Preacher’s Note: This sermon was first preached at the Good Friday Ecumenical Service held at the First Methodist Church in Holland, Michigan on 29 March, 1991. At the time, I was completing my Master of Theology at Western Theological Seminary.
The sermon was preached in the aftermath of the Gulf War, and amidst the daily reports of devastating and unnecessary suffering, including death, of millions of people in Israel-Palestine. But this war was just one heartwrenching and publicised example of a more widespread and unspeakable pain, suffering, and death being inflicted on millions of our citizens in many parts of the globe. More often than not, global elites with mighty weapons and other means at their disposal were the primary orchestrators and perpetrators of the destruction and carnage.
Fast forward to our present time, more than three decades on. Alas! The globalist assaults and onslaughts on our Humanity continue at ever alarming and relentless rates. Now, together with wars, we have pandemics, vaccines, geoengineering, technology, economics, culture, and alot more, being deliberately weaponised to inflict even greater human suffering and death. The rise of a transhumanist technocracy and an AI-centred world appear to have the destruction of humanity (as we know it) and the evisceration of God as primary goals.
So, despite historical references in the Good Friday sermon below that are contextual to the time, and an audience who is dominantly North American, I believe that the essential message of the sermon has significance for our current times, more especially if we name ourselves among the millions of Christians around the world.
During this Holy Week, we remember the person of Jesus Christ and his torture, suffering, and death by crucifixion on a Roman cross in the early 1st century Palestine. The main perpetrators of this crime were the political, economic, cultural, and religious elites of the day. They were intent on demonising, villifying, ridiculing, silencing, and killing this Jesus who was a prophetic and agitating voice for an alternative community, a better humanity, and a peaceful , non-violent, and inclusive world - centred on the reign of God rather the rule of Caesar. In his forsakeness (even by God), and most symbolically captured in those moments as he hung on the Roman cross, Jesus becomes the Voice of the voiceless ones, in his time and across all time.
Today, Jesus of Nazareth continues to be a prophetic witness against the elite usurpers of our time (the 1%). And he also bears witness to the majority of us (the 99%), and wants to shake us out of our own complacency, complicity, and silence amidst so much growing and unnecessary suffering, oppression, violence, and death all around us. He remains ‘the Forsaken Jesus: the Voice of the voiceless ones’ – whether we find ourselves in North America, Latin/South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia or anywhere else.
How will I/we respond?
Biblical Texts: Hebrew Bible (Old Testament): Psalm 22; Christian Bible (New Testament): Mark 15:33-34
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In this cry of pain in the final dark hour of his abandonment, the crucified Jesus echoes forth the cries of the Psalmist. the ‘afflicted’ of Palestine,. and the cries of forsaken peoples throughout all ages. Here, on the ‘old rugged cross’ of Golgotha’s hill, the crucified Jesus plummets the depths of the incarnation itself. He becomes in his suffering and dying, the voice of the voiceless ones; the flesh and blood expression of all the crucified peoples of the world.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The cry of Jesus reverberates with the cries of the martyrs of the faith throughout the centuries. It reverberates also with the anguished groanings of the Muslims slain by the Crusades in the name of the Christian God; the millions of Jews killed in the death camps of Auschwitz and Dachau; the countless thousands of victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, and Iraq; the nations of crucified peoples sucked into the cauldron of colonial inflicted genocide on the continents of Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Listen to the cry of Maria Zotwana, an elderly Mfengu woman who had been dispossessed of her land and dumped onto the barren wildnerness of the Ciskei in South Africa: “We had no choice”, she said. “The guns were behind us. Then they bring us to this sad place. Here there is not enough food. I am hungry now, as I am sitting here. Everybody has died. My man has gone and died, as have my daughters. They took my land away. The Lord has also gone, yes, I suppose he has also gone.”
