Psalms of the Passion: 2. Abandonment

PSALMS OF THE PASSION: 2.ABANDONMENT

The years 1996 and 1997 mark possibly the darkest time of my life. They were also the loneliest time of my life.

At the beginning of the year, my late wife had developed a nasty cough which kept us awake at night. In the April, I decided to take her to Cyprus for a few days break in the sun, hoping that her health would pick up.

But it did not. Within a few days of returning we found ourselves at the doctor's surgery. After a rather inconclusive consultation, Mary asked whether an Xray might prove helpful. The doctor casually agreed, and so the next six weeks were spent at various hospitals for Xrays and blood tests, amidst cancelled appointments and lost results, until at last I blew my top in frustration .

Eventually, after considerable pressure, the diagnosis was made. Cancer. Cancer of both lungs, the groin, the spine and the rib cage. It was inoperable and Mary was given a few months to live.

Fortunately, I was able to get her admitted to the Royal Marsden Hospital in London within a few days where all the previous Xrays and tests, which had taken so long, were repeated within a couple of days with the same diagnosis. Although the results were the same, we felt more confident.

A course of chemotherapy was commenced, augmented with radiotherapy. We both knew the treatment could not cure the cancer, but it could improve the quality of life and make the suffering more bearable. And initially it did. After a final tour around the UK visiting friends, in between treatment, I wheeled her around the Holy Land in the December, which had been a dream of hers for some time.

However, after Christmas she grew steadily weaker and spent more and more time in hospital in London. Finally, at her request I brought her home after Easter and in May 1997, after much suffering, she passed peacefully away.

And then nothing.

I suddenly found myself alone for the first time in my life. Alone in the lounge looking at her empty armchair. Alone in the bedroom with the other half of the bed empty. Alone in the kitchen, as I learned how to cook, to wash and to iron for myself.

No more visits from the Bishop or Archdeacon. No more visits from friends. No more visits from parishioners. Each day the sense of aloneness grew stronger as I found myself looking into the darkness of the unknown future.

And in some of those darkest moments, I have to admit, I felt that even God had abandoned me, and I found those words of the psalmists falling spontaneously from my lips, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

The Christian apologist, C S Lewis, writes of similar experience when his wife Joy died from cancer, which is so movingly told in the film and play called Shadowlands

He writes in A Grief Observed:

'Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing him, so happy that you are tempted to feel his claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to him with gratitude and praise, you will be – so it feels - welcomed with open arms. But go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence becomes. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is he so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?’

Jesus himself had a similar experience of feeling abandoned by God as he hung dying upon the cross.

This is how St Mark describes the experience.

'It was nine o'clock in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read "The King of the Jews". And with him they crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, "Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!" ln the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, "He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of lsrael, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe." Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15.25-34)

Various attempts have been made to explain the 'darkness', such as an eclipse of the sun, or even a sandstorm. Although it is difficult to know what exactly happened, I think we would all agree, that it is at times of darkness, that we are most conscious of being alone. That is why we often fear losing our eyesight since it cuts us off from the world around us.

And Jesus was no exception, as he hung dying upon the cross.

Where are the crowds, who only a few days earlier had welcomed him into Jerusalem, crying out aloud, 'Hosanna' as they cut down branches of palm and placed them on the road before him?

Where are the five thousand whom he had once fed upon the hillside? Where are all those whom he had healed? Where are his disciples, who had been his constant companions for the past three years? Where is that inner circle of Peter, James and John? And where is the one who had earlier pledged his undying loyalty to Jesus?

Above all, where is God?

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

So Jesus hangs upon the cross, rejected. A rejection expressed physically by society, by being crucified, ‘outside the city wall’ on a rubbish heap, where the scavenging dogs could feed upon the dead corpses that littered the area.

ln his semi-conscious state, Jesus calls to mind opening words of Psalm 22 to express his innermost feeling of abandonment, even by God:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

As I said yesterday, the psalter has been described as the 'Hymn Book of the Second Temple' where it was used in public worship. It was also used regularly in synagogue worship. Hence, both Jesus ant his disciples would have been very familiar with the words of the psalms, as you and I are very familiar with the words of hymns which we sing regularly in worship Sunday by Sunday.

It was natural, therefore, that the early Jewish Christians would also have used the psalms in their worship, which eventually led to Christians generally employing them in their worship.

The monastic life, founded by St Antony of Egypt in the third century and developed by St Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century, used the psalms in their regular pattern of daily worship. The whole .psalter of 150 psalms were recited each week during the seven monastic offices. Some went even further. It is claimed that St Patrick recited the whole of the psalter every day!

When Thomas Cranmer produced the Prayer Book of 1549, he reduced the sevenfold monastic offices to two for the busy parish clergy and laity, namely, Morning and Evening Prayer. He also extended the recitation of the psalter from a weekly basis to a monthly basis. That is why you find psalms allocated for recitation for every morning and evening of the month in The Book of Common Prayer

Given the place and frequency of psalmody in worship, it is not surprising then that the words of the psalms should be so familiar to worshippers and be easily recalled by Jesus and others throughout the centuries.

But there is also a second reason why the psalms should have proved so popular throughout the centuries.

Whereas Mowinckel saw the origin of the psalms very much linked with the worship of the Temple, the nineteenth century German Protestant theologian, Hermann Gunkel, went further in his classification of the psalms, and noted that many of them probably originated as personal laments, before being incorporated into public worship.

ln other words, the psalms often express the innermost feelings of the individual when words otherwise fail. They release the tongue tied in prayer.

