The Absence of God
By Charles Rush
March 24, 2013
Matthew 27: 27-50, 54
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veral years ago a friend of mine was out very late at night. A recent graduate of the Wharton Business School, he had been working 80-hour weeks on mergers for Donaldson, Lufkin and Genrette. The schedule had been a grind for months and he had been caught up in the frenzy of it all, burning the candle at both ends and burning out though he didn't know it at the time.
One night a
college friend calls him. The two of them hook up at 10 p.m., they catch up on
their lives, way leads to way, it is suddenly 2:30 in
the morning when the both of them realize that they have to go. Tired, with a
few beers under the belt, they are saying a few farewells right near a subway
stop when shots ring out and they both hit the ground. A shop owner comes
running out of the front of his bodega with two teenagers behind him who force
him to his knees, guns drawn to his head. These two kids are hyped up and wild.
The street is practically empty and one of them is waving his pistol around ordering
everyone to freeze. The owner of the bodega is crying and begging all at once.
He is so scared he forgets to speak in English and is rambling in his native
tongue. The two teens are shouting orders at the few people caught in this
drama to remain still and obey their commands.
The shop owner
finally breaks a few words into English and keeps repeating that he has 5
children. One of the teenagers begins a rant to the whole world as he has
captured their attention for the moment. It was full of a lot of bombast about
how he was in control and people were going to do what he told them to do,
about how he had been nothing to them 5 minutes ago but now he was something,
about how he just might do anything just because he could. Like all the
Cambodians in The Killing Fields, my
friend said there was nothing more frightening than the arbitrary power of an
angry seventeen-year-old with a gun.
Several years
later, I was involved with a four-year-old kid that was in transition. This
young man had been removed from his home where there had been some kind of
abuse, violence, or drug abuse. He had been in a couple of different foster
care homes but the families gave him back to the system because he acted out.
The social worker just needed us to keep him for one night in transition. She
brought him over shrieking. She wasn't able to control this kid, so I went out
to the car and carried him into the house, my neighbors wondering, I'm sure
just what in the world is going on. Now there is not much you can do with a screaming
kid except just hold them and wait and I was just holding this kid for a while
to calm him down. I'm holding him and every once in a while, when he talks at
all, he just says ‘don't touch me or I'll bite you.'
Of course, all
parents have held shrieking children. Some of us have earned a degree in
screaming kids. Many of us have had that wonderful experience of carrying a kid
screaming bloody murder out of a nice restaurant in the Mall, people glancing
at you like you might have beaten this kid or something. Isn't that great?
And you learn to
distinguish different types of screaming, do you not? There is one kind of
screaming that is just the plain old tantrum and you know that if you engage
the tantrum, the screaming will just get louder and longer. There is the scream
of physical pain that is more piercing and alarming, and you also know that it
is going to pass with some tender loving care and good holding. There is the
scream that comes from being too tired, full of cold medicine and just sick. It
has a whiny quality to it, sometimes a hysteria, and you know that these kids
are not truly in control of what they are doing which makes it easier to endure
even if it is not going away.
I may be wrong
but with this kid I thought I heard a new version of screaming. I thought I
heard a screed of the soul. It had a depth to it, seemed to come out of the
center of his being. It was afraid. It was lonely. It was a cry that was mad as
hell and wanted to be loved at the same time. It was the cry of a young child
without his Mom. It was an awful and inconsolable longing. And for just a
moment, I wondered to myself if I wasn't looking at that seventeen
year-old-teenager with a gun when he was a kid?
