Bruised Knuckles

Mark 15:33-37; Psalm 22

September 20, 2020 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Sometimes you have to say things differently to get someone’s attention. Today, “different” seems to mean “louder.” We think if we say what we mean louder, and by that I mean more aggressively, or online IN ALL CAPS, then people will pay attention, right? Truth is, anymore, the louder someone gets, the more they get tuned out, at least in my world. But Christopher, when he was little, already knew that. Somehow, I don’t know how, he learned this lesson: that to get someone’s attention, sometimes you have to change the language. One evening, we were in the family room at the parsonage, Christopher was probably 3 or 4 years old, and he wanted his mom’s attention. I don’t remember what he was doing, but he wanted her to see him, and so he started doing the “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy” thing. You know how that goes. It’s the tone of voice parents learn to tune out, right? Cathy was busy doing something, again I don’t remember what, but she wasn’t hearing him, so he changed the language. He finally just called out, “Cathy!” He wasn’t loud, just clear, and the change of language got her attention!

Changing the language will get people’s attention. This morning, as we continue in this series on “The Lord’s Prayers,” we come to the only prayer of Jesus that is recorded in a different language. We’re at the cross, as we have been for the last couple of weeks, and as Jesus literally hangs between heaven and earth, he prays a prayer that comes from the Psalms—Psalm 22, to be exact. But Mark records it in Aramaic—which is, actually, probably the language Jesus and the disciples most frequently spoke (though there is an argument to be made that Jesus may have fluently spoken as many as three languages). But the Gospels themselves are written in Greek. Greek was the language of the empire, the language most people across the Roman world knew. Greek then was sort of like English is now; it was the common language of trade and commerce and politics. But when Mark came to this prayer, this cry from the cross, he records it in its original language, in Aramaic, and then (thankfully) he translates it for us. I think part of why he does that is so we’ll understand the mistake the crowd makes; they think Jesus is calling for Elijah when he says, “Eloi” (15:35). “Eli” and “Eloi” sound alike, especially in what had to be a muted voice, the best Jesus could do from the cross. But there’s something more going on here. Mark wants us to slow down when we’re reading this prayer, when we listen in to this moment of Jesus praying from the cross. He wants us to stop and notice this prayer, maybe above all the others. So he records it in Aramaic, which catches our attention and should cause us to wonder what this prayer is all about.

As Mark tells the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, it has been an afternoon of mocking. The charge against him, which is posted above his head, reads, “The King of the Jews.” I think it was meant to be sarcastic; I mean, a king on a cross? Come on! This “king of the Jews” is crucified with criminals on either side of him, and we know at least one of them is mocking him. It’s pretty bad when someone who is dying the same horrific death as you uses what little strength he has to make fun of you. Then, Mark says, in the ancient equivalent of “gapers” who slow down to watch a car accident, the people passing by, just walking by the scene of the murder, insult Jesus. Ordinary folks and religious leaders do the same thing. They all throw his own words back at him, twisting them and undoubtedly laughing. “Do you remember when he said that one thing? Now look at him!” The people, many of whom at one time might have even come to listen to him or even have put their hopes in him, have now turned away from Jesus. He’s on the cross and they have abandoned him.

Mark says that at noon, darkness covered the whole land. At noon, at the time when it should have been the brightest, the sun is dark, the clouds are dark, the world is dark. The darkness probably matched Jesus’ mood, probably matched many moods, and I picture that it got especially quiet around the crosses. There’s something in us that makes us talk more quietly the darker it gets. This darkness came suddenly and it lasted for three hours. Three hours in which there might not have been much noise other than the whistling of the wind and the moans of the crucified. Maybe feet shuffling as people moved around. Probably a few muffled tears. Darkness. Quiet. For three hours. Can you imagine? I thought we might try that this morning, but I figured you wouldn’t stay! We barely go three seconds today without some sort of noise. Probably some people drifted away, but those who were keeping vigil stayed close, maybe huddled together in small groups, maybe camped nearby whispering about the Romans and the way they treated people. But I can’t imagine anyone spoke very loudly. And no one said anything too dangerous, lest they become the next person on a cross (cf. Card, Mark: The Gospel of Passion, pg. 183).

