Grace for suffering

Forgiveness is giving up on the hope of a better past. – Anne Lamott

Grace is extending that forgiveness to the present. To people, to circumstances, to moments. It is simply allowing the moment to be what it is.

(This doesn’t mean we can’t work for a better future, but I will discuss this more a bit later.)

I have written about forgiveness and grace before, but I haven’t taken this idea of grace and extended it to God’s grace.

Richard Rohr calls God the great allower.

I think this is the very thing that we struggle most with God. Why does God allow suffering? In theological circles this is called “theodicy”, or “the problem of pain”. It is in essence a struggle with God’s allowing our suffering. God’s grace for our suffering.

To put this in context, before I address this, I think it is important to talk about the future tripping, also called anticipatory anxiety. This is imagining future possibilities and suffering (in the present) because of it.

Mark Twain said “I’ve experienced a great deal of pain and suffering in my life, most of which has never happened.”

Not only will most of these events never happen, but even in the future possibilities that do happen, when we imagine them playing out, we imagine experiencing the future alone, forsaken by God.

God is not in our imagined future. God is in the real.

This doesn’t make the experience of the suffering of the of the imaginary futures less real, but we have a lot more say in this type of suffering than we feel we do when we are caught up in it.

The other point I want to get across as context to this question of suffering, is the fact that God cares about our suffering.

In the book The Shack, there is a scene where the Holy Spirit takes the tears from the main character’s face, and puts it in a bottle. Counting each tear , and keeping it, because it is precious to God. This is directly taken from Psalm 56:8 or 9 (depending on the translation):

You keep track of all my sorrows.
   You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
      You have recorded each one in your book.

Baxter Kruger talks about Jesus’s action after the miracle of the multiplication of the bread and fish in the same way. Jesus tells the disciples to go out and collect every crumb of food that is left over.

Nothing goes to waste.

Our suffering is counted. Our suffering will not be wasted.

Okay, but still, why does God allow suffering?

I think God isn’t scared of suffering.

Have a look at Psalm 22. The writer believes he is alone, but realizes at the end he never was. This has a correlation to Jesus’s experience on the cross, even with Jesus shouting out the name of Psalm 22 in Hebrew to remind the Jews of it.*

Jesus knows how it feels to believe we are forsaken by God in our suffering. He also knows that it is not true.

Jesus went through suffering, came out on the other side, and isn’t terrified of it. Like the first person crossing a river, knowing the river’s depth, and not being scared for others to follow.

And the final and most important part of this is that God does deal with suffering. He resurrects. Maybe a bit later than we would like, but God knows life follows death.

God believes in the resurrection.

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All of this has made me realize the problem of pain is not a problem to be solved philosophically.

In the tension of God’s love for us, and his allowing of all, is the very character of God.

And in our grace, we allow God’s grace. We allow God to be the allower.

When we are here, we can give God our most precious thing: our trust.

And from this trust, we can then work towards changing the future. We can work with the knowledge that we can have grace for the imperfect future as well, because we aren’t working alone. We are working with the driving force of the universe. We are working with the resurrection.

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* I think it is important to realize that Jesus wasn’t actually asking why his Father actually forsook Him. Jesus was saying the name of the Psalm in the language of the Psalm. Remember the Psalms weren’t numbered yet.

Jesus even tells his disciples that they will forsake Him, but He won’t be alone, because His Father is with Him (John 16:32).

A poem – The trees are a reminder

Remember the story I used to tell you when you were a boy about a young prince. A knight, sent by his father, the King of the East, west into Egypt to find a pearl. A pearl from the depths of the sea. But when the prince arrived, the people poured him a cup that took away his memory. He forgot he was the son of the king. Forgot about the pearl and fell into a deep sleep. The king didn’t forget his son. He continued to send word… messengers… guides. But the prince slept on.

From the prologue to the 2015 Terrence Malick film, Knight of Cups.

What if the trees are a reminder 
	that you are part of something bigger?
Can’t you see their vigour?

