Grace and Peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
We have cable TV at my house and lately I have gotten into watching the World Cage Fighting Competitions. It is a rather odd thing for a Pastor to be fascinated by but I am drawn to the intensity of it. Two men, or women as it is now, face each other with only meager gloves to protect their knuckles. They can wrestle, box, and use Brazilian jujitsu, karate or Kung fu to subdue their opponent. They are totally focused when they fight and when interviewed afterward say they seldom feel the pain. Their bodies, spirits, mind and wills fuse into a single intention.
We call tonight the Passion of Our Lord. The events of the week are so connected it is hard to think of them as isolated. Jesus goes to the garden to pray for strength – even for the inevitable not to happen. His disciples fall asleep. He is alone. Awfully, terribly alone. They scatter when the guards come and he is alone again. Soldiers spit on him, mock him, curse at him, beat him, tear his flesh, pierce the skin on his forehead with thorns and then lead him through the streets for further humiliation. He dies on the cross - naked. Exposed to the sun for at least 6 hours during the hottest part of the day. Alone. Abandoned. Friendless.
Last week, the 35 year treasurer of the ELCA’s synod in Harrisburg was arrested for embezzling over a million dollars. I know Barry Herr and I still can not believe it. I have prayed this week that God give him His spirit. No one should feel so alone and so friendless.
In order to understand the blessing of this night, you have to find in your life, your heart, your history that memory of feeling utterly alone and abandoned.
Perhaps you have been through a divorce or the dissolution of a relationship with someone you loved and had given your heart to. You remember feeling crushed, alone, rejected, hopeless.
Maybe you were pregnant and started to spot blood and you wanted the little life within you and you’d prayed for years for a baby. The feeling is horrible – devastation, ruin, pain, and being alone with it.
Possibly you have heard you have cancer and the night for the operation you find yourself sleepless and cry out to God, and God does not seem close. In fact, you wonder if God can hear you at all.
You let the other team sneak in a goal at the soccer field because you weren’t paying attention. The team loses because of you lapse, and you feel their wrath and anger. You have to bear it all alone.
It’s here that God meets us in Christ. It’s here that we find our compilation. Our old French pastor wrote a beautiful meditation that I have in one of my prayer books about the gift of Christ’s abandonment. It reeds:
“We must remind ourselves again of Jesus Christ, whom his father abandoned on the cross. God withdraws all feeling and all reflection to hide Himself from Jesus. This was the consummation of the sacrifice. We never so need to abandon ourselves to God as when He seems to abandon us.”
Jesus did this for us.
Jesus knew abandonment so that we would have a spokesperson when we feel utterly alone.
That is why we call this night Good. Jesus died alone so that he could hear and understand us. He receives our sin and fear. They are buried with him. From his love, we are free.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Who We Are