“Seven Last Words of Jesus”
Rev. Rachel Lewis Cooley
Eternal Hope UCC, Fort Walton Beach, FL
April 14, 2022
Matthew 27:45-46
45 From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. 46 And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Many of the Jewish people hearing Jesus then and many reading Matthew’s account later immediately recognize Jesus’s words of agony. They are from Psalm 22, a psalm of lament which perhaps they or you have dug in to before. Like other scriptures in the deep tradition and wisdom of lament in the Jewish scriptures, Psalm 22 conveys the agony of threats to one’s life and freedom. Sometimes the pain is so great we must cry out.
That Jesus, the one sent by God as divine made flesh, would quote this lament connects him deeply and fully with all those people who cry out in pain and distress. Perhaps the cry asks that physical pain would end. Perhaps its that betrayals by others who abuse or enslave or bomb or poison the body or the mind must be stopped. Perhaps it asks “why, God, why?!”
If God would put skin on and go through such abuse and suffering and crucifixion, though: where is it God will not go… to be present with you, and with all of us, with all creation even when it suffers greatly. God hears our cries – they do not lessen our faith, but make it stronger! , trusting that God will hear us, that God is big enough to hold our laments. God has seen it firsthand.
Even before the cross, Jesus has given and given and given of himself, as a servant – born among the impoverished, the hated and spat upon by the empire, the ones eyed with suspicion and condemned by the religious elite. “Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant,” he says in Matthew 20, 27 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; 28 just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Tonight, he’s washed our feet, caring for us in a most vulnerable, close-up, even undignified, way. He’s devoted his ministry to teaching us, even when we turn away or do not understand. He’s offered us bread, and cup: his body, his life-force, his promise. God’s promise. God makes Godself vulnerable: going to places we see as shameful, ugly, messy, hard, painful. God in Jesus cries out with us at the hurt. And yet God does not shy away. Jesus invites us not to turn away from vulnerability either. When we feel ashamed of ourselves, or exhausted, he says “you are worthy of care.” When we would shush the people shouting “have mercy on me!” “heal me!” lamenting their woes, he goes to them and says your faith will make you well.
He offers a vision and example of going to and being present with the pain of the world, with no shying away – and he says to his disciples “you will do greater things than these.” Jesus was unwilling to give up his ministry even at the threat of death, with the system of empire sure to want to squash the revolutionary – vulnerable - medicine he shared.
Perhaps Jesus’s cry rings out to jolt us awake to the reality of suffering, that we will then go to all the places that hurt and do what we can to make it well. That we will refuse to stop even at the threat of:
sadness, encountering the pain;
servitude, letting those we’d seek to help lead us and tell us what they need;
ridicule, when cynicism overtakes others and they refuse to see our hope; and
suffering, when those who wish to keep the status quo respond; or perhaps despondency, when we feel that we’re not doing much and the world’s pain is so vast. We may cry out to God, too: “where are you?! How can all this suffering be happening!” Even Mother Theresa wrote to a pastor she knew : Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me–The silence and the emptiness is so great–that I look and do not see,–Listen and do not hear.”[i]
Even when we doubt, God is there. God is walking with us, empowering our ministries that they might ignite healing and justice, doing – perhaps – “greater things than those acts of Jesus.
For though Jesus cried out as he was put to death, God was there, and from the ashes of grief and vulnerability, God created of Jesus’s life and example and death greater miracles than we – and maybe even Jesus – thought imaginable.