The Seven Words of the Cross #4

[HKHaugan]

The Seven Words of the Cross #4

 “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt.27:46, Mk.15:34)

 If ever there was a moment of complete lostness, isolation and the aloneness into which we are born, it was this moment of Jesus’ cry to His Father. If anything, it may be for each human being, the most important of the seven words He utters in the midst of His suffering which was not just His physical pain but the inner pain of feeling alone and abandoned. It is these words that ring deeply across the centuries of human existence without God. Close to death, Jesus reaches up and pours out the first words of Psalm 22. There is no one who doesn’t feel the grip of inner separation from something even when you are a child, a youth, a thirty-something, middle age or retired and aging.

 The simple wish that we had more money, or more friends, another car, a different spouse, a second chance, or that you could be someplace else when experiencing a crisis; these surface the need to control the uncontrollable. The frustrations of life when the uncontrollable seem to take over your and you’re in over your head with no way out. These are moments of our self-conscious aloneness.

 Think about all the circumstances where you feel alone. There are surgeries, dentistry, group rejection, loss of a job, divorce, broken friendships, disease and of course, death of relatives and friends. But what you feel in these moments is the aloneness within, over which you have no control but try anyway. Aloneness is the prison of our discontent. It’s something we all try to escape. Entertainment, hobbies, professions, sports, the arts, music, travel, physical pleasure, joining clubs, churches, teams, watching TV, fishing, hunting, then add your own pastime. We may even come to that point when we reach back into our past and remember where we had the best times, go there and hope we can live nostalgically. But there is this reality, you can’t go home again (the title of a Thomas Wolfe novel, by the way) and death still lies waiting for all of us who follow that false hope.

 I’m reminded of Thomas Wolfe’s inner aloneness so poignantly expressed in his first novel, “Look Homeward, Angel.” He projects himself back into his infancy imagining himself in a crib bemoaning his lack of words and his uncontrollable body. “And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars on the floor, unfathomable loneliness crept through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round if skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, His life would always walk down lonely passage. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know anyone, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without ever having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, not matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never (Pg. 31, copyright Scribner, 1929).”

 Thomas Wolfe died at 39. Nothing in the biographies written about him shows the slightest interest in anything spiritual. One clue is that His writings are self-consuming and rambling. We can only assume he reflects the inner workings of an indifferent mind and heart, a lonely mind and heart. That mindset is all around us. You can feel it in the desperation of those without God, those who need rescuing from that isolating inner nature. You can see it in the face of rioters and demonstrators, whose only sense of purpose comes from finding a cause they can physically apply themselves to. They are screaming for some sense of notoriety, so they won’t feel alone. Add the sea of drug addicts, gamers, mentally deranged, social drifters and everyday professionals, whose lives feel empty from one minute to the next. They are attempting to drown their aloneness.

 When Jesus’ humanity cried out His feeling of being forsaken, He was crying out for each of us. The amazing thing is that He was willing to embrace that reality for us and bear it in our place. This is the bottom line experience of human sin He bore on the Cross. He took upon Himself sin’s aloneness, its anxiety and hopelessness. To be limited like the rest of us in a human body that has to be born, learn, work, live and die, but do it as God would have Him do it and then die for it. Is it any wonder He was feeling for Himself what and when we couldn’t understand and feel for ourselves? He went through what we all go through thus His gut-wrenching words, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

 Wasn’t Thomas Wolfe’s plea for meaning and substance everyone’s inner dilemma? If you plumb the depths of the human heart without God, aloneness is what lies in the quarry of meaningless activity everyone sinks in to escape. The harder you try the harder the way out and the only writing on your gravestone will be, “He tried.” One can ‘try’ themselves to death. It’s sin’s forsaken aloneness we inherited from Adam and Eve. Something, someone, out there has to work for lost and forsaken humanity. The key for our plight is not only Jesus’ plea but to whom His plea was addressed. Jesus’ plea was to His Father and our Father. It was His perfect heart embracing our heart and the death it took to rescue us. There was and is no other way. This is why Jesus said “Come unto me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest (Mt.11:28).”