lama sabathani”;  

“My God, My God why have your forsaken me?”

Martin Luther, the great reformer, is said to have sat motionless for hours, fasting and contemplating this word until he finally stood up to say: “God forsaking God!  Who can understand this?  

What we can understand is that greatest pain of the cross was not the physical torture so often dramatized. The great drama was in Jesus’ soul, as he felt abandoned with no answer to his cry!    

When I was a child, I thought there was an answer for everything.  I was 16 when I first experienced, what some call “the absence of God”.  It happened when my neighbor’s child, a first grader, was tragically killed at the school bus stop next to his home.   My Father and I went to the home that evening.   I don’t remember anything that was said, until a pastor came in.   He took the young distraught couple by the hand and with a straight face said, “I know this is hard,  “BUT YOU MUST ACCEPT THE WILL OF GOD.” 

Unfortunately, for that family, that pastor could not bear the unanswerable question. But Jesus did. On the cross Jesus hung where we all hang; living and dying by faith, without answers.

The answer did not come until later. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul expounds, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself…” (2 Cor. 5: 19), to which he continues to explain that “For our sake God made him to be sin, who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God” (vs.21). 

In contemplating this word from the cross, many imagine a holy God turning away to abandon Jesus as he bears our sin.   But Paul begs to differ.  Paul says when God made Jesus “to be sin” “GOD was in CHRIST.”  Here, we need our best theology and highest Christology to remind us that on the cross, Jesus is God forsaking God on our behalf. 

Luther’s great question is the answer.  On the cross, God forsakes God's self.  “For God so loved the world that he gave” means the Father pays the price of love with the currency of is his child—his own flesh and blood.  "For our sake..." and for the sake of his holy love, God holds nothing back.    Amen.