At the end of the three hours, a voice broke through the darkness. It was Jesus, and Mark says he “cried out in a loud voice” (15:34). The same word is used in other contexts to describe a “roar,” which is hard to imagine coming from the cross. Crucifixion victims usually died of suffocation; the pain and the punishment made it difficult to breathe and so they usually said very little. Anything they said was muted or whispered (cf. Garland, NIV Application Commentary: Mark, pg. 594; Lucado, Next Door Savior, pg. 140). But Jesus summons up strength to cry out this fairly long sentence in a roar: “Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani?” — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In Mark’s Gospel, this is Jesus’ only prayer from the cross, and it is a cry of abandonment.

Abandoned. It’s a dark and sad word. “The house no one wants. The child no one claims. The parent no one remembers” (Lucado 141). The friend who betrays you, who forsakes you. The employer who discards you. The group that leaves you out. Abandoned. Take those images and ratchet them up by a million or more and we still only have the smallest inkling of what Jesus felt on the cross. Jesus is God. He is the second person of the Trinity. From time before time, he has known the perfect fellowship and presence of his father and the Holy Spirit. Three persons, one God, perfect community. So the question is: did God the Father really forsake Jesus on the cross? Is that even possible? Was there division in God himself? And you have preachers and teachers and theologians and authors who come down on all sides of the debate—a debate, by the way, that I’m going to get too deep into this morning, nor am I likely to solve it if it hasn’t been solved in two thousand years.

Here’s what I believe happened on that cross, though, and I believe it because it’s the way Paul described what happened. It’s what the church has believed for centuries. Paul describes it this way: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Now, sometimes we think of that in this way: that God took all of our dirty laundry, all of our mess-ups and wrongdoings, and he piled them on top of Jesus, and Jesus had to carry all of those things. He had to hold onto it all. He had to take our punishment; he had to pay our debt. You’ve used language like that to describe it; I have too. We think of it as God putting something on Jesus, but that’s not what Paul says. Listen to it again: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Did you hear it? Jesus became what we are so that we could become like he was and is. He became sin; we became righteousness. Now, if that doesn’t blow your mind, you’re not paying attention. In some way we can’t comprehend, Jesus, in those hours on the cross, became sin. He didn’t just put it on like a garment; he became sin. Or, as Paul puts it in another place, he became a curse for us (cf. Galatians 3:13). Now, I’m going to be honest: I don’t really know completely what that means, and any pastor who tells you they do or they’ve got it all figured out is lying to you. It’s mind-blowing; it’s proof that the Holy Spirit guided the writing of the Scriptures because I’m willing to bet even Paul didn’t fully know what he was saying. I sort of him picture writing the words, “God made him…to be sin…” and dropping then pen, saying, “What?” Jesus became sin, and in that moment, he felt forsaken by his Father. He became so different than he had always been for eternity that it seemed his Father was distant, absent, gone. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

We call this the prayer of forsakenness; it’s the prayer we pray when it feels like heaven is closed. While we will never feel the sort of forsakenness that Jesus felt (because we’re not God), many if not most of us have known how it feels when God seems distant. Richard Foster describes it this way: “We do everything we know. We pray. We serve. We worship. We live as faithfully as we can. And still there is nothing…nothing! It feels like we are ‘beating on Heaven’s door with bruised knuckles in the dark,’ to use the words of George Buttrick” (Foster, Prayer, pg. 17). That’s a powerful and painful image, of banging your fist on a door, desperately trying to get in and not having much hope that someone will answer. The Bible often uses the image of a desert to talk about the same experience—a time when we feel dry, barren, thirsty. Knocking, thirsting, desperate—forsaken.

We are not alone in this experience. Throughout the centuries, Christians of all sorts have talked about feeling forsaken. Saint John of the Cross called it the “dark night of the soul.” Another author called it the “cloud of unknowing.” Puritan writer George Fox described his experience this way: “When it was day I wished for night, and when it was night I wished for day” (Foster 18-19). When I was growing up, no one more exemplified extending the hands and feet of Jesus on the worldwide scene than Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She was known for serving the poorest of the poor in Jesus’ name, loving the dying and ministering to the sick and hurting. She loved the people no one else would. After her death (and against her wishes), her private journals were discovered and published. In those pages, we all learned that for fifty years, Mother Teresa experienced an almost unbroken sense of feeling forsaken by God. She once wrote, “As for me, the silence and emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak…I want you to pray for me—that I let Him have [a] free hand” (Walt, Right Here Right Now Jesus, Apple Books edition, pgs. 592-593). For most of the years during which Mother Teresa so faithfully served Jesus, she was painfully aware of his apparent absence.

