Scripture

Mark 15:33-37

Mark's record of Jesus' death has his last word from the cross a cry of dereliction.

Luke 23:44-49

Luke's record of Jesus' death has his last word from the cross an affirmation of faith.

I want to begin with the story of a boy I knew almost fifty years ago. When he and his sister were about twelve and nine respectively, their mother had a third child: a boy, two weeks premature. Care of premature babies was less refined in 1943; he was whisked off to a babies home, while the mother remained in hospital.

Both older children were despatched to relatives. The boy, never much for piety, decided nonetheless that this was a good time to start praying - especially for the baby brother. Ten days later, the grandparents with whom he was staying told him the little brother had died.

He wept bitter tears that day. The next day, and the next, were no better. He was away from home, had not sighted the long-awaited brother, and knew now that he never would. He did not go to the funeral. He locked himself in his grandparents' spare room, and drenched his pillow. Nothing in his twelve years matched this experience or the feeling it elicited.

All he knew was that he felt utterly desolate; abandoned by this faceless God he had called upon, and who let his baby brother die. He ached for some consolation, and there was none. If there was a God, it was not the God whose son on the Sunday school wall had adoring children clustered around him!

Like everyone at some time in their lives, he echoed the words of Jesus: 'My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?' It was many years before god-talk made any sense to him again. I was the boy. In today's reflection we're going to look at this sense of abandonment, and whether Christian faith has anything to offer when one is moved to that cry of dereliction, 'My God! My God! Why has thou forsaken me?'

I propose to explore this with you under three headings: The relinquishing of faith, the re-examination of faith, and the recovery of faith.

1. The relinquishing of faith

First, the relinquishing of faith. At one of the American universities I visited last year, I had an interesting chat with the president of the atheist society. I was in line with the Catholic chaplain for a cup of coffee; he whispered the identity of the student ahead of us. 'Great young guy', he said. 'Mind if I invite him to join us?'

That's how we got to talking . I asked how long he had been an atheist; if he came from a family of faithful believers in 'No-god'. 'On the contrary', he said. 'My mother and daddy were Southern Baptists. My daddy still is'. 'Your mother?' 'Dead.'

'Long since?' 'Five, six years. I guess that has a lot to do with my being an atheist.' I asked if he would care to elaborate. 'Yeah, okay. My mother got breast cancer when I was about fourteen. She was forty, I think. She wouldn't let them take off her breast; just the lump. We all prayed for healing. I figure there were hundreds praying for her.'

He stopped there. 'Yes?' 'Well, she died, didn't she? The cancer spread and she died about a year later. It was horrible. I'd always thought God answered prayers. See, things always seemed to go pretty well for our family. I went to church; was in Campus Crusade. But I think that was all just good luck. God didn't have anything to do with it, just like God didn't have anything to do with my mother dying. You see, there's no God. That's just a fantasy of people who want to believe it.'

If you're wondering whether I helped that man change his mind, I can tell you now that I didn't even try. To begin with, there was still such a lot of grief and anger that had to be worked through. Also, I have learned not to be contemptuous of atheism. Question is, why had he become an atheist? I think the answer can be put in three propositions.

One, good and faithful people are rewarded by God manipulating things in their favour;
Two, my mother is a good and faithful person - and is not rewarded;
Three, therefore belief in God is an illusion.

If you begin with the assumption that God can and does manipulate things in favour of the good and faithful, and if your faith is dependent on that kind of validation, then sooner or later you come up against the paradox that young man met in such brutal fashion - in the death of his mother.

I wanted to say, 'You are correct in rejecting as false a God who manipulates things for favourites. But just because such a God was absent when you prayed may not be the case for atheism. It may be a good case for re-examining your ideas about God.

2. Re-examination of faith

So to the re-examination of faith. I don't know if you have your own saints' days. I have some of mine: in most cases the days on which these men or women died. For instance, on April 9 I always pause to think about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged on that day in 1945 by the Gestapo, for his involvement in the German resistance to Hitler.

At twenty-one, Bonhoeffer was ordained in the Lutheran Church. After working in Spain, the U.S. and Britain, he became a lecturer at the University of Berlin, at the age of twenty-five. It was 1931. He began at once to speak for the Protestant opposition to the Nazis. Soon after that, he was in Britain for about three years, trying to warn the world against what was happening in Germany. Back home again, he was forbidden by the Nazis to teach.

In 1939 he was on a lecture tour of America. Although pressed by friends to stay, he insisted on going back to Germany. The Gestapo forbade him to publish or to speak publicly; also banned him from Berlin. But like a biblical prophet, he continued to criticise the Nazis.

In April 1943 he was gaoled. When the attempted assassination of Hitler failed, he was thought to be implicated and was placed under extra security. Two years later he was hanged. During imprisonment, from which he sensed there would be no deliverance, Bonhoeffer wrote letters and papers - some of which were saved.

