A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — Nov. 15, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts: Romans 8:31-39; Mark 15:1-47

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life,

love of God in Jesus our Lord. — Romans 8:38-39

At three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice,

God, why have you forsaken me?”—Mark 15:34

As followers of Jesus Christ we live in the midst of a spiritual tug-of-war.  At times our faith has all the assurance of Paul’s words to the church at Rome—we’re sure nothing can separate us from the love of God.  But other times God can seem to be “absent or on leave,” to use the phrase we sang in our opening hymn by Brian Wren.¹  A mother or father dies, or a child, a brother or sister is lost, a wife or husband.  A tragedy occurs: the massacre at Ft. Hood, a typhoon half a world away, a diagnosis at your doctor’s office.  Then our faith may become more a matter of desperately hanging on in the midst of a silent absence, or as that same hymn puts it,  “when all seems empty, wrecked, and wrong”¹ and Jesus’ cry from the cross becomes our painful reality, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  In such times, Paul’s promise can seem little more than trying to whistle a happy tune in the darkness.

In chapter 15 of Mark, it all goes horribly wrong as the religious authorities finally succeed in their plots to have Jesus put to death.  They hand him over to the leader of the Roman occupying force, and more out of political expediency than anything else, Pilate does what only he can do.  He has Jesus crucified as a common criminal.  The author of Mark does not make it easy for us readers here.  Other gospels show us a Jesus who has some measure of assurance and control in his death, right up to his final words:  “It is finished” in John or “Into your hands I commend my spirit” in Luke.  But Mark offers only two utterances that are ambiguous at best: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and a loud, wordless cry as Jesus breathes his last.  Is there assurance in Jesus crying out to “my God, my God” from the cross?  Or are we left with the agony of that “Why?”

 

The author of Mark seems to be acutely aware of these two sides of the spiritual life.  Other gospel writers and Paul will relate stories of the risen Jesus interacting with his followers, walking and eating with them, teaching them, telling them what to do.  But in the next chapter of Mark, we will not find such homey, comfortable and comforting scenes, but only the voice of an unidentified young man in white saying, “He has been raised, [and] he is going on ahead of you to Galilee.”  Elsewhere in the New Testament we will find the joy of Easter, the promise of life restored, Paul’s assurance that “nothing can separate us from the love of God” and his understanding that “in Christ, God was reconciling the world to [Godself], not counting their trespasses against them…” [2 Cor. 5:19]  But the author of Mark will leave us at the very end of his gospel without any word from Jesus at all and with the only followers of Jesus who stayed and looked on he was crucified—Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome—paralyzed by fear, too afraid to share the young man’s good news.

In Mark, resurrection does happen, but only in the context of suffering and loss.  Mark remembers how human it is to ask, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—how human it is human to know pain and loss.  He knows that it is human to be angry with God—normal to be angry that children continue to suffer and die in the world, to be angry that old resentments are continually being reborn as new wars, to be angry that hatred and greed and fear seem free to rule so much of life.  Easter tells us that God makes up with us no matter what we have done.  Yet we must ask ourselves:  are we ready, willing, and able to make up with God?
By way of exploring this question, I want to share with you a prayer about making up with God.  But first I must warn you.  As it stands, it is not a prayer we can pray for ourselves—although we can, I think, learn from it.  It is called “A Prayer for the Days of Awe.”  It is a Passover prayer written by Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and survivor of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.  The reason we cannot pray this prayer is not because it is a “Jewish” prayer.  After all, the Lord’s Prayer was composed by a Jew for his band of Jewish followers.  No, the reason we cannot pray this prayer is that we are not Jews who have places like Treblinka and Buchenwald and Auschwitz etched on our souls.  We are not Jews who have been accused of being “Christ-killers” and persecuted for centuries by people who proclaimed the name of Jesus.

Most of those who took part in the killing of six million Jews were professing Christians, as were many more who knew of the killings but did nothing to interfere.  We like to think that we would have been among the minority who resisted.  As Presbyterians we are proud to claim the Barmen Declaration against Hitler and the Nazis as part of our confessional heritage.  But we must acknowledge that the Declaration itself omitted all references to persecution of the Jews because to include them would have meant its defeat.  So we cannot pray Elie Wiesel’s “Prayer for the Days of Awe” explicitly for ourselves.  Still, we can learn from it.  This is the prayer:

Master of the Universe, let us make up.  It is time.  How long can we go on being angry?

More than 50 years have passed since the nightmare was lifted.  Many things, good and less good, have since happened to those who survived it.  They learned to build on ruins.  Family life was re-created.  Children were born, friendships struck.  They learned to have faith in their surroundings, even in their fellow men and women.  Gratitude has replaced bitterness in their hearts.  No one is as capable of thankfulness as they are.  Thankful to anyone willing to hear their tales and become their ally in the battle against apathy and forgetfulness.  For them every moment is grace.