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani. ‘My God, my
God why have you forsaken me?' There is no question but that the God forsaken
moments in our lives shake us to the heart of our being and some of us never
recover from them entirely. Those times when the forces of nature and the
forces of history seemed to have aligned themselves in a foreboding
intersection that has us as the target in the cross hairs. I was reading about
a Navy captain this week that was piloting one of the very first long-range
submarines after the war. It was a brand new submarine with the best technology
on it. Everything was going along just as planned when a fire broke out on the
fifth day that the crew couldn't put out. Then came
another explosion and another. Toxic fumes were filling the sub and the fire
was uncontrollable. The men leapt to the deck of the sub. Unfortunately, they
were in the Arctic Ocean north of Norway. Unfortunately, there were 16-foot
waves crashing over the top of the sub. Unfortunately, it happened in the
middle of the night when most everyone was sleeping. None of the men were in
protective gear. Most were in their underwear, lashed to the bow of the sub,
being violently thrown to and fro. There was no solution in sight. It was fire
below and freezing air above and there came a moment of somber resolve when the
Captain of the submarine was trying to find some solace in the fact that people
generally conk out in the freezing waters before they drown. That is a God
forsaken moment. He didn't plan it, didn't deserve it. The only options were
bad, worse, and tragic.
Nature is bad
enough, but injustice, caprice, and arbitrariness can literally drive you insane. I was in Moscow in 1991 and I met
quite a few people who had spent time in the Gulag, enduring the torture for
which Communism became infamous. I met many people who had suffered much for
their religion or because they stood for human rights and they were truly
admirable. But one fellow struck me in particular, precisely because he could
not suffer for a cause.
Serge told me a
story that he was arrested in the middle of the night, torn from the warmth of
his bed and brought to an interrogation room where he was questioned and
tortured for hours about things he knew absolutely nothing about. The more he
denied knowledge, the worse the torture became. Finally, he confessed to something/anything
just to be left alone. That began an oddessy for him through the system of the
Gulag that would last for ten years. He was arrested, as he would later learn,
on a case of mistaken identity, charged for conspiracy and espionage he knew
nothing about.
For the first
weeks of his imprisonment, he kept thinking that this would all end soon, that
someone in his family or his neighbors would come explain everything and it
would be over. They never came. They were too afraid that they might also get arrested
for something they didn't do. He went from one camp to a progressively more
harsh camp, ending up in Siberia.
I asked him what
the hardest thing about the whole experience was. He looked at me in a pensive
blank stare and said ‘I was going insane
progressively… Each day I had to wake up and find a reason to live. That was
the hard part.'
The story of the
trial and death of Jesus is filled with frustration, arbitrariness. It appears
that the forces of destiny are arrayed with evil and injustice. There is no
question that this story is more threatening still for very religious folk.
There is a strong tradition in our natural theology and in our biblical
tradition that assumes that because God is God, God is in control of the
universe; and if God is in control of the universe, God is going to protect us
from arbitrary evil because otherwise God wouldn't be good. It is more
threatening still because surely God would protect Jesus. I mean, God may not
protect us because we are fairly compromised people. But Jesus is the very best
of our breed.
It is just
common sense to have a pretty strong tradition of the Sovereign protection of
God. The psalms repeatedly lift up God as worthy of praise because God brings
us the routine of the seasons. Furthermore, God is looking out for us. One of
my favorite psalms is Psalm 121 ‘I lift mine eyes to the hills/ from whence
cometh my strength/ my strength cometh from the Lord who hath made heaven and
earth… He will not left your foot stumble/behold he who keeps Israel shall
neither slumber nor sleep/ The Lord is your guardian/ He is your defense at
your right hand/ The sun will not strike you by day/nor the moon by night.'The
Lord will guard you against all evil/The Lord will protect your coming out and
your going in from this day forward and forevermore.
I think that is
pretty clear. This is the Sovereign God who stands over against us, the
ultimate power of the universe. Clearly, enforcing justice in the world is in
the job description of the Almighty. We need reassurance that God is not only
there but that God is actively enforcing justice, protecting us from the
vicissitudes of history and the arbitrariness of evil men.
Even Jesus
portrayed God in much this fashion. Jesus taught us not to worry about what we
shall wear or how we shall eat. One time in the gospel of Matthew, he is
reported to have said ‘Put away anxious thoughts about food and drink to keep
you alive, and clothes to cover your body. ‘Surely life is more than food, the
body more than clothes. Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow and reap
and store in the barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. You are worth more
than the birds! Is there one among you who by anxious thought can add a foot to
their height? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they do not
work, they do not spin; and yet, even Solomon in all his splendor was not
arrayed as one of these (Mt. 6:25-28). The justification for this non-anxious
approach is that God will take care of us.
