Rev. Dr. Martin J. Lohrmann
These opening words of Psalm 22 became Jesus’s own prayer on the cross. With these words (as throughout his ministry), Jesus joined his life to all who have been forsaken, forgotten, lost, and condemned.
On the cross, forsakenness became a reality that God’s savior experienced directly. The messiah knows its shame intimately.
His holiness forsaken, Jesus hallowed forsakenness.
His love within the depths of that pain and shame doesn’t make our hurts go away. It might even make the suffering more acute, as his grace heightens our awareness that goodness really is missing. The absence of God remains, an open wound. The pain is real.
And… it is an absence that has Jesus for a companion, so we are never alone. It is a wound shared by the creator of the universe, tended with love.
Even when the absence of God gapes before us, when life’s lack of meaning leaves us empty, when we have truly reached the end of our abilities, Jesus is by our side. The God-forsaken one: God with us.
This Good Friday, we enter the mystery that neither death, nor life, nor anything else in all creation—not even the absence of God—can keep us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
Peace be with you.