Oh, they do not forgive the killers and their accomplices, nor should they.  Nor should you, Master of the Universe.  But they no longer look at every passer-by with suspicion.  Nor do they see a dagger in every hand.
Does this mean that the wounds in their soul have healed?  They will never heal.  As long as a spark of the flames of Auschwitz and Treblinka glows in their memory, so long will my joy be incomplete.
What about my faith in you, Master of the Universe?

I now realize I never lost it, not even over there, during the darkest hours of my life.  I don’t know why I kept on whispering my daily prayers, and those one reserves for the Sabbath, and for the holidays, but I did recite them, often with my father and, on Rosh ha-Shannah eve, with hundreds of inmates at Auschwitz.  Was it because the prayers remained a link to the vanished world of my childhood?

But my faith was no longer pure.  How could it be?  It was filled with anguish rather than fervor, with perplexity more than piety.  In the kingdom of eternal night, on the Days of Awe, which are the Days of Judgment, my traditional prayers were directed to you as well as against you, Master of the Universe.  What hurt me more:  your absence or your silence?

In my testimony I have written harsh words, burning words about your role in our tragedy.  I would not repeat them today.  But I felt them then.  I felt them in every cell of my being.  Why did you allow if not enable the killer day after day, night after night to torment, kill and annihilate tens of thousands of Jewish children?  Why were they abandoned by your Creation?  These thoughts were in no way destined to diminish the guilt of the guilty.  Their established culpability is irrelevant to my “problem” with you, Master of the Universe.  In my childhood I did not expect much from human beings.  But I expected everything from you

Where were you, God of kindness, in Auschwitz?  What was going on in heaven, at the celestial tribunal, while your children were marked for humiliation, isolation and death only because they were Jewish?

These questions have been haunting me for more than five decades.  You have vocal defenders, you know.  Many theological answers were given me, such as:  “God is God.  He alone knows what He is doing.  One has no right to question Him or His ways.”  Or:  “Auschwitz was a punishment for European Jewry’s sins of assimilation and/or Zionism.”  And:  “Isn’t Israel the solution?  Without Auschwitz, there would have been no Israel.”

I reject all these answers.  Auschwitz must and will forever remain a question mark only:  it can be conceived neither with God nor without God.  At one point, I began wondering whether I was not unfair with you.  After all, Auschwitz was not something that came down ready-made from heaven.  It was conceived by men, staffed by men.  And their aim was to destroy not only us but you as well.  Ought we not to think of your pain, too?  Watching your children suffer at the hands of your other children, haven’t you also suffered?

As we Jews now enter the High Holidays again, preparing ourselves to pray for a year of peace and happiness for our people and all people, let us make up, Master of the Universe.  In spite of everything that happened?  Yes, in spite.  Let us make up:  for the child in me, it is unbearable to be divorced from you so long.²

The raw power and honesty of Wiesel’s prayer reminds me of Job complaining and confronting God with his pain and his anger.  Wiesel’s urgent question, “What hurt me more:  your absence or your silence?” echoes our Lord’s cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  And if none of us can pray this prayer as a Jew who endured the Holocaust, it does have deep resonances with the doubts and questions that gnaw at the edges of our faith… and sometimes seem to eat out its very heart.  We, too, have been wounded by the world.  We, too, have prayed to (and even against) a God and heard no answer.  We, too, have continued worshipping even as we doubted God’s reality.  And we, too, have railed against superficial, simplistic answers to the problem of suffering.

Elie Wiesel’s prayer does teach us something about feeling forsaken by God and yet still trying to return to God.  For one thing, the way of faith—or back to faith—need not detour around questions and doubts.  It is not a way of easy answers.  Wiesel himself is not all that convinced by his own tentative and partial answer that God, too, has known pain and suffering in the Holocaust.  He says, “Auschwitz must and will forever remain a question mark only:  it can be conceived neither with God nor without God.”  We need not agree fully with such an “answer.”  But we can take our lead from his probing honesty.  Wiesel’s path does not ignore his doubt and hurt, but proceeds through them while directing them to God, just as Jesus directed his agonized plea to “My God, my God…”

A second and perhaps deeper lesson in Elie Wiesel’s prayer is that making up with God is somehow a two-way thing.  “Let us make up” is the beginning and ending of his Passover prayer.  “Let us make up” means that both sides are involved.  We Christians speak mostly in terms of God forgiving us.  While it may seem audacious, we should also consider our own need to forgive God.  Easter tells us that God reaches out to us, even at great cost to God’s very self.  Easter offers the promise that nothing whatsoever can separate us from the love of God.  Yet even while this is true, our own haunting questions about suffering may turn us away from God.  That is, unless… unless we realize that we, too, need to make up with God… to let go of our hurt and forgive God… to recognize that for us it is indeed unbearable, as Elie Wiesel says, “to be divorced from [God] for so long.”

 

Amen and amen.

 

_______________________

¹ “God, Give Us Freedom to Lament” by Brian Wren (Hope Publishing Co., 1993).

 

² ©1997, Elirion Associates Inc., reprinted in Reformed Liturgy & Music, Vol. XXXII, #4.