Mark Trotter
says he was preaching once on how God looks out for us and takes care of us. By
the time he finished his sermon he was all fuzzy, with a warm, basking glow. He
is standing at the back of the church when someone came up to him and said
‘what about Auschwitz?' He went on to say that this person came to his office
the next day and reported to him ‘I'm not coming to church anymore because I
don't believe in God and I don't believe in God because God did not answer my
prayers'. She then enumerated a number of very sober, legitimate things that
she had prayed for, things you and I would regularly pray for as well- health,
well being, protection for her children. She didn't
really want an answer to her declaration, not that we Ministers have an answer
for some of these questions either, she just wanted to file a complaint
officially with the Cleric ‘God doesn't answer prayer.'
Eloi, Eloi lama sabachthani.
You may recall that Elie Wiesel's response to the radical evil of the Holocaust
was something quite like this woman's. He tells the oft-quoted story of the
time that two men and a boy were hanged for some routine trespass. The two men
died instantly and the young boy slowly strangled because his weight wasn't
enough to break his neck. In the midst of the agony of watching this someone cried
out ‘Where is God?' Another man answered, pointing to the boy, ‘there is God'.
Wiesel uses that story to point to the impotence of God in our world. And if
God is impotent, then God is pretty much irrelevant in his view. And that is
one possible answer.
But I would also
point to the witness of Etty Hillesum in the book An Interrupted Life. She was in the same concentration camp, filled
with the same frustration and hardship. It never exactly occurred to her to
blame God for her condition. She appears to have had a visceral- a
pre-reflective- understanding that God would not want to put anyone through
something so horrible. Quite different from Wiesel, she remarks that she had an
increasing sense of the presence of God as a help in her time of trouble. Indeed,
as things became more difficult and dangerous that sense of divine
accompaniment and encouragement became more pronounced. ‘It was as if she
didn't need to understand, because she knew God understood her'.[i]
She had a sense of divine support in the midst of tragedy.
And that is what
the symbol of the Cross has meant to Christians for centuries. It means that
God is with us, that God understands our suffering and our frustration, the
alienation that we are going through. The tragedy that Jesus experiences is not
diminished one wit. He is not relieved of the horrible violence of it. But
Christians came to see this whole episode as God taking that suffering up into
the bosom of God.
You see, it is
at precisely this point that the authentic man Jesus becomes something of a
living icon, radiating the presence of God in empathetic identification. It is
exactly here in his forsakeness that the communion of the divine transcendent
is manifest. It is in this boundary situation, this mixture of courage and despair, that Jesus does not so much know as he appears to
have been known by God. This is what Christians gleaned from this story looking
back on the whole unfolding drama at a later time. As Paul Tillich once said ‘The courage to be is rooted in the God who
appears when god has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.'
God is present
with us but not in such a way that the antinomies and contradictions of history
are resolved prematurely. It is not given to us to have the cup of tragedy and
frustration pass from us in this life. We are not granted any special exemption
because of our spiritual discipline or moral virtue. Indeed, if the life of
Jesus is a reliable guide, we should be warned that following in this way is
likely to animate the arbitrary evil that exists all around us.
But in some
sense, all of our life is taken up into the heart and mind of God, all of our
injustice and tragedy, even our God forsaken moments. There is an
incompleteness to our lives, however good and beautiful, however ugly and sad. Their
completion will finally come from beyond ourselves.
They will come from God. There is an irresolution to
history that will come from beyond time. It will come from eternity. That is
the promise of the Cross.
Reinhold Niebuhr
once said ‘Nothing worth doing is
completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or
beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be
accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.'
Brothers and
sisters, we are at that time of year in the Christian calendar, we are at that
place in our confession of the faith, when we are forced to remember that our
faith in the world must come from some place beyond it. Our confidence in the
triumph of goodness is not warranted by the facts alone. We must confess with
St. Paul ‘for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face.
For now, I know in part; but then we will understand fully, even as we have been understood. So
faith, hope, and love abide, these three.' They are
not borne out by the world, but ultimately, they will make sense of it. Amen.