The voice of Maria Zotwana pierces the silence enforced by her domination and enslavement. But her cry shames our own ‘conspiracy of silence.’ She dares to ask in all of her suffering of forced removal – shared in South Africa by more than 3.5 million mainly black people since 1960 – “Where is God in all of this?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
We have witnessed the tormented faces of Iraqi families on our TV screens in recent months, shaken and brutalized by the 81 980 tons of unguided or ‘dump’ bombs dropped on Iraq and in occupied Kuwait. We have heard the woeful mourning and bitter outrage of thousands of Kuwaitis who have been raped of their very humanity. We are confronted again with the cries for justice from the Palestinians. We have heard – if we have truly listened – the cry of Jesus in the cries of the crucified peoples of our world:“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” “Why does your salvation seem so far away?”
Therefore, on this Good Friday we need to pause. We need to pause long enough so that we may draw into sharp focus the wide gamut of human despair, suffering and death which grips our world at this time. Let us not hasten on too prematurely to our celebrations of hope and life which Easter Sunday promises. Jon Sobrino, the prophetic theologian from El Salvador, warns that such a hastening would be “fatal to faith, as well as offensive to the oppressed; to concentrate on liberation without plunging into the abyss of oppression…(would be) repeating the perennial temptations facing Christian faith and theology – to exalt the risen Christ without appreciating the horrors of the cross on the historical level.”
As we reflect on the horrors of the cross in our history, we are not immediately speaking of suffering in general, nor even of suffering which may have positive value. Rather, we are concerned to listen to the cries of the victims of “oppressive” or “unjust” suffering. The theologian Edward Schillebeeckx draws forcible attention to this kind of suffering: “…there is an excess of suffering and evil in history. There is a barbarous excess, for all the explanations and interpretations…There is suffering in which [humanity], without finding meaning for themselves, are simply made the crude victims of an evil cause which serves others.”
I have witnessed something of the excess and oppressive suffering of the majority of my own people in South Africa over the years. Recently, I was privileged to come alongside the suffering peoples of Guatemala [Central America] and on the reservations of Arizona. The words of Schillebeeckx have penetrated ever deeper into my soul. I have recognized like Jon Sobrino that, of the many signs of the times that beckon Christians to urgent reflection, it is the one sign of “the people crucified in history” that looms the largest. “This crucified people is the historical continuation of the servant of Yahweh (in Isaiah), who is stripped of everything by the sin of the world, even of his life, above all of his life.”
Like the crucified Jesus who is mocked by his enemies, the crucified peoples of the world bear the biting scorn of their oppressors.
Like the crucified Jesus arrested in the darkness of Gethsemane, so the crucified peoples of El Salvador are arrested by military forces and taken away to prison and often to death.
Like the crucified Jesus who is mercilessly beaten and crushed and robbed of his clothes, so the crucified peoples of South Africa have been stripped naked, and have felt the batons, the rubber bullets, the tear-gas, the kickings and punches of those who claim to uphold ‘law and order’ in society.
Like the crucified Jesus alienated from family and friends,the crucified peoples of Guatemala have been kidnapped and made to disappear.
Like the crucified Jesus, too many crucified peoples – the more than 40 million among the so-called ‘underclass’ on the streets of the USA; the Palestinians in refugee camps in the Middle-East; the starving Ethiopians; the Peruvians dying of cholera; the abused mothers and children and the victims of racism in our societies – are plunged daily into oppressive darkness where even the light of God’s presence struggles to break through with healing and life.
And like the crucified Jesus who was a tragic spectacle of both indifference and abuse, so the crucified peoples of our world are gazed on, often with indifference, very seldom with anything more than feelings of passive sorrow or horror, and soon to be forgotten.
Paul Tillich said: “the first duty of love is to listen”. Let us listen then, to the cry of the crucified Jesus as we hear in him the cries of the suffering peoples of our world. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Listen and we will begin to be gripped by the passionate and deepest theological questions of our time: “Where is God in all of this?”
