The Absence of God

Then about that time Jesus shouted, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

Mark 15:34

Not a word we use very often: Godforsaken.

Is there a time and place when even God has had enough of us, when even the immortal invisible needs to take some personal time? 

Was God now hiding from Jesus... or was it just that Jesus lost sight of God?

When it feels like that, what’s the difference?

And if you believe that Jesus, somehow, was also God, this is a kind of self-abandonment - God taking leave of himself, forgetting himself. A kind of madness?

As darkness falls, confusion rises. Voices nearby drop away, disappear. Spectators lose interest. Now just the silent sound of hearts breaking, hope evaporating. 

‘Hello?’

No reply. 

‘Anyone there?’

Nothing answers. 

Just you and nothing.

Forsaken. 

Jesus Christ abandoned to his fate in the middle of history.

Foolishness.

The mad epicentre of all things.

Losing it. Always losing it.

‘You have to lose your life in order to find it’, he had said.                                                            

Martin Wroe

It may seem odd to offer a reflection on the crucifixion of Jesus in the midst of Advent. But, for me, it is not really that strange.

On the Cross, Jesus is taking upon himself and into himself that sense of abandonment and forsakenness that God’s people had been experiencing as they waited for God to redeem and rescue them, and just as it would have seemed to them that their prayers were not heard, no action occurred and God felt absent, so now Jesus was enduring these very things.

I have often preached on the gospel story of the storm on the Sea of Galilee when the disciples are in the boat and afraid. Not the account where Jesus is asleep in the boat and is awakened and commands the storms to be still, but the other one were the disciples are in a boat… the wind is getting up, the waves are crashing... a storm is blowing... and Jesus is not even there with them!

And how often do we feel that? The storms are blowing up in our lives and Jesus feels very absent.

Indeed, the absence of Jesus in the gospels is a very interesting study in itself. He is absent when the disciples are struggling – and failing – to heal an epileptic boy; absent when Lazarus dies and Mary and Martha are filled with grief; absent when this storm hits the disciples’ boat.

Where are you, Lord? Where are you when we need you?

Most of us find that in the course of our life journey and faith journey storms blow up from time to time... personal, circumstantial, spiritual, medical, emotional, financial, relational... whatever… and Jesus seems absent… sometimes very absent.

And Jesus himself – on the Cross – experiences that sense of abandonment: the absence of God.

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

In these last months I have often felt somewhat abandoned by God, and I have certainly had only the rarest sense of his presence in the midst of an overwhelming sense of his absence.

But, perhaps the most interesting bit of the story of the storm on Galilee concerns where it is that Jesus is eventually seen. Not in the boat with us, but out there in the very storm that is battering us. And – initially at least – he is unrecognised.

Like all of us who have faced storms in life, what I want to do in difficult and dark times is batten down the hatches and hope to find God right there beside me, speaking peace and making the storm go away!

Like children afraid of the dark we want someone to cuddle us and put the light on! 

But what if, in these experiences of doubt, of loss, of emotional turmoil, relationship tensions, God is – in fact – in the very midst of the storm and calling us not to keep low until the storm has past, but to face up to it, walk out into it, and find God in it.

God may seem absent and we may feel abandoned.  But maybe sometimes he is just not where we expect him to be.