The sixteenth century Protestant Reformer, John Calvin, recognised this when he wrote of the psalter: 'The varied and resplendent riches which are contained in this treasury is no easy matter to express in words.....l have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul for there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not represented as in a mirror.'

And my personal friend, Gordon Mursell, now Bishop of Stafford, has observed that 'the psalms do not offer answers but ways of expressing how one feels, and of identifying with those who have trodden the path before, and making contact with the one who has made that way his own.'

So it is the frequent repetition in worship, and their natural expression of our innermost feelings, that make the psalms a natural and automatic resource for our prayer life, when words often fail.

Little wonder then, that Jesus on the cross should have expressed his innermost feeling of abandonment by God, by using the opening words of psalm 22.

The psalm opens with an appeal to God. What hurts the person praying more than the loneliness of his suffering is the fact that he imagines himself forsaken by God.

God seems not to answer him when he cries out for help. Moreover, he asks himself the poignant question 'Why?' should God forsake him, and 'Why?’ does he not answer him.

'My God, my God, look upon me; why hast thou forsaken me: and art so far from my health and from the words of my complaint?

O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not: and ln the night season also I take no rest.

And thou continuest hoty: O thou worship of Israel.

Our fathers hoped in thee: they trusted in thee, and thou didst deliver them.

They called upon thee, and were holpen: they put their trust in thee, and were not confounded.'

These later verses are obviously a clear reference to how God heard the Jewish nation's prayer for help when they were slaves in Egypt. So why is God now playing so hard to get? Why is God so indifferent to his current plight, particularly bearing in mind his goodness towards him in the past?

'But as for me, I am a worm, and no man: a very scorn of men, and the outcast of the people.

All they that see me laugh me to scorn: thy shoot out their lips, and shake their heads, saying,

He trusted in God, that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, if he will have him.

But thou art he that took me out of my mother's womb: thou wast my hope, when I hanged yet upon my mother's breasts.

t have been left unto thee ever since I was born: thou art my God even from my mother's womb.

O go not from me, for trouble is hard at hand: and there is none to help me.'

One cannot but wonder, to what extent the psalmist's lament about the mocking of men, influenced the gospel writers in describing how Jesus was mocked by the soldiers and scoffed at by the crowds, at the time of his crucifixion.

The psalmist now turns his attention away from God towards his mocking enemies whom he describes as bulls, lions and dogs.

'Many oxen are come about me: fat bulls of Basan close me in on every side.

They gape upon me with their mouths: as it were a ramping and roaring lion.’

He then describes the consequences of the suffering they inflict. His fear and his trembling.

‘l am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart also in the midst of my body is even like melting wax.

My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaveth to my gums: and thou shalt bring me into the dust of death.’

He then compares the ruthlessness of his enemies with that of a hunter closing in on a wild beast and dragging it off for the kill. Whilst his physical condition shows that he is near death, his enemies behave as if he was already dead, as they fight over the spoils.

‘For many dogs are come about me: and the council of the wicked layeth siege against me.

They pierced my hands and my feet; I may tell all my bones: they stand staring and looking upon me.

They part my garments among them: and cast lots upon my vesture.'

Once again, one cannot but wonder to what extent the psalmist has influenced the evangelists’ account of the nailing of Jesus upon the cross and the fighting over his seamless robe.

So again the psalmist cries to God for help, repeating his earlier cry:

'But be not thou far from me ,O Lord: thou art my succour, haste thee to help me.

Deliver my soul from the sword: my darling from the power of the dog.

Save me from the lion's mouth: thou hast heard me also from among the horns of the unicorns.'

For the rest of the psalm, the whole mood changes. The psalmist who had earlier felt abandoned by God now turns to thanksgiving, concluding with a great crescendo in the final stanza. Not only the living, near and far, but also the dead, and generations yet unborn, shall hear and swell the chorus of praise to the Lord.

'They shall come, and the heavens shall declare his righteousness: unto a people that shall be born, whom the Lord hath made.'

Thus, the darkness of abandonment, following the death of my late wife, began to dissipate with passage of time and the breaking of a new dawn. Sometime later I met Joyce and the rest, as they say, is history. And the death of Jesus was followed by his resurrection from the dead.

This sense of abandonment by God comes to all of us, sooner or later in the spiritual life. We pray, but no one appears to be listening. We read our Bibles but we are quickly bored. We share in Christian fellowship but it leaves us feeling empty. We are present at the Eucharist but we have no sense of the presence of God in the sacrament.

Thus come those moments of darkness when we cannot see, and in our solitude we feel abandoned by God. We shake our fist in disappointment and anger, and cry out, 'My God, my God why have you forsaken me?'

But, my friends, he does not forsake us. He is there in the darkness, though we may not see him. We may forsake him, but he does not forsake us. It is in such moments that our faith is tested. We are being invited to live by faith rather than by sight, And from such experiences we can emerge stronger than before, just as Jesus emerged from his wilderness experience a stronger person than before.

'Abide with us, O lord, for it is toward evening and the day is.far spent. Abide with us and with thy whole church. Abide with us in the end of the day, in the end of life, in the end of the world. Abide with us in thy grace and bounty, with thy Holy Word and sacrament, with thy comfort and blessing. Abide with us when cometh the night of affliction and fear, the night of doubt and temptation, the night of bitter death. Abide with us and with all thy faithful ones, O Lord, in time and eternity. Amen.