In some of these writings he began to explore a radically different way of thinking about God, which was never completed. He saw how, in a pre-scientific age, God was the explanation of the inexplicable, the solution of the insoluble, the cause both of the fortuitous and its converse. In other words, God was a 'god of the gaps': the gaps in our understanding of things. But as knowledge of the world and its working grew, these 'gaps' God had inhabited could be explained in other ways.

So, Bonhoeffer concluded, there had to be another way of thinking about God. In 1944 he wrote to a friend, 'There is no longer any need for God as a working hypothesis'. (That is, to explain the inexplicable.) This was not the statement of an atheist. Nor what followed. 'God is teaching us that we must live as (people) who can get along very well without him.' If that is not outrageous to you, he added,

The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who makes us live in this world without using him as a working hypothesis is the God before whom we are ever standing. Before God and with him, we live without God

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, London:Fontana Books, 1959, p.122.)

It may seem strange to you that Bonhoeffer saw this message embedded in the crucifixion. The great paradox of the cross, for those who want an omnicompetent God, is that the holy one is bundled outside the gates and bumped off on the town dump. Bonhoeffer saw this as a 'cameo' of God's relationship with the world.

God allows himself to be edged out of this world and on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us ...

Bonhoeffer saw a huge difference between this understanding of Christianity, and the world's religions.

Man's religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world ... The Bible however directs him to the powerlessness and suffering of God; only a suffering God can help.

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, London:Fontana Books, 1959, p.122.)

None of this means Bonhoeffer had lost his faith, or become fatalist and resigned. Certainly he was writing from prison, and only nine months before his death. Although he could see the awfulness of evil in the world, he sensed the presence in all this of a God both powerless and suffering, alongside all powerless and suffering humanity.

I am well aware that this way of speaking about God may be not only surprising, but perhaps even offensive. It runs counter to what many believe or would like to believe. Maybe it runs counter to some other Wednesday worship messages. But I ask you to stay with it a little longer, and consider if there's something here we could lay alongside whatever else we have tried to assemble as a personal faith.

3. The recovery of faith

For some, although not all, this line of thinking may lead to the recovery of faith. In some respects, Bonhoeffer's 'heir' is Jürgen Moltmann, whose best-known book is probably The Crucified God. Moltmann tells of a trip to Poland about fifteen years after World War II, when he saw the remains of a concentration camp at Maidanek. With every step he found it physically harder to walk through thousands of children's shoes, scraps of clothing, gold teeth.

The problem with which Moltmann has struggled is the one that faces all Jews, and (I suggest) all Christians. Namely, how does one speak sensibly about a God whose nature is love before the horror of the shoah? Moltmann says,

How is faith in God, how is being human, possible after Auschwitz? I don't know. But it helps me to remember that story Elie Wiesel reports in his book on Auschwitz called Night. Two Jewish men and a child were hanged. The prisoners were forced to watch. The men died quickly. The boy lived in torture for a long while. Then someone behind me said, 'Where is God?' and I was silent. After half an hour he cried out again: 'Where is God? He hangs there from the gallows.'

Moltmann's conclusion is that any way of talking about God after Auschwitz can only make sense if God's own self was in Auschwitz, suffering with the martyred and murdered. An all-powerful god who did nothing would be a monster. A God who had gone away would be a coward. But God was like Jesus: neither monster nor coward. In the person of Jesus God became subject to the worst things human beings can do to one another.

Much has been said about Jesus' so-called 'cry of dereliction': those words the bystanders heard from the cross. 'My God! My god! Why hast thou forsaken me?' Various explanations have been offered.

Some say at that point Jesus' faith and sense of identity deserted him. All he had believed and done seemed senseless. He died broken.
Others suggest he was beginning to recite Psalm 22, which begins 'My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?' and ends with a song of joy: 'The Lord saves his people!' But his body gave out before that line.

Both those explanations are lop-sided: the one that says Jesus was a broken man, and the one that says he could never have felt abandoned. Of course, he could - unless he was not fully a man. That awful sense of abandonment, alone to confront the terrible and the terrifying, can come to all.

This is the message of Psalm 22. The writer gives vent to this sense of being alone, abused, abandoned and unheard. This is the rebuttal of that false faith which says trouble and torment never afflict the good. On the contrary, it would seem that, instead of protecting good people, God exposes them to the worst the world can do!

And the upshot is that, if they're to go on believing, this is not because life goes well with them - but despite the fact it's going badly. Jesus knew that. It's why his last word from the cross, according to Luke, was 'Into thy hands I commend my spirit'.

Reproduced here on the Warragul Uniting Church web site with the permission of the author,
Rev Dr John Bodycomb -2004.