Mt. 27.46 "My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?"
1. Do you ever feel hypocritical coming to church? You feel awful but you come through the front doors with a smile on your face. You struggled getting up in the morning but here you are now, laughing and joking like everything in the world is just right. I mean, do we really believe that out of all the days of the week that we wake up on the wrong side of the bed, it’s never Sunday. No matter what kind of morning you had, no matter what sort of discussion you had with your spouse or your kids or yourself, no matter how heated it got, when you came through the doors of this building, there was a smile on your face. It may have been plastered there but it was there. You don’t feel like smiling. You don’t feel like being cheery, but you feel that if there was ever a place where you ought to smile, it’s here. No matter how fake. No matter how unreal. If you are going to smile, it has to be at the church. You can yell and scream at home, all the way in the car, but get out of the car, walk across the parking lot and through those doors and you act happy.
2. Sometimes this really bothers people. To walk in the church feeling like that. To feel like something is wrong, like God is absent but that in the midst of that they are just supposed to smile. Some time ago, I got an email from a couple who attended a church I pastored. They expressed this idea that they wished they had more faith, that they could be more like us. And it made me think how often we, even as a parsonage family can make it seem like life is always together. Like everything is always good. Like somehow we as believers experience life as a bed of roses, when that’s really not true. We all have struggles and we all have difficulties. None of us, no matter how much we want to be are exempt from this reality. This couple were foster parents who had been wrongly accused of something by one of their foster children. And for one reason or another, the child who had been known as a habitual liar was believed and all of the children, even girls this couple planned to adopt were removed from their home and they prayed hard for these children to come back but at the end of a rather long battle, the state decided that the girls had been with another couple too long and it would be against their best interests to move them back to this couple’s home. In the midst of this process, the woman’s father passed away due to kidney failure, and he had believed that God would return the girls to their home. All of these events together caused this couple to doubt and to believe that maybe they weren’t the best Christians. I mean, after all they had prayed but God didn’t seem to have answered their prayers. And they felt bad being unable to come to the church and not smile.
3. And I have to say to them and to others that the truth is life sometimes stinks. The truth is that sometimes we are big fat liars because we come into the church feeling awful and we put these smiles on our face and act like everything is alright, even though it isn’t. Why is that? Why is it that we struggle being genuine in this place? I suspect that some of the reasons why have to do with our understanding of God and our understanding of ourselves.
4. First of all, the reason we don’t come into this place genuinely is because we think that to not do so reflects a lack of faith. That to wonder if God is really there isn’t a problem of God’s but a problem of ours. That to question His faithfulness makes us doubters. As if we don’t believe the promises of His word. That we fail to believe that He will never leave us nor forsake us. And yet, we have those seasons in our lives where that is exactly how we feel. We feel alone and betrayed. We feel forsaken and forgotten. But we don’t dare let on for fear that someone might wonder about our faith, our confidence in God.
5. A second reason why we don’t express our true feelings of doubt and anxiety is because somehow we think we might be letting God down. If I tell God that I don’t feel He is there right now, I tell Him He’s not good enough for me and that sounds like blasphemy. It sounds again like I know better than God or I think I know better than God. To suggest that God isn’t there when I need Him, to me that sounds like something I shouldn’t be doing.
6. So, even when it feels like this, when it feels like I am completely and utterly alone, when no one care or understands, when everyone is absent, I don’t dare express it for the fear that someone might judge me, be it another believer or God. But if you stop and think about that, if I feel like God is absent, if I feel like God is silent on the matters that I really care about and I don’t express that, but simply walk into church with a smile on my face, than I’m not being an authentic believer. As if expressing doubts in God is a sign of a faith failure.
7. But listen to what Matthew records as some of Jesus’ last words. They are found in Matthew 27.46. These are the words of Jesus as He hung on the cross. [Play CD].
8. How many of you are shocked that Jesus, hanging on the cross, cries out, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" These are the same words that we just expressed are not the kind of words real Christians ought to say. These are the words that real Christians avoid saying. Yet, here we have Jesus Christ as He hangs on the cross voicing these very words. My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
9. Now Jesus Christ, as He hung on the cross has been rejected by everyone, His followers have left Him, His family with the exception of His mom are gone, the crowds are turned against Him, and here He is, innocent of anything, yet He hangs on the cross, a tool of punishment for those who have been found guilty. Christ felt completely and totally alone. But notice what He didn’t do. He didn’t smile out at the crowds and say, "I have faith God will take care of me." He didn’t try to pretend He wasn’t feeling what He felt. What He did was act out how He felt. He was true on the outside to what He felt on the inside. No plastic mask. No fake smile. But a cry of anguish, "Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani."
10. And what did the crowds do? They misunderstood what He was doing. And what did God do? He heard the cry of His Son. He heard the pain and the complaint of His Son. But He didn’t chastise His Son. He didn’t zap Him and say, "Why didn’t you trust me better." He didn’t challenge Jesus’ lack of faith, because at the very moments Christ was hanging on the cross, was when He was in the very center of God’s will. Not that He had ever been out of God’s will, but when He hung on the cross and cried out because God felt absent, He was still in the center of God’s will.
11. This teaches us two things. First, we can be in the center of God’s will and struggle with the feeling that God is absent. Mother Teresa who struggled for over five years to get permission from the Catholic church to start a ministry to the poor in India, felt this absence most of her ministry even though she knew she was doing what God wanted her to do. Sometimes we can be doing exactly what God wants us to do and feel like He is nowhere to be found. Secondly, Jesus experience on the cross teaches us it’s okay to ask God, "Why?" "Why is this happening to me?" "Why am I experiencing this awful experience?" "Why do I have to go through this?"
12. I submit to you today though that a part of what happened there on the cross for Christ was that even while He asked this question, He submitted His will to God. And this is the final aspect of what Christ teaches us through this statement. We can ask "Why?" but we must still submit our wills to His. We must still allow His will to be greater than ours. We must still allow God to be in control of the situation rather than trying to take it into our own hands. How well are you doing with that? How well do you go through difficult seasons in life and still submit yourself to God’s will? How well do you keep from trying to take the situation back into your own control and simply hold on, even when it seems as though God is absent?
