March 15, 2020 “Dereliction” – Matthew 27:45-47

Matthew 27:45-47
“Dereliction”
March 15, 2020 – Third Sunday in Lent

One Sunday afternoon after church a long time ago, I drove home, walked in the door from the garage to our house in Springfield, closed it, and started up the stairs to change clothes. Beth asked, “Where’s Susan?” “What do you mean?” I said, “She came home with you.” “No,” said Beth, “I brought Joanna home for a nap, but Susan stayed with you.” A disconcerting wave of angst washed over us as we both realized that our precious seven-year-old daughter had been left behind in an empty church building 13 miles away. I jumped back in the car and rushed off to get our little girl.

Fortunately when I arrived back at church, Susan had been engrossed reading a book in a room off my office. She had only started to notice she was completely alone a few minutes before. She had called home and Beth was able to reassure her that Daddy was on the way to get her. But it was a bit of a parental nightmare for a while. Thanks be to God that it’s now just another old family story we all laugh about when we remember it.

No loving parent would deliberately and completely abandon a child. That’s one reason why I believe the fourth word from the Cross, what is commonly called the “Cry of Dereliction,” is not a sign, as some Christians seem to believe, that God the Father turned His back on Jesus His Son as He hung there dying. The other reasons for not understanding that terrible cry as Jesus’ abandonment by His Father are that neither the Bible nor good Christian theology of the Cross requires such a view. God the Father was right there with His Son, looking at Him through the whole ordeal.

What does Jesus’ agonized question, recorded here in His own everyday Aramaic language, mean then? Both Matthew and Mark tell us it was misunderstood right from the beginning, with some of the bystanders probably hearing the Aramaic word for “my God,” Eli, or Eloi in Mark, as the name Elias, Elijah in Greek. So they imagined He was calling for the historic prophet, expected to return someday, to come and save Him then.

We are blessed with the clearer understanding of the Gospel writers, who helpfully give us both the original words and the correct translation. But it is still a terribly difficult saying to understand. Some Christians imagine that Jesus, who is fully God and also fully human, towards the end gave up hope, like any human being might. So this outcry is actually an expression of despair.

Yet some of the same aspects of how Jesus died which make it clear that God did not turn away or abandon Him while on the Cross also show us that Jesus did not despair as He died. All we need do is look ahead at the last two things He said there. John records the second to the last for us, “It is finished.” I do not want to steal too much from the message on that sixth last word in two weeks, but suffice it to say that we have to realize that the word used there for “finished” means “completed” or “fulfilled.” It means what Stan would mean if he said “It is finished” about a project where he had just driven the last nail. It means what Terry would mean if he said it as he wrote the last word of a book. Jesus could not have been despairing on the Cross because He went on to express His conviction that He had accomplished what He came to do. That’s not despair. Nor does it suggest that God the Father was not with Him while it was all being done.

The very last word from the Cross shows us clearly both that Jesus did not despair and that He did not Himself feel abandoned by His Father. Luke 23:46 tells us that Jesus’ final words were, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Jesus was still able to speak directly to God the Father and in trusting love commended Himself into the Father’s care. Those are not the words of one who perceives himself forsaken. They are the words of a trusting Son who still feels close to and seen by a kind and loving Parent.

Why then do we regularly hear the thought that Jesus was actually and truly abandoned by God while on the Cross? In an otherwise very beautiful modern hymn, “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” by Stuart Townend, we hear these words,

How great the pain of searing loss.
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the Chosen One
bring many sons to glory.

In that line “The Father turns His face away,” Townend is expressing an understanding of how Jesus dying on the Cross saves us from our sins. It’s a very common view among evangelical Christians, but the Covenant church looks at things a bit differently. I grew up learning the basic idea, but I first heard it expressed clearly and crassly by an Old Testament professor at my Christian college. He called it the “dump truck theory” of salvation. Basically, as Jesus died, a cosmic dump truck, carrying all the sins of every human being throughout time, backed up to Cross and poured them all on Jesus. So there He was bearing the weight and load of the sins of all humanity, the whole rotting, stinking mess of every wrong ever done by you or I or anyone else. It’s a huge pile of garbage.

