“The hour has come.”
That’s what Jesus said, and that’s what we’re saying on this Sunday before Palm Sunday, on this Sunday before Holy Week, this fifth Sunday in Lent, and the hour can’t come soon enough for those of us who find Lent tedious or depressing, Spring Break notwithstanding. “The hour has come,” Jesus is saying but before we get too excited let’s remember that he’s talking about his crucifixion, not his resurrection. And so the hour to come leads us inexorably to a story of betrayal, denial, suffering, degradation—all of those things, if we had any sense, we’d like to avoid. It is the psalmist’s famous “Valley of the shadow of death” into which we are about to be immersed culminating with those three hours on Good Friday when every detail, every angle is open for scrutiny, until we hear the bell toll 33 times signifying death at an early age of one who was supremely innocent.
Part of Good Friday that always haunts me is the anguish in Jesus’ cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It haunts because I was always taught and believe it to be true that if I want to know who God is then I need to know who Jesus is. And the Jesus who reveals God to me is usually the compassionate Jesus, the healing Jesus, the one who is depicted in the east window of our church feeding the 5,000 and the one depicted in the west window of our church, welcoming the children. I have been taught and am forever grateful for the teaching that God is to be found there, that God is to be found in the welcome Jesus extended to all who crossed his path—highborn, lowborn, rich, poor, young, old, Gentile or Jew—Jesus and therefore God said, “You are inheritors of the Kingdom.” But on the cross Jesus claims that God has abandoned him and it suggests to us that God is not to be revealed in Jesus’ suffering save for God’s apparent indifference or worse, God’s judgment.
That vision haunts me because it could be me on a cross of some sort, it could be me in the fear of God’s abandonment, of God’s judgment. Does that strike a resounding cord with you? Have you ever felt at all fearful at the prospect of loneliness? Those who have lost a parent at an early age or who have suffered the effects of divorce or whose company went belly up along with your pension, you have some sense of what that feels like. But all of us need look no farther than innocent people who suffer to question where God is to be found. There is a wonderful verse in that great old hymn, HowFirm a Foundation, which reads “…and sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.” It has been suggested that that’s not how most of us look upon our times of distress.
Distress is something that we hope to get over or around as quickly as possible. Distress is that which often causes us to feel resentment, anger, and hurt, but not that which causes us to feel sanctified. (William Willimon)
And so what does it mean to sanctify our distress? Surely it means for our distress to be redeemed, made holy, something that is offered to God, something that brings us ironically closer to God.
And so God was not lost to Jesus on the cross, any more than God is lost to us in our experiences of “the valley of the shadow of death.” God is finally to be found in these profound moments as Henri Nouwen comments,
The fact that I am always searching for God, always struggling to discover the fullness of Love, always yearning for the complete Truth, tells me that I have already been given a taste of God, of Love, and of Truth. I can only look for something that I have, to some degree, have already found. How can I search for beauty and truth unless that beauty and truth are already known to me in the depth of my heart? It seems that all of us human beings have deep inner memories of the paradise that we have lost. Maybe the word “innocence” is better than the word “paradise.” We were innocent before we started feeling guilty; we were in the light before we entered the darkness; we were home before we started to search for home. Deep in the recesses of our minds and hearts lies hidden the treasure we seek. We know its preciousness, and we know that it holds the gift we most desire: a life stronger than death.
Jesus on the cross was crying out to a life stronger than death. He knew that life in his heart of hearts because God had been with and in him in his birth in Bethlehem, in his growing up, in his baptism in the Jordan, in his teaching, in his healing the sick, in his last supper with his disciples.
And for you and me, we claim God’s goodness, God’s love and truth, in us—in our baptisms, in our growing and learning, in our caring for others and others’ care for us, and in this supper that we too share with Christ’s disciples. Amen.
