Why Have You Abandoned Me?
April 2, 2023 + Sunday of the Passion + Pr. Craig Mueller
Sometimes there are no words.
A man nurses his fifty-year old wife as she dies of cancer.
When she stopped breathing, he said the silence in the room destroyed all language for him.
No words could get out.
And no words could get in.
He was a pastor. And he resigned from his church.
Months and months later, his voice was still raspy.
“It makes you want to go to Dachau,” he said.
“You want to go to the place where there are no answers.”1
In moments of desolation
we may feel abandoned.
Nothing makes sense.
Nothing offers comfort.
Nothing brings hope.
No words.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus cries on the cross.
Or in some translations: “why have you abandoned me?”
These are the opening words from psalm 22.
Words on Jesus’ lips as dies,
the only final words in Mark and Matthew’s passion account.
Downright chilling words, it you take them in.
“Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.”
Where is God?
Why does not God answer our prayer?
Why this suffering?
So many unanswered questions.
So many scenes from human history come to mind.
Some we may have witnessed or experienced.
But few match the trauma of the Holocaust
in which six million Jews were murdered—
the extermination of 60% of all Jews living in Europe.
In a scene that many of us have read or heard many times,
Elie Wiesel tells of his experience as a teen-ager in a death camp.
Thousands were killed and incinerated in ovens on a daily basis.
Others were hanged.
But one particular day, the Nazi commanders took cruelty to an unimaginable level.
Three gallows were set up.
At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over.
One of the prisoners pleaded: “Where is merciful God, where is he?
Then the prisoners were marched past the victims.
The two men were no longer alive,
“their tongues hanging out, swollen and bluish.”
The child was too light and still breathing,
hovering between life and death for another half hour.
“His tongue still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.”
The same man then asked: “for God’s sake, where is God?”
There was only silence,
But from deep within one of them, “where is God? Hanging here on this gallows.”3
In our deepest, darkest night, many of us question the existence of God.
When a loved one abandons us.
When a rejection turns our world upside down.
When the state of our planet and our politics
fills us with dread for the future.
Oh God, why have you forsaken us?
Like the fickle disciples who deny, betray and abandon Jesus
and then flee to who-knows-where,
we too fall short, abandoning those closest to us.
We give lip service to liberal causes
but then escape back into our comfortable lives.
This Jesus, who spoke of God’s mercy for everyone,
has little to say in his final hours.
This Jesus, who was there for others,
is abandoned by those closest to him.
This Jesus who challenged the power structures of his day,
dies helpless and alone.
At his birth he was named Emmanuel, God with us.
Even then, the powers-that-be were threatened.
King Herod killed innocent babies because he feared one child.
Frightened leaders used fear to control the people.
Drawing just enough blood to keep everyone afraid.
Like so many others before and after him,
Jesus dies at the hands of power.
But, as one writer puts it,
“this time, the bloodshed changes everything.”2
On this Sunday of the Passion, we behold a crucified God.
Hanging on the gallows.
Sharing our suffering.
Bearing our wounds.
God-with-us in our godforsaken moments.
God-with-us when there are no words.
God-with-us when there are no answers.
God-with-us when we wonder if we can make it through the night.
God-with-us when we question whether life is worth living or has any meaning.
God-with-us when we doubt the very existence of God.
As Matthew tells it, the silence of God is not the end of the story.
Jesus is not forsaken.
At Jesus’ death, the temple curtain is torn in two.
There is an earthquake.
Tombs are opened and the dead rise.
Jesus’ birth was marked by a star in the sky.
Now there are signs in the heavens and on earth.
And the promise of resurrection.
Though forsaken, this Jesus will be raised, and at the end of the gospel
will promise to be with us always—even to the end of the age.
In moments of abandonment,
and through this coming Holy Week,
stay close to the cross,
stay close to the community,
stay close.
Hold on to hope.
Even when there are no words.
1Told by Barbara Brown Taylor in When God is Silent, p. 37.
2Frederick Niedner, Christian Century, March 11, 2008.
3Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), p. 64.