But is it possible? Was it possible for God to have forsaken Mother Teresa? or George Fox? Or Saint John of the Cross? Was it possible for God to have forsaken Jesus on the cross? Is it possible for God to forsake you and me? I’ll let the psalmist answer that question: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there” (Psalm 139:7-8). And that’s just the beginning. The psalmist goes on to describe other places where he can’t get away from God: the sky, the far side of the sea, in the darkness of the night—pretty much everywhere, including Terre Haute, Indiana (even though that’s not listen in the psalm, but it’s implied, trust me). In other words, there’s no place, according to the psalmist, where God isn’t. And if that’s true, then the answer to the question is: it’s not possible for you to get away from God and it’s not possible for God to actually forsake you because God is present everywhere. He’s there when you go home, when you go to school or to work, when you are sleeping or when you are awake, when you go for a jog or when you sit down to watch Netflix. He is there when you talk about the neighbors and when you calculate your taxes. He is there when you travel and stay home, when you work in the yard and when you kick back in your chair. There is no place and no time where God is not. It is impossible to be forsaken by God (cf. Walt 593).

That doesn’t mean that we don’t experience a sense of God’s absence. There are times in our lives when we cannot sense his presence, and those times come for a variety of reasons (cf. Foster 18). I think that’s what’s happening at the top of that cross. Besides that, would Jesus really cry out to an absent God unless he genuinely knew that God the Father was there to hear his prayer? Jesus is not giving up; he knows his Father is still there, even if for some reason he couldn’t sense his presence (cf. Garland 601). We don’t have to understand it to know it’s true. The prayer he prays, though, is actually the first line of another psalm, Psalm 22. As I mentioned, crucifixion was largely death by suffocation, so there is no way Jesus could have prayed or recited the whole prayer out loud with what little breath he had. If every breath was a struggle, he would have been lucky to even get out this little bit of the psalm. But it wasn’t unusual in those days for someone to recite a short portion of a psalm or a Scripture and everyone around would understand that they were referring to the whole thing. There were no chapters and verses yet, and they didn’t have printed copies laying around their homes. So they were much, much better than we are at having the Scriptures in their heads and in their hearts. When the good Jews in the crowd heard Jesus pray this prayer from the top of the cross, their minds and hearts would have gone immediately to the whole of what we know as Psalm 22. If you follow the daily Scripture readings, you will read Psalm 22 in its entirety tomorrow, but I want you to hear what the psalmist was originally praying. We don’t know for sure what the original situation was when David wrote Psalm 22 (centuries before Jesus), but apparently he felt abandoned or forsaken by God in some way, and so, in typical David honesty, he tells God how he feels:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

    Why are you so far from saving me,

    so far from my cries of anguish?

My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,

    by night, but I find no rest (22:1-2).

Even in the midst of that forsakenness, though, David still affirms God’s presence and his holiness. He knows God is good; he does not give up on God like we so often do. It’s almost like we think if God doesn’t do such and such for us, we’ll just quit following him. It becomes all about us. But it’s not about you and it’s not about me. It’s about God, and the creator of the universe can do as he pleases, even if it doesn’t please us. David knew that. His prayer continues:

But I am a worm and not a man,

    scorned by everyone, despised by the people (22:6).

Then listen to how David’s prayer parallels Jesus’ experience:

All who see me mock me;

    they hurl insults, shaking their heads.

“He trusts in the Lord,” they say,

    “let the Lord rescue him.

Let him deliver him,

    since he delights in him” (22:7-8).

David goes on to lament his situation, to describe it to God (who, of course, already knows what’s going on). He affirms God’s ability to rescue him, and he proclaims his trust in God to do so. And then, in the end, he celebrates God’s rescue that has not yet come but that he is confident will come in time. Because God is good, he will not leave his beloved child to suffer. 

For he has not despised or scorned

    the suffering of the afflicted one;

he has not hidden his face from him

    but has listened to his cry for help (22:24).