Yet the fish does not see the water, because the water is all it knows...

Maybe you would see if the tree was only one!
	Yet you’ve missed your radiance in the sun...

Oh Beloved, can’t you see your splendour in the stars? 
	Your surety in the soil, 
		all around you creation toil. 

Even the rain
	whispers your true name.

The blue sky is trying to remind you of what you’ve got, 
	the cloudy one: that you simply forgot. 

Luckily, I know you know, because the reminders aren’t just out there...

It is the thing that wakes when with friends, 
	and at injustice defends. 

It is the part that is sad about suffering, 
	and joyful at what new life will bring. 

It is in the hunger and the feast. 
	In the sweltering heat, and in the shower’s release. 

 	The longing and the fulfilment. 

And may I say:
	Why do the mountains make you feel that way?

		Deep cries out to Deep. 

My attempt to get you to watch The Tree of Life

I find it hard to describe how much I like the film The Tree of Life. But it is not an easy watch. It is very slow. Everyone that sees it, has a strong opinion about it. Some couldn’t sit through it, some adore it.

This is post is simply trying to convince people to give it a go, manage expectations, and possibly give some handles so the film doesn’t feel so jarringly disjointed.

Without the expectation of a three part narrative structure, you are free to enjoy the beauty of the moments in the film. Without the incessant need for “meaning”, you can enjoy it like one would enjoy classical music. What is Beethoven’s 9th symphony about? Or simply the beautiful cinematography of each scene.

For me, the movie was, the first time I watched it, a cognitive exercise in not understanding.

I think this letting go of a need of understanding, is actually one of the points the movie is trying to get across. The film is about life, and just like life, if you are going to eternally try to figure out what it is about, you are going to miss it. The father in the film makes this discovery for himself “I missed the glory that is all around me.”

We have to find joy in the little things, because most of the time, that’s all there is.

[If you feel this is enough to manage your expectation, then you can stop reading here, and finish this post after you’ve seen the movie.]

The film opens with quote from Job. After tragedy strikes Job, his friends come to him and have arguments with him about God. About why he is suffering and how he should handle it. Eventually, God shows up.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? … When the morning stars sang, and the sons of God shouted for joy?”

The movie is about dealing with suffering and loss. Occasionally the main characters whisper their inner thoughts as a voice over. Not just thoughts, but groanings of their being. Often these are directed to God. And a lot of the film is God’s answer to them. As suggested by the opening quote.

Nature is used often as a symbolism for God: trees, the sky and especially the sun. Once you get this, you’ll notice how often these appear. The sun is almost omnipresent in the film. Almost in every scene with people in it. Patiently watching.

The movie starts with the news of the loss of the second son, probably during the Vietnam war.

It skips to the modern day where the eldest son is going through a crisis of faith. His life is passing him by and it feels meaningless to him. Until he sees a tree and he remembers God. He thinks back to the loss of his brother. And he wonders how did his mother cope with the loss. How did she manage to keep her faith? The next act starts with the mother asking God “where were you?” Then follows the creation scene, 20 minutes of extraordinary visual slowly capturing the birth of the universe, the formation of stars and plants, the genesis of life on earth and even the dinosaurs.

It feels out of place, but it essentially God’s response to Job. The creation scene is God’s response to the mother’s question.

The creation flows seamlessly into the start of her and her husband’s marriage, the birth of their children and the boy’s childhood. It is all part of the response. It puts the loss in context. Ultimately, our life: our collection of moments, our suffering and joy are part of something vast and beautiful. We are not just a bunch of individuals. We are part of an unbroken chain of life starting 3.7 billion years ago. We are part of the tree of life.

Our life is simultaneously miniscule in the grand scheme of things, and so much more extraordinary than we can ever imagine. Our “little things” is an intricate and important part of the grand scheme.

(Why does this apparent paradox, bring me so much peace?)

The movie ultimately also offers the hope of reconciling with our loved one. This present moment isn’t the conclusion to our suffering. 

