WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert 3/05/06

Mark 15:33-47 “The Silence of God”

Where is God? Faced with innocent human suffering, with disasters, with death, people of all times and places have cried out with the same question. Where is God? At Calvary, the Light of the World, the Prince of Peace, the Son of God has been deserted, betrayed, denied, rejected, condemned, mocked. Now he experiences the greatest suffering of all – the sense of being abandoned by God in his hour of need. What is happening?

1) Judgment

Something earth-shattering, something apocalyptic is occurring. The skies grow dark, the sun hides. The prophets had foreseen it: on the great Day of the LORD, when judgment falls, “I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth” said the LORD through Amos. In the life of Jesus, there have been apocalyptic moments: at his baptism, when the thunder roared and the dove descended and the voice from heaven said “This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased;” or on the mountain of Transfiguration, when the cloud descends and the voice says “This is my Son, listen to him.”

But on this day, on Calvary, when the sun goes dark, there is no voice from heaven. Instead there is the piercing cry from Jesus as he hangs on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is the day of God’s wrath, and no word of comfort comes. Jesus is alone, utterly alone, in a way he has never experienced before.

The words he utters, often called “the Cry of Dereliction,” are from Psalm 22. It is an astonishing prophecy of Jesus’ experience of suffering and desolation. How are we to understand his cry? Some will say that Jesus for the moment feels deserted, but that he has ultimate confidence in God his Father. He still calls him “my” God. Psalm 22 starts out with a cry of desolation, but ends with quiet confidence in God. Jesus surely knows that.

Others say that here Jesus is truly abandoned by his Father. Two lines of thought converge: as Paul will tell it, Jesus – perfect though his life had been - is here “made to be sin for us;” he “became a curse for us.” He took upon himself at this moment the burden of sin for all his people. The consequence of “being sin” had been spelled out repeatedly in the OT: if my people sin and turn from me, says the LORD, “I will hide my face from them.” So in popular language, some say that at this moment “the Father turned away from the Son” as he poured out judgment upon him for the sins of the world.

There is certainly precedent for this kind of language. And yet... Had not Jesus prayed that he would do his Father’s will? Was he ever closer to the center of his Father’s will than this? We are confronted with a mystery. How can we begin to grasp what happened in the Godhead at this moment? That God was here judging his people in the person of his Son is clear: the NT is full of talk of Jesus taking our punishment upon him, of dying “for us.” We are told that Jesus “turned away the wrath of God” (the big word for that is “propitiation,” which most Bibles today reword as “making atonement,” because the concept of propitiating God – or even of God’s wrath - is considered to be unintelligible to modern people).

But did the Father at this moment desert the Son? It is hard to believe – and hard to combine with the other “words from the cross” recorded in the four Gospels. In Matthew, in Luke, and in John, we are told that Jesus “gave up his spirit” in trust to his Father. Mark does not hint at that peaceful surrender, perhaps because he wants us to remain focused on what Jesus suffered, for us.

2) The Silence of God

And so one thing we cannot escape is that here Jesus enters totally into human experience, for our sakes. He learns the truth that we all slowly learn, that sin separates us from God. Whether that is because God “turns away” from sin – or whether this is simply a human way of describing God’s aversion to sin – what we as humans deeply experience is the silence of God, our own sense that “God is absent.”

This may say more about us than about God. It is surely one of the marks of our fallen-ness that we have little sense of God’s presence, although the Bible assures us that he is everywhere and at all time present and close to us. But we do not sense that; it is as though we have become deaf or blind to spiritual realities. Indeed we have! And it also true, I believe, that if we fall into deep and persistent sin, that we find ourselves more and more separated from God in our minds, our hearts, our consciences. It’s as though we suppress what little knowledge of God we had, because we do not want him around at this moment. We fool ourselves, of course, into thinking we can get rid of God – but even so, our sense of his presence shrinks to little or nothing.

So with us, so with our world. Where is God? He seems to many people to have “left the building”- if he was ever here, he is gone now! There is a sense of abandonment that marks much of our culture; God is irrelevant, or forgotten, or “dead.” And so, as Nietzsche and others saw long ago, nothing matters, there is no right and wrong and it’s foolish to pretend there is; there is only power and personal expression.

But there is more to be said about God’s silence. Even for those who have been close to God, who count themselves as disciples, as Christians, there are times when God seems silent. And this is not simply due to “sin in their lives.” In fact the holiest of people have declared that there were times when they had no sense of God at all; that their prayers went unanswered, that God seemed to have deserted them. Some called it “the dark night” of the soul, and the mystics of the faith tell us that even those growing closer to God can experience it. Growth in faith can lead to greater assurance and sense of God’s presence, but it can also reveal greater areas of darkness that can seem to swallow the light.

There is another mystery here: in his inscrutable ways, God is not always at our beck and call. Even when we are innocent of any great sin, God can seem remote or absent. Many people would say that this is in fact an accurate description of the way they live, even if they are “believers.” The lively sense of God’s presence is what is rare; the sense of his absence is their daily experience. We don’t understand this, and yet we can find plenty of evidence that it is not just “about us.” Two great examples are clear in the OT experience of God’s people: after they went into Egypt in the time of Joseph to escape famine, it was over 400 years before Moses appeared as their deliverer! Nothing is recorded of that whole period; no “word from the LORD,” no prophet, no sign of God. He has not deserted Israel, of course; in fact for much of that time they prospered and grew in numbers. But there is no record that they heard from God.

The second long silence is between the Old and New Testaments. Again 400 years elapse from the last prophet Malachi until the appearance in the desert of John the Baptist. No “word from the LORD.” It is not surprising that we find written in – for example – Isaiah, that “Surely you are a God who hides himself” (Is 45:15) – a profound thought that has become foundational in – for example – Lutheran theology. God is inscrutable, and does not reveal himself when and where and how we would expect, or want. He is in fact known most clearly in the crucified Christ – who himself experienced “the absence of God.”

3) Where Is Your God?

So we confront a mystery. At Calvary, God is not absent. He is there in the darkening of the sun, he is there in the tearing of the veil of the Temple from top to bottom, showing that the way into the Holy of Holies and into the very presence of God is now open to all through the blood of Christ (cf. Hebrews); he is there in the confession of the centurion that this “Surely was the Son of God;” he is there in the bravery of Joseph of Arimathea, and in the kindness of the three named women who for a moment replace the three men who had been Jesus’ closest friends.

And most profoundly of all, God is present on the cross. There is a story from the prison camps of WWII – from Dachau - told by several of the survivors. After an attempted escape, ten young men were hung publicly in retaliation. The whole camp was made to watch. In the silence, a voice called out “Where now is your God?” The silence returned, until another voice responded “He is there, on the gallows.”

We cannot look at the cross of Jesus and ignore that here God himself entered into the suffering of the world, that he took it upon himself; that the burden of sin and the separation it causes, that the pain of death and the sense of abandonment, were here experienced and willingly embraced by God himself in the person of his Son. That is what makes this “good news;” that is why we call that day “Good Friday;” because God took on himself the “wages of sin.” He had promised to do that, and at Calvary he did it – he took the judgment due his people’s sins, and made it his own.

Jesus the Son of God has entered fully into our human experience; of birth and growth, of family and friends, of calling and betrayal, of suffering and death. He knows what it’s like to sense the absence of his Father, he knows what it’s like when God seems silent in the face of our suffering and our prayers. So he can now walk with us along any path, because he has been here before. Father and Son are still with us, in the person of the Holy Spirit they sent, and God has promised never to forsake us – no matter how abandoned we sometimes feel.

Let us pray...