And in the end, there is praise. There is celebration because God has once again been seen to be faithful. But remember, again, that even in David’s darkness, even in his forsakenness, this was never about him. It’s about God. That’s where David’s focus is.

And I believe that’s why Jesus prayed this particular psalm from the top of the cross. Of all the psalms in his heart and mind, he chose this one because in the midst of his “dark night of the soul,” as he felt forsaken, he prayed these words not just because it was the way he felt but because of the triumphant end of the psalm. He wanted people to meditate on these words, on this prayer, and know that whatever they would go through, whenever they felt forsaken, they could know beyond the shadow of a doubt that God is still there and in the end he will win.

We think Mark’s Gospel was originally written to persecuted Christians in Rome. It was probably written during or in the aftermath of the great fire of Rome which most people today agree emperor Nero set even though he blamed it on the Christians. And so a huge wave of persecution broke out, and both Peter and Paul lost their lives in those attacks on God’s people. Dr. William Lane called Mark a “pamphlet for hard times,” because Mark wants his readers to hear, in the midst of their own trials, in the midst of times in which it seemed like God had abandoned them, that Jesus is with them. He’s been there and he knows what forsakenness feels like. And the message comes down to you and me: he still does and he’s still there. It is perhaps in the moments when we feel most forsaken that God is doing some of his best work (cf. Card 22-24; Garland 602).

In those moments, our call is to trust and to pray. I grow rather tired of people who say, “Is praying all you’re going to do?” Friends, in prayer we turn our lives and our situations over to the God of the universe. Prayer should always be the first thing we do. Yes, I do believe God will call us to act in some way, often becoming the answers to our own prayers, but if we start with action instead of with prayer, we’re not going to get very far. In a time of forsakenness, prayer is what we do to learn to trust again, to learn to sense his presence again. Pray. Pray the Scriptures. Pray psalms like Psalm 22 or any of the other psalms in the readings this week. Pray by picturing yourself at the foot of the cross and hearing Jesus pray this psalm. Pray and allow the words of the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit to remind you that God is there, even when you don’t “feel” him. It just may be that God is doing his most important work in moments like that.

But let me suggest something else: if you’re in a good place, if you’re not at a place where you feel forsaken, what might it mean for you to stand in the gap for someone who believes they have been forsaken? There are all sorts of people in our world, not to mention the world at large, who believe God has forgotten them. People in poverty—both financial poverty and spiritual poverty—people who have been hurt deeply by others, maybe by Christians or by the church, people who believed that Jesus should have done more for them, people who have felt neglected by others…I could go on and on. You probably know someone like one of these, or someone else who for whatever reason has bruised knuckles from banging on heaven’s door. What if you decided this week to stand in the gap for them? What if, this week, rather than praying for our own needs, we asked the Holy Spirit to help us enter into their experience. Maybe it’s a relative or someone you work with, a friend or a neighbor. Maybe it’s someone nameless but you can tell by the haunted look in their eyes that they are distant from God. Allow the Holy Spirit to give you deep empathy for them, and pray for a new sense of God’s presence. Enter their experience and ask the Spirit to give you words and prayers and even actions for them, to help them draw a step closer to God (cf. Walt 594-595). How might God use such a bold and willing pray-er?

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there is one way you can be forsaken by God, and that’s if you choose to be. God will never force his way into your life, and if you choose not to follow Jesus here, if you reject his offer of friendship and companionship, he will honor that choice. He will allow you to live without the joy, peace, forgiveness and hope that comes from being part of the family of God. And he will honor that choice for eternity, if need be. That’s not what God wants, but because he loves us so much, he allows us to choose to be in his presence or not. People ask me sometimes what I think hell is like, if the flames and stuff (which is largely drawn from Dante more than the Bible) are real. And I don’t know. It’s not that I don’t care; it’s just that the Scriptures are not as clear as we want them to be and so I try not to be dogmatic on things the Bible is not dogmatic on. What I do know is that, whatever else hell is, it’s separation from God for eternity. It’s eternal hopelessness, and it’s being forsaken by God forever. It is God honoring our choice. Having experienced times here where it seems like God is absent, I know that I do not want that for eternity. And maybe that’s another reason for times of seeming absence, forsakenness or separation here: to make us long for heaven, where we will be forever with the Lord (cf. 1 Thessalonians 4:17). I long for that, and I pray you do, too. Let’s pray.