Will Sing Out Magazine Ever Publish Again
Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabacthani: My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me? (St Matt. xxvii. 46)
We come up on this Good Friday to the fourth series of words uttered by Christ from the Cross. They are to be certain the most hard words that Jesus- or perhaps anyone, has ever uttered. They strike the states every bit wrong, precisely because they seem and so dangerously close to despair. And yet they are not the cry of despair, merely of alienation, dereliction, and abandonment. These words reveal the deepest spiritual pain that Christ every bit Man can feel. Yous volition discover that Christ is not speaking into the void of nothingness. Rather He turns to the 1 and only source of reality, God the Father, in a cry of painful helplessness. This is the summary of the long, dark night of the soul. The soul can turn to zippo for comfort other than God himself. And though God is perceived as afar and unmoving, Christ does cry My God, My God.
God'southward altitude and silence are indeed office of the process of salvation. Here is the sense of utter dependence upon God when He does not respond. O my Father, if it be possible, let this loving cup laissez passer from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou [wilt].(St. Matthew 26. 39), He prayed in his desperation in the garden. Only God must attain His will in Jesus. And so Jesus endures what for all other men is unendurable. The lite shineth in the darkness and the darkness overcame it non. (St. John 1. 5) The light flickers, trembles, quivers and quakes and yet does not yield to despair. The low-cal flickers and trembles because the loving Christ has taken into his middle the feel of every human being, woman, and child who has ever felt forsaken, abandoned, and rendered powerless. In the center of Jesus, mankind's last and final temptation to surrender to the void, to choose the meaninglessness of nothingness is taken on. Jesus experiences humanity's predicament to the full. He endures a last temptation to sin against the Holy Ghost. And notwithstanding he does non yield. He is tempest tossed, nearly overwhelmed, and yet He sings the song of the Psalmist:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou and then far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? O my God, I weep in the twenty-four hour period fourth dimension, but thou hearest not; and in the dark flavor, and am not silent…I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and m hast brought me into the grit of death…They pierced my hands and my anxiety. I may tell all my bones…
Jesus confesses the pain and desperation of being forsaken equally He resists the evil 1 and cleaves to His Father. Romano Guardini sums upward what is at work hither beautifully. He writes:
God followed man…into the no man's land which sin had ripped open up. God non merely glanced down at him and summoned him lovingly to return; He personally entered into that vacuous dark to fetch him, as St. John powerfully expresses it in his opening Gospel. Thus in the midst of human history stood one was both human being and God. Pure as God, but bowed with responsibility equally human being. He drank the dregs of that responsibility- down to the bottom of the chalice. Mere man cannot do this. Man is and then much smaller than his sin against God, that he can neither contain it nor cope with it. He can commit it, but he is incapable of fully realizing what he has done. He cannot measure out his act; cannot receive it into his life and suffer it through to the end… It confuses him, leaves him desperate but helpless. God lone can 'handle' sin. Merely he sees through it, weighs information technology, judges information technology with a judgment that condemns the sin but loves the sinner… Through the Incarnation a being came into being who though human in form, realized God'south ain attitude toward sin. In the middle and spirit and body of a man, God straightened his accounts with sin. The process was contained in the life and death of Jesus Christ.
Christ is lone at present. He has forgiven His enemies. He has welcomed a new friend into the journeying of expiry, which includes His female parent and her new son. Now he is alone.The more than perfect the Life, the more severe is the sense of its loss. Just Jesus wills to be cut down in guild that he may grow up. His desire has been to be nothing less than the will of God made flesh. This demands death not just to sin, suffering, and pain but also to any existence other than God. He cannot help man fully unless he endures man's death to himself completely. So Jesus must surrender the skilful mankind that He has used to express God's volition to all other men. The climax of separation from His onetime self, as perfect equally information technology was, compels the cry, My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me? (St. Matthew xxvii. 46) The sheer hurting and agony of whatsoever segmentation between His soul and His flesh is nigh unbearable. He has loved his neighbor, every bit himself. He has loved the cocky that was cipher but a pure gift from God. But His flesh was zip if it did not endure the collision between bearing God's love and man's sin at one time. In property to the one, He would now completely conquer the other. Had he clung to his flesh, he would have gone downward in history as the world'southward greatest fool. Man and his sin, which Jesus holds in His forgiving eye, must die.
Jesus Christ stands at the door of Hell. Hell is the penalization for those who despair of God's goodness. Those who despair exercise non cry out, My God, My God. With Matthew Arnold, they lament the loss of retreating faith, the disappearance, they say, of God.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and circular globe's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-current of air, downwardly the vast edges drear[15]
And naked shingles of the world.
Simply those who learn to exist exiled, banished, emptied, solitary, and dead to all else can and will sing out against the poet's muse, My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me considering Jesus has faced the horror and endured the pain. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God. (St. Matthew v. 3)
The world and all of cosmos tin can offer Him nothing now. Out of the pettiness, that He has in a way become, He must turn once more to the light that makes new life. The created universe is dark and at a standstill considering every bit yet it awaits God's response to the omnipresent desperation, the full and complete experience of darkness by primal Human being himself. Man is zippo but what God will make Him again.
For He hath non despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted;
neither hath He hid his face from Him;
only when He cried unto Him, He heard.
Amen.
©wjsmartin
Source: https://anglicanway.org/2015/04/03/my-god-my-god-why-hast-thou-forsaken-me/
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