Now there is something true about that dump truck picture. We do believe that Jesus bore our sins on the Cross, that He died because of all the wrong we have done. In II Corinthians 5:21, Paul writes, “For our sake he [God the Father] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin…” In some way it is our sin which is being crucified in Jesus.

But we get into sketchy territory when we add the next bit of theology behind Townend’s line about the Father turning away from His Son. People have tried to explain Jesus’ sense of forsakenness in terms of that load of sin upon Him by pointing to one or two verses in the Old Testament, especially Habakkuk 1:13, which says, “Your eyes are too pure to behold evil, and you cannot look on wrongdoing…” Thus, it is said, with all our sin laid upon Jesus, the sight becomes unbearable for His Father, who turns away and Jesus really is forsaken, abandoned by His God, by His Father.

The problem with that Father-turning-away idea is that it’s not what Habakkuk meant and clearly not, as I’ve already said, what is happening on the Cross. First, Habakkuk talked about God being too pure to look on evil only to wonder “why do you look on the treacherous and are silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they?” While the prophet was clearly talking about how abhorrent human sin is in God’s eyes, he is actually setting up a question about why at that moment in Israel’s history, when the Babylonians were beginning to overrun Judah, God is silent and not doing anything about it. In other words, if God hates sin so much that He can barely look at it, why is He not doing anything? There is no implication at all that God turns away when He sees sin. No, Habakkuk’s question is that God sees and looks at sin full on, so why is it happening?

The problem here is that lines like “The Father turns his face away,” have a kind of poetic beauty which appeals to both song writers and preachers. It’s a dramatic and awesome thought to think that there on the Cross something so powerful happened that it broke even the close bond between God the Father and God the Son. Some writers even say it that way. As one commentary I read put it, “the hitherto unbroken communion between the Father and the Son was mysteriously broken.” But that cannot be. However Jesus’ death on the Cross saved us, it did not do it by breaking the unbreakable, by creating a separation between the Father and the Son. That is, to put it simply, impossible.

At the core of the Christian faith is the great revelation that God is three persons in one God, an eternal unity in trinity. If to be three persons yet one is what God is, then anything which breaks that unity would also make God not God. The Cross did not break the Trinity because nothing can break the Trinity.

Whatever Jesus meant by “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He did not mean that He thought God had actually and literally abandoned Him. You can see that in the very fact that the cry is “My God, my God…” In all His suffering and desolation, God to Jesus is still my God, the Father to whom He can in quiet confidence not long after commend His spirit. As the Son of God He is not expressing His own forsakenness.

One different answer to what the Cry of Dereliction is about has been to suggest that it was not uncommon for Jewish people to refer to a passage of Scripture by its opening line. In a Jewish Bible, the first five books, the Torah, have names which all come from the first word or words of the book. It’s a little like how we often name our hymns from their first words, like “Blessed Assurance,” or “I Love to Tell the Story,” or “Great Is thy Faithfulness.” So we should realize that “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is the first line of Psalm 22. In calling it out on the Cross, it may be that Jesus means not just to say that one line, but the whole psalm.

Thinking of all of Psalm 22 instead of just the first line shows us that while a great deal of pain and suffering is expressed, both emotionally and physically, it is ultimately a song of hope, ending with confidence and trust in God, even at the point of death. We can also see that just before the Cry of Dereliction Matthew points out in chapter 27, verses 35, 39 and 43, specific events in the Crucifixion which match verses in Psalm 22. So it is not at all wild to think Jesus was reminding both us and Himself not just of the suffering and distress the psalm expresses, but it’s whole “story arc” moving from distress to hope.

Directly to the point about the Father turning away from Jesus on the Cross we find Psalm 22 verse 24 saying clearly about God:

For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.

