Tuesday, 04 May 2010 14:02
Written by Bob Flack
Good Friday Meditation
Over the past several years, Grace has marked the crucifixion of Jesus each year with a service on Friday of holy week. We have referred to this day as Good Friday. As I mentioned in the call to worship at the service this year, I am not at all sure that Jesus was crucified on Friday. There are sound arguments for a Thursday or even Wednesday crucifixion. We can be sure that by the time we gather on Friday his death had occurred and he was either already buried or soon to be buried.
If you have not attended this service, you should know that we have structured our worship around the seven sayings of Christ from the cross. We identify these and the order in which he spoke them from a harmonization of the gospel records. For each word or saying we offer elements of praise, meditation, and prayer related to the theme of that saying.
Each year we select a different saying from which to draw a biblical meditation. My practice then has been to locate a sermon or piece of writing from the past on that specific saying. I edit and sparingly update that piece to present it to our congregation as a part of the service.
This year the saying was “My God, My God, Why have You forsaken Me?” I chose a meditation from a book by James Stalker titled, The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ: A Devotional History of Our Lord’s Passion. By now the book is in the public domain. I accessed it through the Logos electronic library. In it he devotes one chapter to each of the cross sayings.
Stalker was a young pastor in Scotland when God used D.L. Moody to bring revival to his region in the early 1870’s. The experience affected Stalker’s entire life in ministry. His evangelical spirit never diminished. In a biography of him, Alexander Gammie quoted another leader of the day who compared Stalker as a preacher to a blacksmith, “‘The dark, strong energy of the moderate figure … was like that of a man at the anvil, using force but measuring it, driving at a point but guarding the blow.’”
In his book Stalker points out that the first three words of Jesus involve others (Father forgive them, Today you will be with me, and behold your mother, your son). The final four of the seven are more personal. A silence separates the two groups of sayings. There we pick up the meditation. Where I have added anything, you will see brackets ([ ]). Where I have removed words or you will notice ellipses (….) although I did skip major sections without noting it. What follows is the manuscript I took with me into the pulpit minus a couple of spelling corrections. Whether you attended or not, I trust this will refresh your heart of worship.
James Stalker on the Cry of Christ from the Cross When Forsaken of God
At length the silence was broken by Christ Himself, who, in a loud voice, gave utterance to the Fourth Word from the cross. This was a word of astonishment and agony, yet also of victory.
Indeed, it is the most appalling sound that ever pierced the atmosphere of this earth. Familiar as it is to us, it cannot be heard by a sensitive ear even at this day without causing a cold shudder of terror. In the entire Bible there is no other sentence so difficult to explain.
All His life Jesus had been accustomed to find Himself forsaken. The members of His own household early rejected Him. So did His fellow-townsmen in Nazareth. Ultimately the nation at large followed the same course. The multitudes that at one time followed Him wherever He went and hung upon His lips eventually took offence and went away.
At last, in the crisis of His [mission], one of His nearest followers betrayed Him and the rest forsook Him and fled. But in these disappointments, though He felt them keenly, He had always had one resource:... He was always able, when rejected of men, to turn away from them and cast Himself with confidence on the breast of God.
Therefore He could calmly say, even at the Last Supper, with reference to the impending desertion of the Twelve, “Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone; and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.”
Now, however, the hour had come; and was this expectation fulfilled? His own words supply the answer: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”
There can be little doubt that there was a physical element in [this agony]. He had now been a considerable time on the cross; and every minute the agony was increasing.
The wounds in His hands and feet, exposed to the atmosphere and the sun, grew barked and hardened; the blood, impeded in its circulation, swelled in heart and brain, till these organs were like to burst; and the slightest attempt to move the body from the one intolerable posture caused pains to shoot along the quivering nerves.
Bodily suffering clouds the brain and distorts the images formed on the mirror of the mind. Even the face of God, reflected there, may be turned to a shape of terror by the fumes of physical trouble.
He did not belong to death; yet He was falling into death’s grasp. No angel came to rescue Him; God interposed with no miracle to arrest the issue; He was abandoned to His [mission].
There was more, however, it is easy to see, in the agony which prompted this cry than the merely physical.
This intellectual character of His pain is indicated by the word “Why.” It is always painful when the creature has to say Why to the Creator. We believe that He is Sovereign of the world and Guide of our destiny, and that He urges forward the course of things in the reins of infinite wisdom and love.
But, while this is the habitual and healthy sense of the human mind, especially when it is truly religious, there are crises … when …[t]he world is out of joint; everything appears to have gone wrong; the reins seem to have slipped out of the hands of God and the chariot to be plunging forward uncontrolled…It is then that the poor human mind cries out Why.
The entire book of Job is such a cry. Jeremiah cried Why to God in terms of startling boldness. In mortal pain, in bewildering disappointments, in bereavements which empty the heart and empty the world, millions have thus cried Why in every age. It seems an irreligious word.