Interpreting the Old Testament

We all know the story of Job. After everything goes wrong for him, his friends arrive. They give him advice, which turns into a debate about God. A very large chunk of the book is this debate. God then appears in a whirlwind and sets the record straight. Job’s friends are horrendously wrong.

When I look at the Old Testament I think of it as the debate between Job and his friends.

The Old Testament starts with a warning about religion: “Eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and you will surely die”. Humanity does eat of the fruit, and the Old Testament is the story of the establishment and growth of formal religion (the formal construct of “the knowledge of good and evil”), and its failure. It is the story of the death that was warned about.

Then at some point, God steps in and sets the record straight. The Word became flesh. As Jesus says “no one knows the Father, except the Son”. Essentially “you are all wrong” and thank God for that.

In Jesus’s death we see the end of the idea of a wrathful God. I expand this idea in this post.

The god of religion is dead and religion is a farce.

In a public display Jesus cuts down the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, just as John the Baptist says He would.

When reading the Old Testament, I do not “take it with a pinch of salt”, I read it as I would read the debate between Job and his friends. People inventing theology out of necessity, but ultimately fumbling around in the dark.

I find it interesting that even though Job is not the first book in the Bible, it is the oldest book. If the story of the fall is the prologue: giving us a context to what we read in the rest of the Old Testament; then maybe the book of Job is an overture: summarizing in a broad sense what is to come.

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*When Jesus says “no one knows the Father, except the Son”, He also adds “those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him”. There are places where the Father of Jesus is revealed in the Old Testament, but it is not the norm. I would add that the test whether something is true in the Old Testament is whether it fits with the Father as reveal by the Son.

“The Lord is my Shepard” sounds like the Father of Jesus.

The god who sends bears to kill children who teased a thin skinned grumpy old man… absolutely not.

Grace and forgiveness

Anne Lamott said “forgiveness is letting go of the hope of a better past”. 

Forgiveness is opening your fist. 
		Letting go of your sense of justice.

What forgiveness is to the past, grace is to the present. 
						And the future. 
To every event, 
	to every person, 
		to yourself, 
			to your emotions, 
				to suffering, 
to the process. 

It is love in it’s most broad, 
	yet most gentle expression - 
		that of simply allowing.

Words for my grief

Three weeks ago my father passed away from a heart attack.

Two days later I was on the road to be with my mother in the week ahead of the funeral.

I live in Cape Town, my mom lives in Port Elizabeth. It was useful to get time alone… with little children, you don’t have a lot of time to reflect.

I listened to an audiobook for most of the trip. At my last stop, I realized I need to get in touch with my emotions before arriving home. So I decided to put on music instead.

I’ve selected an Irish band called The Gloaming. I felt in the mood for their ambiguous Irish instrumental. Somber, yet bittersweet. I’ve always skipped their tracks with vocals. The vocals are in Gaelic, so I couldn’t identify with it. This day the album I selected started with a song with vocal.

Have a listen… at least to get the idea. The droning Gaelic vocals sounds like a chant (at least at the start).

I didn’t skip it.

It made a huge impression on me. It loosened my emotions, and nearly overwhelmed me. Identifying emotions so accurately, without me even knowing what it meant.

The next day, I looked it up. It was a poem called Meáchan Rudaí by the Irish poet Liam Ó Muirthile. The translation is:

The weight of me in your arms.
    A photo of the two of us in Fitzgerald’s Park. 
    Three years of age I was. 

The weight of the pair of us. 
Our weight together. 
The weight of your hat shading your laughter. 
My weight as you bore me for nine months. 
The weight of sitting, getting up, lying down. 
Your weight that I never lifted from the ground – before burying you in the ground. 
Your living weight. 
Your dead weight. 

The weight of words rising and falling between us, 
    like the wingbeat of swans.
The heavy weight of prayers. 
The feather weight of lilting. 
The middle weight of memory, ancient spiral.

The weight of the music of your country voice in the city. 
The weight of the lipstick on your lips airing vowels.
The weight of your fragrance in the bedroom after giving birth. 
The weight of your maternal weariness asking me kindly to go outside.

