Never forsaken

RCL Year B, Palm Sunday It is always pretty redundant to preach a sermon after the Passion story is read like that. What more is there to say that has not already been said? And yet even with this story we can forget to hear it, really hear it – it can roll right over […]

RCL Year B, Palm Sunday

It is always pretty redundant to preach a sermon after the Passion story is read like that. What more is there to say that has not already been said? And yet even with this story we can forget to hear it, really hear it – it can roll right over us yet again without us taking it in. Sometimes we still need something, a way out of the harsh suffering of the story, and a way to make sense of it for ourselves. So, a little bit of a homily.

The Gospel of Mark pulls no punches in the Passion narrative. It is maybe the harshest of all the versions of the Passion. Jesus’ suffering is utterly without relief in this story. Every time anyone speaks, it is to accuse Jesus, to betray him, to mock him, to turn away from him. Every single character in the story does this, from all the mobs of priests and bystanders to Jesus’ dear friends Judas and Peter to the indifferent bureaucrat Pilate. Every one of them uses words to him and about him that inflict and further Jesus’ suffering: He’s horrible and deserves to die. I’ll betray him to you in return for money. He’s worse than a criminal.  I don’t know him.

And so when he finally comes to those six hours on the cross, Jesus’ abandonment is total. No one of his friends and followers has stayed by his side, no one in power has come to his aid, and he is forsaken. Flogging hurt intensely, crucifixion is a horrible way to die, but the gospel writer doesn’t dwell on that. Instead, what he tells us and shows us relentlessly is how horrible it is to suffer and die alone. And Jesus is utterly alone.

There’s one flicker of hope, of course: some of the women who knew Jesus follow at a distance and stand vigil over his cross. Joseph of Arimathea comes and buries his body after his death. Someone at least seems to care. But it seems too little too late – and by the time we come to the very end of the gospel, what we will hear next Sunday, we find it amounts to nothing. Even at the resurrection, these last few witnesses run away in fear and tell no one what they saw. Mark wants us to be quite clear: humanity completely fails the Son of Man.

There’s another abandonment too. In Mark, but not in any of the other three gospels, Jesus’ last words are a cry of abandonment. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It’s a quote from Psalm 22 – a scripture which those standing near would have known. But it is also a cry from the heart, real and heartbreaking. Alone and dying on the cross, Jesus does not even feel the comfort of God’s presence to sustain him. Jesus is cosmically alone, cast out by humanity and God alike.

And this is the path he sets for us to follow: to be my disciple, Jesus says, you must deny yourself, and take up your cross, and follow me. Well, what do you think: do you want to follow him, seeing today where it leads to?

And yet, today is not the end of the story. Jesus cries out to God, forsaken by him yet still calling to him, praying to God in a kind of faithful desolation. He cries out one more time and dies. And right then, the veil of the temple is torn in two – the veil that symbolizes the barrier between human beings and God is torn apart, the division is erased. God answers Jesus’ prayer – he takes him out of this life of betrayal and hatred and gathers him in, and there is no separation anymore, for him or for any of us. The abandonment of Jesus on the cross turns into the moment when God steps in and saves, when God saves him and saves each one of us from the worst this world can do. Human beings’ betrayal, betraying and being betrayed, gets remade. God heals the relationship, once and for all.

And one person sees this and names it, the centurion, someone just doing his job, uninterested in this particular crucifixion among all the other crucifixions he’s witnessed. He’s the one who says, this was the Son of God.

So what does this mean for us? Everything. Our part of the covenant with God should have been so simple: love God and love your neighbor. But we never got it right, and we still don’t. But at the cross, what we are shown is this: All the times we’ve messed up the relationship – all those times are healed and made whole. All the times we’ve betrayed and let other people down; all the times other people have done the same to us. All the times we’ve turned our backs on someone who needed us, or intentionally spurned someone to advance our own cause, or just joined the crowds to howl at someone we hardly even know. All the times we’ve ignored God at the heart of all things, or blamed God for our own messes, or chosen our own mean small gods instead. All of that gets forgiven; all of that gets wiped clean; all of that gets forgotten. We are gathered in to God, away from all the hatred and betrayal around us and in us. We are never, never abandoned – no matter how keenly we feel God’s absence, no matter how desolate and separated from others or from ourselves we feel, God always saves.

At the cross, with Jesus, we ask: God, why have you forsaken me? And at the cross, we hear: I am here, my child. I will never forsake you. Ever. And that is it.

I am indebted in this sermon to a book called Sowing the Gospel by Mary Ann Tolbert, who in her class at the Pacific School of Religion forever shaped my reading of the Gospel of Mark.