A Sermon
by Rev. Merlin T. Batt,
Intentional Interim Pastor
St. Matthew’s United Church of Christ
Maiden, North Carolina
Presented on March 4, 2007
Community Lenten Services
St. Martin Lutheran Church
Scripture Readings: Deuteronomy 31:14-18; II Corinthians 5:17-21; Matthew 27:33-36, 45-50
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Some twenty years ago when I was serving as Senior Pastor of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Holden, Massachusetts, on the church staff was a young, newly ordained Associate Pastor named Tom Leinbach. Tom was a bright, Yale University graduate with a dry sense of humor.
One year the church staff was planning the Lenten program. I saw a slight smile cross Tom’s face before he spoke. Then with a straight face he suggested we might do what a church in his Connecticut hometown had done the year before. Their program was based on the four letters that spell the word Lent, “L-E-N-T” – L for Let’s, E for Eliminate, N for Negative, and T for Thinking…Let’s Eliminate Negative Thinking.
When we realized Tom was putting us on, we all had a good laugh at the goofiness of such a theme for a Lenten series. Then we re-doubled our efforts at putting together a Lenten program which was worthy of a Christian church, a series which encouraged our people to focus attention on Jesus Christ and what he accomplished through his ministry and his Passion.
There is no question in my mind that our Community Lenten Services are doing this very thing admirably. Here in these evening services, the various preachers in our community are undertaking the challenge of exploring a selection of Old Testament texts through which we may understand more deeply and richly the saving work of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. I am grateful to be part of this important Lenten endeavor. The text I have chosen to explore with you tonight is Psalm 22.
Before reading to you the psalm which begins with the words Jesus borrowed and spoke from the Cross just before he died, I want to call your attention to an obscure story from the little known (among Protestants anyway) Book of Second Maccabees. You may know this book is part of what we Protestants call the Apocrypha, but which Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians include as part of the Holy Bible.
The story concerns a Jewish scribe named Eleazer who lived in Jerusalem during the oppressive rule of Syria under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the maniacal, cruel king who delighted in humiliating and torturing the Jews under his authority. Eleazer at the time was much advanced in age and greatly respected in the Jewish community. He was arrested by order of the Syrian king and ordered to eat pork as a public display of rejecting his faith in the God of Israel.
Well, Eleazer refused to eat the pork and thus renounce his faith. The author of Maccabees writes, “But he (Eleazer), welcoming death with honor rather than life with pollution, went up to the rack of his own accord, spitting out the (pork), as all ought to go who have the courage to refuse things that it is not right to taste, even for the natural love of life.”
After much pain and suffering, when Eleazer was at the point of dying, he groaned aloud and declared, “It is clear to the Lord in his holy knowledge that, though I might have been saved from death, I am enduring terrible sufferings in my body under this beating, but in my soul I am glad to suffer these things because I fear him.” With that, the editor of the book concludes, “So in this way (Eleazer) died, leaving in his death an example of nobility and a memorial of courage, not only to the young but to the great body of his nation.”
This account of Eleazer’s death is the story of a martyr, a story designed to edify and strengthen believers. But notice how radically different is the story of Jesus’ death! According to the Gospel writers, Jesus does not die as a martyr. The story of Jesus’ death is not meant to edify and strengthen us. Rather, it is meant to humble and awe us. Instead of providing an uplifting oration for the ages as did Eleazer, Jesus leaves us with an excruciating question shouted into the deepening Golgotha darkness: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
These tortured words, as you may know, come not originally from the pain-wracked mind and lips of Jesus on the Cross, but from the 22nd Psalm, some of which I will read to you now:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest…I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people. All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me; they shake their heads…I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death…a company of evildoers encircles me…they stare and gloat over me; they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots. But you, O Lord, do not be far away! O my help, come quickly to my aid!
What made this psalm come to Jesus’ mind as his life was ebbing away, weakening with every heartbeat? After all, he might have quoted the martyr Eleazer, and thereby leave the world with another example of nobility, and with words designed to embolden generations to come.
Or, Jesus might have turned his thoughts to the comforting words of the 23rd Psalm, and said with the few breaths that remained, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.” But he didn’t. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is what he said, and then he died.
I don’t know how you react to these pained words, but these words of Jesus have been profoundly disturbing to Christian believers over the centuries. At worst, they seem to suggest that at the last moment Jesus lost his faith in God, and in the instant before his breath failed, looked back upon his lifework as a total failure, as if the Father in whom he had trusted had abandoned him and his work at the last.
But given what we know about Jesus, this darkest of interpretations is most unlikely, I think. And given what we know about the Gospel writer’s faith, Matthew’s faith, it’s fair to assume that such a dark shout of bitter despair would never have been included in the story of Jesus. No, there has to be some other explanation.
Some interpreters, at the other extreme, propose that, ironically, Jesus intended his last words to be, not a cry of dereliction, but a triumphant declaration of faith in God. How so, you ask? Well, these scholars point out that it was common in the tradition of the time for someone to cite the first words of a text as a way of identifying an entire passage. So, some say, when Jesus from the Cross quoted the opening line of Psalm 22, he was actually affirming the positive thrust of the whole psalm, which ends this way:
All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations. To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him…
Such a positive interpretation would remove the sting of this dark passage, but it doesn’t hold up to closer inspection. Notice in the story what follows Jesus’ cry of dereliction. Some who heard it said, “This man is calling for Elijah.” Well, the confusion can be traced to the fact that Jesus had cried out in Aramaic, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” “Eli, Eli” means “My God, my God” in Aramaic, but what some of the bystanders thought they heard was Jesus calling out the name of the prophet Elijah, so they lifted up a wine-soaked sponge to Jesus’ lips to prolong his life, and they waited to see if his cry for Elijah’s help would be answered. The point is: the bystanders heard not an affirmation of confidence in God, but a desperate cry for help from a dying man.
You see, Jesus’ agonized cry of dereliction from the Cross is neither a result of Jesus losing his faith at the last, nor an ironic statement of his ultimate confidence in God’s victory. I believe that when Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it was because the crushing weight of the world’s sin had converged upon him at that moment, blotting out the sunlight of God’s love as surely as the light of day was blotted out for three hours while he hung on the Cross bearing the sins of many. There, for the first and only time in Jesus’ experience, “a cloud came between him and the Father he loved and obeyed,” causing him to ask with his last breath, “why have you forsaken me?”
And down, down into the deep darkness of death, Jesus took with him the sin of the world: my sin, your sin, the sin of countless millions, the heavy weight that has hung around the world’s neck, and he dragged it down to destruction! That’s why St. Paul could say of Jesus to the Christians in Corinth, “For our sake (God) made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
What language shall I borrow to thank thee, dearest friend;
For this thy dying sorrow, thy pity without end?
O make me thine forever; and, should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never, outlive my love to thee! Amen.
