Sunday of the Passion 2017

Sunday of the Passion Year A
April 9, 2017

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
The saddest words in scripture I think.  Jesus calls out to the God and Father he loves, in pain and darkness, and in desperation… and as we hear his cry of brokenness, we too wonder, why has God forsaken him?  Where is God as his only Son is dying?

    It has been so hard to read or watch the news the last few weeks.  It seems that everywhere we look, something awful has happened.  A young police officer gunned down in Tecumseh, a woman murdered by her stepson in Edmond, a high school teacher kidnapping a female student in Tennessee… a young father in Syria cradling his twin babies who have been killed in a deadly gas attack; many people afraid after our own military strike against Syria, and news this morning of deadly bombings in Coptic churches in Egypt … it’s too much… there is too much pain, suffering and death swirling around us… and it is hard to see God in any of it. 

    A friend of mine used to say, that when suffering became intense, when it became too much to bear, that the suffering and death of Jesus was the only answer that made any sense.  I have pondered that statement for many years, and while I don’t think I can explain it very well, I think my friend is right.  There is no way for any of us to make meaning out of the suffering around us.  Suffering is always a tragedy, and in that darkness we shake our fists and we cry out to God… It’s hard not to be angry knowing that ours is a world where evil and suffering are allowed to happen, but that is the price we pay for the freedom to choose; being free is a gift of love that allows us the option to be fully who God has created us to be… or we can choose to turn away and choose a different path… and sometimes the bad news is we become the victims of someone else’s evil choice.  It doesn’t seem fair… and yet somehow in God’s kingdom where the king rides on a donkey rather than a grand chariot, it might make sense.  In Jesus God has chosen to be with us even in the evil and suffering that we experience… In Jesus, God is always to be found in the suffering… and I am convinced, that our suffering and our death breaks God’s heart… as Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus,  he weeps at ours… and as Jesus cries out to God the Father from the cross of suffering, he cries out when we suffer as well because he has joined himself to us forever by emptying himself and being born in our likeness…
    But we are now in his likeness… and while God is present in the darkness and in the suffering of the world, the great mystery is that the darkness and suffering are not all there is.  God is indeed in the suffering… but God is also beyond it, reaching through the horror of the cross to bring us into Easter light, helping us to somehow know that God is present…

    The world we live in often seems overrun by greed, fear, and violence.  Suffering was not God’s choice for Jesus… and it is not God’s choice for us.  Jesus was the victim of the greed and fear of the empire that he dared to challenge.  Sometimes it seems to me that human beings are hell bent on their own destruction and the destruction of perfect love, because love challenges us.  It demands that we choose love over fear… Love demands that we risk everything in order to gain everything.  Love demands that we live as disciples in the kingdom, rather than live as patriots of the empire.  Perfect love came into the world in Jesus, and cries out from the cross for the suffering of the whole world, pleading with us to choose love.  Love will always win, even in the darkest moments.  As we turn our own faces toward Jerusalem to where Jesus is, may we join our voices with his, crying out in love on behalf of others who may not know to whom to call to.  May our own cries of abandonment be joined with Jesus’ cries to the Father… and may we always know the mystery of God’s love and presence is with us no matter where we are, or what we have chosen.  Jesus is our answer to suffering and evil and death, because perfect love will always win.