The weight of your relations. 
The weight of intimacy. 
The weight of ancestry. 
The weight of neighbours. 
The weight of tribal lore.
The weight of the great world.
The weight of priests. 
The weight of brothers.
The weight of drink.
The weight of history. 
The weight of humour. 
The weight of those who got away. 
The weight of the otherworld. 
The weight of your faith. 
The sorrowful weight of your fear. 
The weight of your shame.

The weight of the two of us as we met for lunch in the city. 
The weight of my patience waiting for you at the chapel door. 
The weight of your patience waiting for me to enter. 
The weight of your praying. 
The weight of the crosses of the world. 
The weight of your appetite. 
The weight of your lingering over food. 
The airy weight of a girl stepping it out at a dance.
The weight of the accordion on your shoulders. 
The weight of your two knees keeping time with the dances.

The weight of your corpse as we waked you three nights and three days

The weight of the terror in your eyes as they called to you from the other side.
The weight of your refusal to go. 
The weight of the anchor from yonder as it took a firm hold of you. 
The weight of secrets that had nowhere now to hide. 
The weight of unspoken love that death’s call freed in you. 
The weight of confusion that had your head in a merry-go-round.
The weight of life draining away. 
The weight of my last visit.

The weight of country folk making their way to the city. 
The weight of their murmurings. 
The weight of your conversation with us from beyond.
The weight of things you said when alive and continued to say in death. The weight of your language, still. 
The weight of the shower that didn’t allow us to stand very long at the mouth of the grave.

The lightness of your soul that covered us like the silk sheet on your bed after we buried you.

After we buried you. 
   After.

Some of the phrases were chillingly accurate.

I ended up translating into Afrikaans and adapting it, and added it to my eulogy for my father.

I felt like I was given words for my grief.

What you seldom hear about parenthood – Part 1

Let me tell you one of my favourite gross parenting stories to tell at a party.

One night I woke up, with my daughter vomiting on me. Which is – in my opinion – the worst way to wake up… or at least top three.

After about 20 minutes of calming her down and changing the sheets, we went to bed again. It took about 5 minutes, just enough to start drifting off, for her to vomit again. Ruining the sheets again. And 5 minutes after cleaning those sheets it happened again. At which point we didn’t have more sheets and we were forced to just put towels down and sleep on those. Luckily after that we slept through.

This is a pretty good gross parenting story. Perfect to pull out at a party. Always getting some laughs and a couple of horrified reactions. And usually being followed up by another gross story from other parents.

But let me tell you how I really experienced this incident.

We co-sleep with our girls on a giant joined bed. When I woke up with my daughter vomiting on me, my first thought was how glad I was that I was there with her and she wasn’t alone, scared and in shock. (Which would have been true earlier the evening before we went to bed, or if she had a separate room.)

Later, I think it was the second incident, after I came back from the linen cupboard, my wife was sitting with my daughter on the bathroom floor, consoling her. There was a point where I’ve done what I could do, and so I could observe the moment.

It took me back to similar incidents in my childhood. Sitting with my mother in the bathroom, when I was sick. I realized how those events stayed in my subconscious, and built trust in my mother.

I looked at the cold, starkly lit bathroom and felt an intense atmosphere of intimacy. My wife could feel it too.

This night with my daughter, I felt privileged to be able to care for her, and it is, if I’m honest, one of my most precious memories.

But I leave all of this out when I tell this story. The gross and gory gets a laugh, but joy is vulnerable. And to be honest, damn hard to explain.

Added to that I’m scared I offend someone who doesn’t want kids, or hurt someone who can’t. It is all so deeply personal.

But then one day we met a young married couple at a party. They didn’t have kids and mentioned how their friends who have kids would tell them these horror stories, and then follow up with “so when are you guys planning on having kids?”.

So for those who only hear the gross horror stories I’ve decided to share a little of my joy.

