A Meditation for the Friday after the Fifth Sunday in Lent | James De Koven, Priest, 1879
By The Rev. Tim MacDonald
Today’s Daily Office includes Psalm 22, one of the most powerful and moving of the psalms. In Aramaic, the psalm starts with these words, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”). As we find ourselves about to enter Holy Week and just seven days out from Good Friday, these words are especially powerful and meaningful. For they were among the last words uttered by Jesus as he hung dying upon the cross. His Jewish listeners would have associated this phrase with the psalm, but those who knew Jesus to be the Son of God would have heard them differently – as the languished cry of a Son to his Father. As I meditate on these words, I cannot help but think of the moments in my own life when I felt that God had forsaken me. Those moments when a friendship went wrong, or a contract fell through, or a loved one was suffering through illness. I can only reflect on how pathetic the words of lament that start Psalm 22 would have sounded upon my own lips.
As Jesus hung on that cross, He had not slept in over 30 hours. He had been tortured to within inches of death. He had been nailed to a tree and had hung there for hours. Blood, spilling from his many wounds, would have congealed, bonding his body onto the hard wood of the cross. Jesus had been betrayed by one of those closest to him, Judas, and had been abandoned by almost everyone else. At this very moment, the Son of God, the Entity within the Trinity that had given up his Heavenly Glory to live as a man, a man who had lived a blameless life, felt abandoned by his Father. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
Since the fall of Adam and Eve, sin has separated humans from God; heaven was closed to humankind. In the Old Testament, the Israelites presented animal sacrifices to atone for their sins. They would try to obey the law, fail, pour their sins out onto an animal, and sacrifice the animal to atone for those sins, and then repeat the cycle because they could not help but fall short of the law. The barrier between heaven and earth was too thick and the animal sacrifices too imperfect. Imagine an impenetrable wall–but one which God wanted to tear down.
As Jesus’ human form was dying on that tree, he took upon himself every human sin that would ever be committed–the sins we committed yesterday, the ones we’ve committed today, and the transgressions we are yet to commit. He who was God and was blameless experienced the barrier that had separated God and humans since the fall of Adam and Eve. Jesus became the perfect sacrifice for all our failings–the only sacrifice able to break down the wall between heaven and earth.
In anguish at that moment, feeling the separation, Jesus cried out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” He prayed Psalm 22, words first spoken by his ancestor, King David, over a thousand years earlier. That psalm contains numerous prophecies of Jesus’s death: “they pierce my hands and my feet; . . . they stare and gloat over me; they divide my garments among them; they cast lots for my clothing.” These verses pre-imagined this very moment. Most importantly, however, Psalm 22 ends in triumph: “They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn the saving deeds that he has done.” This is the triumph of Easter morning: Jesus’s resurrection and our salvation.
Only one person that has ever lived could truly utter the words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God has never forsaken me. He has always been there. Rather, it is I, in my sinful pursuit of earthly pleasures, who have too often forsaken him. My own chaotic will and sinful affections are where the forsaking is to be found. I cannot count the times in my own life when I have spoken words like Jesus’s lament upon the cross, blaming God for my separation from him, refusing to acknowledge my own guilt by trying to convince myself that somehow God had erred. Spoken by me, those words haven’t been a prayer of lament but, rather, attempts to shuffle blame, misdirected whines. What complete silliness in comparison to Jesus’s words on the cross as he died for us! In our own lives, even in King David’s life, is not the reverse much closer to the truth, “My God, my God, why have I forsaken you?” Yet, how infrequently, if ever, do we utter that!
In today’s New Testament reading, Paul exhorts the Corinthians and us: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor 4:8-9). Why are we not crushed? Why are we not in despair? Why are we not destroyed? Because God is with us. He will not forsake us. That assurance is repeated throughout the Scriptures (e.g., Deut 31:6, Deut 31:8, Jos 1:5, Heb 13:5), but God’s assurance was most evidently exhibited with the sacrifice of his Son upon the cross. God has not forsaken us, ever, but has always been there, buoying us up, despite our tendency to forsake him, clothing us with his righteousness so that we are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies” (2 Cor 4:10).
Let us pray:
Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
(Collect for the Fifth Sunday of Lent; BCP 1979, 219)
Tim MacDonald is a Florida native, born in Daytona Beach. Before answering the call to ordained ministry, Tim was a fisheries biologist in Florida for over thirty years. Tim is in his final year at Nashotah House and looks forward to receiving the MDiv in May. He was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church in January 2024, at the Cathedral of St. Peter in St. Petersburg, Florida. Upon graduation, Tim has been called back to Florida and will be priest-in-charge at the Church of the Nativity in Sarasota, Florida. In his free time, Tim immerses himself in God’s creation. He loves fishing, kayaking, hiking, cooking, and conversation over a delicious meal with family and friends.The readings for the preceding devotional may be located here from Forward Movement.