When Jeremiah says, “O Lord, Thou hast deceived me and I was deceived,” or when Job demands, “Why did I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?” it sounds like the voice of a blasphemer.
But indeed it is into the most earnest and delicate souls that this despair is likeliest to slip. The ignorant … are safe from it; for they are well enough satisfied with things as they are. Callous minds learn to be content without explanations. But the more deeply pious a mind is, the more jealous must it be for justice and the glory of God … to be able to trace the footsteps of God’s care is a necessity of its existence.
Hence its pain when these evidences disappear. Now, all the contradictions and confusions of the world were focused on Golgotha. Injustice was triumphant; innocence was scorned and crushed; everything was exactly the reverse of what it ought to have been. And all the millions of Whys which have risen from agonized souls, jealous for the honour of God but perplexed by His providence, were concentrated in the Why of Christ.
How near to us He is! Never perhaps in His whole life did He so completely identify Himself with … mankind. For here He comes down to stand by our side not only when we have to encounter pain and misfortune, bereavement and death, but when we are enduring that pain which is beyond all pains, that horror in whose presence the brain reels, and faith and love, the eyes of life, are put out—the horror of a universe without God, a universe which is one hideous, tumbling, crashing mass of confusion, with no reason to guide and no love to sustain it.
Can we advance a step farther into the mystery? The deepest question of all is whether the desertion of Jesus was subjective or objective—that is, whether He had only, on account of bodily weakness and a temporary obscuration of the inward vision, a sense of being abandoned, or whether, in any real sense, God had actually forsaken Him.
Of course we are certain that God was infinitely well pleased with Him—never more so, surely, than when He was sacrificing Himself to the uttermost on behalf of others. But was there, at the same time, any outflashing against Him of the reverse side of the Divine nature—the lightning of the Divine wrath?
Calvary was an awful revelation of the human heart, whose enmity was directed straight against the perfect revelation of the love of God in Christ. There the sin of man reached its climax and did its worst. What was done there against Christ, and against God in Him, was a kind of embodiment and quintessence of the sin of the whole world.
And undoubtedly it was this which was pressing on Jesus; this was “the travail of His soul.” He was looking close at sin’s utmost hideousness; He was sickened with its contact; He was crushed with its brutality—crushed to death. Yet this human nature was His own; He was identified with it—bone of its bone, flesh of its flesh… and, like the scapegoat on whose head the sins of the community were laid in the old dispensation, He went out into the land of forsakenness.
The heavenly Father now regards His Son as the greatest sinner to be found beneath the sun, and discharges on Him the whole weight of His wrath.” …“In this fourth word from the cross our Saviour not only says that He has been delivered up into the hands of men, but that He has suffered at the hands of God something unutterable.”
Certainly there is here something unutterable. We have ventured into the mystery as far as we are able; but we know that we are yet only in the shallows near the shore; the unplumbed ocean lies beyond.
…If what has just been said be true, this, which was the extreme moment of suffering, was also the supreme moment of achievement. As the flower, by being crushed, yields up its fragrant essence, so He, by taking into His heart the sin of the world, brought salvation to the world.
In point of fact, all history since has shown that it was in this very hour that Christ conquered…, “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.” And the correctness of this anticipation is matter of history.
Theology has its centre in the cross. Sometimes, indeed, it has been shy of it, and has divagated from it in wide circles; but, as soon as it becomes profound and humble again, it always returns.
Yes, when it becomes humble! Penitent souls are drawn to the cross, and the deeper their penitence the more are they at home. They stand beside the dying Saviour and say, This is what we ought to have suffered; our life was forfeited by our guilt; thus our blood deserved to flow; we might justly have been banished forever into the desert of forsakenness.
But, as they thus make confession, their forfeited life is given back to them for Christ’s sake, the peace of God is shed abroad in their hearts, and the new life of love and service begins. The supreme Christian rite brings us to this very spot and to this very moment: “This is My blood of the New Testament, shed for many for the remission of sins.”
It was not, however, merely in this profound sense that this fourth word of the dying Saviour was a cry of victory. …The cry itself, though an utterance of despair, yet involved the strongest faith. See how He lays hold of the Eternal with both hands: “My God, My God!” It is a prayer: a thousand times He had turned to this resource in days of trial; and He does so in this supreme trouble.
To do so cures despair. No one is forsaken who can pray, “My God.” As one in deep water, feeling no bottom, makes a despairing plunge forward and lands on solid ground, so Jesus, in the very act of uttering His despair, overcame it.
Feeling forsaken of God, He rushed into the arms of God; and these arms closed round Him in loving protection. Accordingly, as the darkness, which had brooded over all the land, disappeared at the ninth hour, so His mind emerged from eclipse; and, as we shall see, His last words were uttered in His usual mood of serenity. Amen.