A thought on imperfection, grace and the Trinity

I wrote the draft for this post a couple of years ago. But I found it recently and thought to dust it off and publish it.

In my new marriage we have found that some of the most valuable experiences have come, not from our perfect compatibility, but from the grace that flows out of the imperfect. Grace has a way to cut through our defenses. Or maybe it is that we use our perfections as a shield. And the imperfect opens us up past that… Grace is then able to reach our heart.

Our imperfection makes us vulnerable. And in that lies the power.

My wife and I have started talking about imperfection as opportunities for grace, and trust building. It opens both the giver and receiver of the grace. Grace is a very powerful expression of love.

What is interesting though is that in the perfect relationship of the Trinity grace isn’t expressed. There is no place for it.

This means that the Father could only express this once we came along with our imperfection. Could it be that the Father not only tolerates our imperfection, but treasures it, for it allows Him to more fully express Himself?

What’s more, Jesus, being sinless, never experienced the grace of his Father. We have a unique experience of the Father.

Or perhaps, when Jesus took our sins on Him, when He became sin for us, He could for the first time in eternity experience this particular expression of his Father’s love. Maybe this is why the cross is terrifying for Him, it is a new experience of the person He knows best.

Then follows a staggering thought: did we as humanity in some mysterious way, add something to the perfect relationship of the Father and Son? That They treasure the possibilities and expressions of love that could not be possible without us.

Christ Victor

This is a follow up on a previous post dismantling penal substitution, or the idea that God needs a sacrifice.

The view I want to discuss comes from one of the great church fathers, Athanasius of Alexandria in his book “On the Incarnation” (you can read it online for free). He went on to be a defender of the faith and is credited, in large part, with formulating the Nicene creed (there is an Athanasian creed as well, which was written by his followers), but this book was written before that. The book is actually a letter to his friend who was new to the faith. In it he outlines what Christianity is all about. This wasn’t him sharing his own ideas, it was simply what he grew up with. It is therefore an amazing insight into the understanding of the early church.

Let’s start with the problem of sin. After dismantling penal substitution a question usually comes up.

So if God didn’t need a sacrifice, and He isn’t “afraid” of our sin or doesn’t turn away from us because of it, and He can simply forgive us… why is the cross even necessary.

Read those questions again.

…if God didn’t need a sacrifice, and He isn’t “afraid” of our sin or [He] doesn’t turn away from us because of it, and He can simply forgive us…

We in some sense think the problem that the real problem with sin (and therefore why the cross is necessary), is what it does to the Father… not to us.

Do we believe in some way that sin controls the Father? And that the cross somehow changed that? Almost as if the cross allowed God to love us… but who or what can dictate God?!

If I say it like that it seems obvious that there is something wrong.

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8

The cross didn’t allow the Father to love us, the cross happened because He already loved us. It is not that God was ever “captured” by sin. Humanity was.

In what way?

The Bible talks about the law of sin and death (Rom 8:2). If you sin, you will die (Rom 8:10 and Gen 3:3). This is not the wrath of God, but simply the mechanism of the universe.

God warms Adam and Eve in Genesis 2:7 against eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because “you will surely die”. That “surely die” is more literally translated as “in dying you will die”.

Athanasuis describes that death not as a physical death but as “non-existence”. Even a view of hell requires a view that your soul is essentially immortal. Non-existence is not hell, it is simply to come to an end. “In dying you will die.”

You cannot argue with death. You cannot use your good deeds to try and argue with death – with nothingness.

Death doesn’t weigh you. It doesn’t judge you. It simply swallows you.

This idea that you cannot use your deeds to argue with death, is very similar to the Calvinist idea of the total depravity of man – nothing we can do can save us. But the word “depravity” has a terrible underlying connotation. It sound like we are worth nothing.

Yes, we need a savior. But we are definitely worth saving. Or as Athanasius put it:

It was unworthy of the goodness of God that creatures made by Him should be brought to nothing through the deceit wrought upon man by the devil; and it was supremely unfitting that the work of God in mankind should disappear, either through their own negligence or through the deceit of evil spirits.

