THE FORSAKEN GOD
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It is unnerving to hear Jesus proclaim His forsakenness as He did from the darkness and agony of the cross. While we have the human fear that comes from God walking toward us in the garden—the sound from which Adam and Eve first hid—we have another, perhaps deeper existential fear that God is not walking toward us in the garden, that He might not exist at all, that God is an idea we have made up in our own minds and fooled ourselves into believing. And this fear can become urgent when we so desperately want to hear from God, yet the silence seems so loud. In Jesus, God was there with us. It is one of the unique elements of the Bible story. “They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”* In Jesus, God experienced a broken relationship with God! He experienced how His seeming silence in the face of our suffering and despair makes suffering all the more intense. Remarkably, God knows what it is like to feel forsaken by God! The irony is that Jesus likely experienced it more intensely as a result of the close relationship He had maintained with His Father. Rather than having some kind of divine advantage, He simultaneously submitted Himself to being murdered by human beings He had created and was cut off from the presence of God, the community in which He had created.
We can understand only those elements of this forsakenness that feel human, with the divine dynamic so far beyond our understanding or imagination.
Perhaps our discomfort at hearing these anguished words of Jesus is never unnerving enough.
* G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 206.