When we take all of Psalm 22 into account then, it tells us that whether or not Jesus meant to be quoting the whole psalm when He quoted the first line from the Cross, that cry about being forsaken cannot mean God the Father somehow abandoned Jesus there. The Father was there at the Cross, seeing the whole thing, with His own parental sorrow echoing the torment Jesus was suffering. And that gives us a clue to what that forlorn and haunting cry actually meant and means for us right now.

In order to bear our sin on the Cross and cure the disease of human wrong, Jesus had to be human. That is another of our core Christian beliefs. Jesus is truly and fully God and at the very same time truly and fully human. That means Jesus entered into and often expressed the whole range of human experience and emotion. Here on the Cross we see Jesus experience physical and emotional pain. Next week in His fifth word we will hear Him state simply how thirsty He was there. Earlier in the Gospels we see Him sad and happy, full of energy and tired, filled with compassion and angry. It’s all there. Our God was and is also a true human being.

The feeling of being forsaken is a true human feeling. It is coming home to roost in hard and ugly ways around the world and very likely soon if not already in our own community. A former student of my wife’s who is all alone wrote to her on Thursday that he has been making a living as a substitute teacher for public schools here in Eugene. Now with the closures, unlike regular teachers and staff, he will have no income. There must be millions of people in our country in situations like that. Yes, there may be some government assistance coming, but for the moment he and those like him must feel very alone and helpless. And I haven’t even touched on all those who already have bad cases of Covid-19 spending their sick time in isolation and quarantine and cut off from normal human contact. “Forsaken” is an apt word for how they must feel.

And despite what I have been saying about Christ bearing our sins on the Cross but not being forsaken by the Father, sin really does cut human beings off from God. One other Old Testament verse that is sometimes used to support the idea that God could not look at Jesus on the Cross with all our sins on Him is Isaiah 59:2. Part of it reads, “your sins have hidden his face from you.” But we need to read that bit in context.

Isaiah 59:1 and 2 in totality says,

See, the Lord’s hand is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear.
Rather, your iniquities have been barriers between you and God,
and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.

Which all suggests what we should know full well. The distance between us and God comes from our end, not His. He is always there, seeing us, hearing us, and loving us like a father, but our sins keep us from sensing that, from experiencing His presence. Caught up in our sins, we feel forsaken even though we are not, just like someone confined at home in this strange time might feel alone even though she’s in constant contact with family and friends by e-mail or phone.

So I think the best understanding of what Jesus was feeling and crying out from the Cross in the Cry of Dereliction is His total identification with us as human beings, even to the point of feeling forsaken by God. He knew very well that feeling was not the whole picture. He could still say “My God,” could still call on His Father to forgive those who crucified Him, could still trust His loving Father to receive His spirit. But in those moments of human torment He let Himself feel and give voice to what you and I might feel in such a time, the agonizing sense that we are cut off even from God. The mystery is not that the relationship between God the Father and God the Son was broken. They mystery is that Jesus for a while felt and named what it feels like when our relationships, especially our relationships with God, are broken.

Yet God was always there. I cannot say it enough. II Corinthians 5:19 says that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” That means God never turned away, never left, even for a moment. He was right there with, right there in Jesus as He died for our sins. God was doing what was needed to bring us back into the kind of relationship Jesus always had with God. And that means God is still always there wherever there is human suffering. That the Cross is where God chose to be on that Friday afternoon means that God will not forsake you or me on any afternoon, no matter how awful it is.

So today as we face an afternoon of uncertainty, wondering what tomorrow’s news might bring, wondering if someone we love or we ourselves will come down with a mysterious illness that has swept across the world, this fourth word from the Cross declares that Jesus our Savior knows how we feel. Whether it is simple loneliness, fear for the future, spiritual doubt, or even physical distress, Jesus let Himself feel such things too and knows about it. And He is there, with His Father, and with the sweet comfort and consolation of His Holy Spirit. Jesus let Himself feel forsaken on the Cross so that you and I could know we are never forsaken when we trust in Him.

May the loving and unbroken presence of God be your experience as you read or listen to this message this morning or later. If you need to hear more about it or just be reassured that it’s true, give me a call. God was and is always with Jesus. Through Jesus He is always with you and always will be.

Amen.