Athanasius

In other words, whatever the reason, God took it on Himself to get us out of the mess we find ourselves in.

“I will deliver this people from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. Where, O death, are your plagues? Where, O grave, is your destruction?” – Hosea 13:14 and 15

He saved us from the might of death through the cross.

But to understand how, we need to talk a bit about the omnipresence of God. I know it sounds like an odd direction, but it will make sense.

I always believed that God was “up there” and that He is essentially doing us a favour with his presence. As if He is omnipresent by choice.

I’ve often heard at churches “calling down the presence of God” or something similar. Like He isn’t here already. Like his presence is something out of the ordinary.

From there, it is a small jump to the idea that God is separate, and we therefore excluding the “omni” in the “omnipresence” completely. We say stuff like “your sin separates you from God”, or we define Hell as a place where God isn’t.

Let us see what Paul says in Colossians.

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 

Col 1:15 – 17

Paul is saying that God isn’t present in the creation, but that the creation is present in Him. This is huge. It leaves no room, no question about God’s presence.

To say that God turns away from the sinful is like saying that the sun hides itself from the blind.

Anthony the Great

The cosmos only exist inside Him. He cannot be one place, and not at another. The presence of God doesn’t descend when the worship band starts playing the slower songs.

To say God is omnipresent is true, but it falls short of extent of the fact. His presence, or rather the universe’s presence in Him is not passive. The universe is kept together by Him (verse 17 above).

He is actively busy breathing life into the physics that govern our reality. If Jesus were to remove Himself from the universe, it would disappear.

When God says “I AM” (Ex 3:14, Joh 8:58), He is essentially saying He is being itself. There is not being outside of Him (Acts 17:28). Separation from God is not an option.

What does this have to do with the cross?

Well, Jesus is more than God that became a man. Jesus is the cradle of reality. We are not simply spectators to the incarnation of Jesus. We are in Him. And in Him everything exist, all matter, all time.

And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.

John 12:32

In his death, we entered into nothingness with Him.

But it wasn’t simply a man that entered into the void. Christ is the light of the world (John 1:4) The I AM of the cosmos The resurrection and the life (John 11:25).

Form entered formlessness.

It is therefore only logical that death cannot hold him. Like switching on a light in a dark room. Life swallows death. Christ is resurrected, because He cannot do anything else.

And He has us with Him. We aren’t spectators to the cross, and we aren’t spectators to the resurrection.

The cross and the resurrection of Jesus is not something that Jesus did for us.

The cross and resurrection of Jesus is some that happened to us.

His death is our death, His resurrection is our resurrection.

Hosea 6:2 prophesies the third day resurrection, but it is not Jesus’s resurrection. It is ours:

After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.

Paul says over and over again that we died in Christ and that we no longer live, but Christ lives in us. (gal 2:20, Col 2:20, 3:3, Rom 6:8 etc.)

So in this death and resurrection everything was made new (2 Cor 5:17).

For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.

1 Cor 15:22

Athanasius says it so well:

This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.

What a victory! Halleljah!

Dismantling the idea that God has to punish something

“Punitive retribution” also called “penal substitution” is the name for the idea that God is angry at us because of our sin, and He has to punish us for it. Jesus steps in and takes our punishment on Himself. And then God loves us.

This idea is so core to modern Christianity that it is difficult to discuss it, without feeling like you are abandoning the faith itself. After all it is the first thing we tell people when telling them about Jesus. It often taught as the Gospel itself.

And yet, the early church didn’t believe it. This idea was first formulated around 1100 AD. And before that there were other interpretation of what happened at the cross. The discussion of what happened at the cross is called atonement theory.

You might think it is a Biblical idea i.e. it is what the apostles preached. But the idea isn’t to be found in the Bible.

You could easily think that the origin of this idea is connected to the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, but we forget that the blood (and thus the offering) is for our own conscious (Heb 10:22).

And God doesn’t want blood. He wants “love, not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6).