The cry of Jesus reveals the mystery and paradox of Good Friday itself – God, yes, God is indeed the crucified one. In the words of the German theologian, Jurgen Moltman, in Jesus we see “the Crucified God.” God is no passive onlooker who isolates Godself from human pain and dereliction. The cross is more than a Christian symbol; it is itself a reality of God. Here, “God experiences in [God]self the ultimate suffering of God’s own wrath and absence; God takes upon [God]self the pain and suffering of creation; God becomes the defenseless victim. And thus it is, according to the gospel, that God can only be known through God’s suffering and weakness revealed in Jesus Christ. On the cross, God is most intensely present and absent; grace and wrath are most powerfully at work.”
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In the forsaken Jesus, all crucified people have found a voice resonating with their own sorrowful cries of alienation and abandonment. In their suffering of disfigurement, torture and murder, they come to Jesus, and find in him, in the first place, “a close brother.” And in the crucified Jesus, the crucified people come to find in God the one who suffers with them; that in the soil of their own suffering and death are planted the seeds of God’s own healing and life.
But what of us, all too often shielded from the suffering, abandonment and death of the cross by our privilege and power? The cry of Jesus from the cross challenges us to ask where our God really is? Who indeed is the God we worship and serve? Is our God the god of military might, economic power or technological success? Is our God the god of our own individual piety or limited church tradition?
Who indeed is the God to whom we give our allegiance?
If our God is ‘the crucified God’ revealed in Jesus, the one to whom we pledge our loyalty, are we not compelled then to break utterly with our complacency and indifference? “If anyone wishes to come after me,” Jesus says, “let him/her deny him/herself, and take up his/her cross and follow me.” (Mark 9:34). We are invited by Jesus to participate in the suffering of God with God’s people. In this participation we come to know ourselves as Christians as we never did before.
As that martyr of the faith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us: “It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the suffering of God in the secular life. That is metanoia [repentance]; not in the first place, thinking about one’s own needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the ways of Jesus Christ, into the messianic event, thus fulfilling Isaiah 53.”
In his own “pilgrimage of remembrance,” Professor Thomas Boogaart from Western Theological Seminary recounts his first life-changing encounter with human suffering and death. It happened in a visit to a Nazi death camp in the city of Majdanek, in a remote part of Poland. Here 360 000 men, women and children were incinerated in the heated ovens. As a white, middle-class North American, Tom Boogaart heard and felt the cry of pain rising from the human ashes of Madjanek. In that moment, he understood for the first time, the real meaning, not only of death, but also of life itself! Any semblance of Christian triumphalism was dissolved in the dark light of Madjanek.
I believe many more white, middle-class North Americans; indeed many more of us gathered here today who all too often rest secure in our privilege and power; we need to take similar journeys into communities of pain, abandonment and death. For it is here that the crucified Jesus is to be found.
Only in such journeys will we understand not only the meaning of the crucifixion, but also the meaning of the incarnation itself – God becoming flesh among us. We will realize among the poor and suffering of our world that ‘incarnation’ does not merely mean assuming any sort of flesh. It is taking on the flesh of the weak, the powerless, the voiceless of the earth. Materially, the poor have already taken on this incarnation. The challenge is to us who are more privileged to do the same. As we experience this incarnation, we are compelled, like the crucified Jesus, to echo the cries of crucified peoples of the world – cries for God’s presence, God’s justice, God’s peace, and God’s liberation.
I conclude with the words of Robert MacAfee Brown which capture, I believe, the meaning of this kind of incarnation for the Church which claims allegiance to the crucified Christ: “Entering into ‘solidarity with the oppressed’ means creating space in which the oppressed can both be heard and act on their own behalf. The voiceless need a voice…The church must become a place where the only credential necessary to gain a hearing is a cry of pain. Once that cry is heard within the church, the church must become the loudspeaker through which the cry can be transmitted elsewhere.”
Prayer of Commitment: “O God, by your Spirit, help us to listen to your cry of pain in the cries of the suffering peoples of our world. Then move us to do your will just as Jesus did. AMEN!"