I think the main place the idea of penal substitution comes from, is ideas about how God feels about sin, and relates to it. To me the thread I started pulling on that eventually made the whole idea of penal substitution crumble is the idea that Jesus was forsaken at the cross.

“Jesus was forsaken at the cross, because God cannot look on sin” we say.

In the church I grew up in, this was extended to “Jesus was forsaken so that we will never be forsaken”.

This is a little bit of a problem, considering Jesus Himself says He wasn’t forsaken by God.

“A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me.” – John 16:32

I also thought that Jesus was forsaken. I mean He did cry out “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46)

Let’s think about this.

The language of the New Testament is Greek, but this part isn’t. It is Hebrew. Some bystanders didn’t understand, and thought He was calling for Elijah (Matt 27:47). But the Jews understood, more than just understood – they recognized it.

It is the first line of Psalm 22 – the Crucifixion Psalm. Keep in mind that at that time, the Psalms weren’t numbered. The first line of the Psalm was the title. Add to that, that He said it in the language of the Psalm means that he was crying out the name of the Psalm. Not that He was neccesirily forsaken Himself.

Let’s look at the Psalm.

Verse 1

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?    

Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?

Verse 6 -8:

But I am a worm and not a man, 

scorned by everyone, despised by the people.

All who see me mock me;

they hurl insults, shaking their heads.

“He trusts in the Lord,” they say,

“let the Lord rescue him .

Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.”

Verse 14:

I am poured out like water,

and all my bones are out of joint.

My heart has turned to wax;

it has melted within me.

Verse 16-18

Dogs surround me,

a pack of villains encircles me;

they pierce my hands and my feet. 

All my bones are on display;

people stare and gloat over me.

They divide my clothes among them

and cast lots for my garment.

It is pretty clear that the Psalm is referring to Jesus’s crucifixion. The Jews seeing Him hanging there, probably started to connect the dots after Jesus quoted the Psalm.

But look at verse 25:

For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one;

he has not hidden his face from him 

but has listened to his cry for help.

The outcry of “why have you forsaken me?” at the start of the Psalm is the poet’s subjective experience, and the poet realizes it towards the end of the Psalm he was wrong. (I do not want to discount the fact that it would have been excruciating for Jesus even just feeling forsaken, but it is important to realize that He wasn’t really forsaken.)

So it suddenly is makes sense that Jesus says He won’t be alone.

But now we are left with a lot of other theologies, very connected to this idea. Like the idea that God is too holy to look on sin. This idea comes from Habakkuk 1:13.

You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, And cannot look on wickedness

Hab 1:13a

But let me finish the verse

Why do You look on those who deal treacherously,

And hold Your tongue when the wicked devours

A person more righteous than he?

Hab 1:13b

So God does indeed look on evil. The idea that God is too pure to look on evil, is the speaker’s opinion.

Or what about the idea that our sin separates us from God. This comes from Isaiah 59.

Verse 1 and 2:

Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save,

nor his ear too dull to hear.

But your iniquities have separated you from your God;

your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.

But then once again we keep reading.

Verse 15 and 16

Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey.

The LORD looked and was displeased that there was no justice.

He saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was no one to intervene;

so his own arm achieved salvation for him, and his own righteousness sustained him.

So Biblically there isn’t evidence for the idea that God looks away from sin or that Jesus was forsaken on the cross. There is the other little problem that Jesus cannot be separate from God, because He is, of course, Himself God.

… God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

2 Cor 5:19

This is squarely the opposite of penal substitution. Whatever happened at the cross the Father was in Christ bringing the world to Himself, not somewhere else pouring out his wrath on Jesus.

There are other atonement theories. There is a way of understanding the cross as pretty simply as the worst thing we could do to God, and Him simply forgiving us. Have a look at this post.

But that idea alone might leave some people uncomfortable, because on it’s own it doesn’t deal with sin and doesn’t explain the importance of the resurrection.

There is another atonement theory called Christ Victor, which is about Christ (and the Father’s) victory over sin and death. I deal with it in my next blog.