April 10, 2009
Grace Church
Rev. Robert E. Hensley

Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10:16-25, John 18:1-19:42

      Let us pray.  Where, O God, is the good news? Our Lord has been crucified and all hope seems to be lost. On this darkest of all days – where are you? How could this have happened? With the psalmist, we cry out, “God, God … my God! Why did you dump me miles from nowhere? Doubled up with pain, I call to God all the day long. There is no answer. Nothing. We know you were there for our parents: They cried for your help and you gave it; they trusted and lived a good life.” We seek your presence and comfort in this time of loss. Be our source of strength as we wait the long hours until we see Jesus’ promised return Easter morning. We pray in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ, who was, is, and will come again. Amen. 
 

      We humans have a habit of blaming others for our problems.  Do you suppose that Jesus blamed God in his ‘shout-out’ from the Cross?  When I was preparing my homily for this afternoon, I came across this question:  What do the Academy Awards, a congressional hearing and a lovers’ quarrel all have in common? Other than crying and a lot of gesturing, that is. 
 

      According to the late Charles Tilly, who was a professor of social science at Columbia University, the common link has to do with one of the basic engines that drive human relationships – the yin and yang of credit and blame.  
 

      “We humans spend our lives blaming, taking credit and (often more reluctantly) giving credit to other people,” wrote Tilly in his 2008 book, Credit and Blame. “At all scales, credit and blame pervade social life.” As humans, living within social networks, we insist when things go right or wrong that someone else caused them and that they…the “someone else’s”…should take responsibility for the consequences, good or bad. People expend a lot of energy, then, assigning that responsibility to themselves or others. That’s why the Oscars are such a spectacle of gushing speeches, why members of Congress are grumpy and why lovers’ arguments bring shouts and tears.  We are passionate about wanting to make sure others are getting what we think they deserve, retributive justice, as call it, and, at the same time, we often try to prevent others from doing the same to us (unless they are giving us credit, of course!). 
 

      When he began writing his book, Tilly theorized that credit and blame are simply different sides of the same coin, but he found that blame “activates sharper distinctions between a worthy us and an unworthy them than credit does, [making] that us-them boundary harder to cross than in the cases of taking or receiving credit ….” In other words, blame drives a wedge between people and that separation can often be devastating.

      On Good Friday (or Bad Friday, or Black Friday in reality), blame leads to a cross, yet the one hanging there doesn’t seem to blame anyone for his plight. Or does he? For the answer, we need to dig a little deeper into the connection between the narrative of the Passion and the text of Psalm 22 on which the writers of all of the gospels anchor some of their imagery. 
 

      Mark tells us that there was plenty of blame to go around on that Friday. The cross was the intersection and focal point of the worst kinds of human evil. At the top of the list were the religious authorities who, ironically, accuse an innocent Jesus of “blasphemy” while heaping blame upon him in a sham trial and hasty sentence. The Roman Empire, represented by Pontius Pilate, was guilty, too, of using its violence as a way of both provoking and placating its subjects. Even Jesus’ closest friends make the list – one having betrayed him and the rest having abandoned him. Jesus hung naked in shame, broken, bleeding from violence, alone with no one to comfort him, and dying as a death-row inmate who never committed a crime. If anyone had reason to assign blame to the whole of humanity, it was Jesus. 
 

      But on the cross, there is no bitter shout-out against the world coming from the parched and cracked lips of Jesus. It certainly would have been the pattern of most victims of crucifixion, which was a means of death so shameful that proper citizens of the empire refused to even speak of it. Those revolutionary bandits who were crucified with him no doubt cast their insults not only at Jesus but at their tormentors as well (Mark 15:32). When the gathered crowd shouted mockingly, “Save yourself and come down from the cross” (Mark 15:30), it must have been tempting for Jesus to think about doing just that; to strike fear into their hearts and retaliate against them for their treatment of him.  
 

      Yet, Jesus does not even utter a word of blame toward any person, even those who had beaten and tortured him. The only words of Jesus concerning his tormentors are in the form of a prayer of mercy for them: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).  
 

      So Jesus does not blame others for the mess that he is in; but does he blame God?  It does sound like it, don’t you think? “Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). Is Jesus blaming God here in his last moments? 
 

      I think that we would certainly understand if he did. As Tilly said, it is natural for us to assign credit or blame to someone for our situation. Jesus had been faithful to his mission, had cultivated a deep intimacy with his “Abba”, and now at the critical moment it would seem that even God had abandoned him. The crowd who heard him interpreted his cry as a call to the prophet Elijah who, in the belief of some Jewish traditions of the time, would come and help those in deep distress (Mark 15:35). If God had abandoned him, maybe there was someone else that would come.

      But what the crowd missed, and what many people reading this story today still miss, is that Jesus’ cry to God, while certainly a lament of despair, transcends the usual human categories of credit and blame. Students of Scripture, both then and now, would recognize Jesus’ cry as the first line of Psalm 22, a “plea for deliverance from suffering and hostility” according to the psalm’s superscription. In the tradition of the time, when a person quoted the first line of a passage it was as if he or she was quoting the whole thing; thus Jesus brings the whole witness of the psalm to his cry from the cross.  
 

      Psalm 22 strikes the reader from the beginning with the depth of the psalmist’s relationship with God, using the personal possessive pronoun “My God…” (Psalm 22:1, emphasis added). To the psalmist, God is the loving parent who has nurtured and cared for him from his birth (vv. 9-10). This is an unusually intimate address for God in the Scriptures, but it is that intimacy that heightens the tension. When one is intimately connected with someone else, the absence of the other is felt more deeply; thus the psalmist’s complaint that God has “forsaken” the author of the Psalm takes on a particularly tragic tone. “Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?” is a question of desperation and despair coming from one who has known the security and provision of God throughout their life (v. 1). God had always been there for the psalmist’s “ancestors,” delivering them when they cried out to God (v. 2). They were not “put to shame” then, but now it seemed that God had abandoned the beloved child to the shaming scorn and mockery of others (vv. 6-7).  
 

      It is little wonder that Jesus called these words to mind in his last moments. Looking at the sneering crowd, remembering the betrayal of his friends, feeling the agonizing sting of the lash and the desperate squeezing of the life from his body, Jesus would have seen no evidence whatsoever that the God who was present with him in his ministry, the God whose power had flowed within him, the loving parent with whom he had spent so many hours alone in prayer, was still with him. All the human evil of the world now circled him, ready to pounce (vv. 12-13, 16). Despite his pleas, bound up with those of the psalmist he quotes with his last breaths, God seems to be so very far away (v. 19).  
 

      It is important to note, however, that neither Jesus nor the psalmist seems to be assigning blame to God as the cause of his plight. Humans, being naturals at assigning credit and blame, are wont to construct a framework on which to hang their victimhood, and God often becomes the chief cause of pain in the minds of many people, whether through overt action or inexcusable absence. It would be difficult to find any priest or pastor who hasn’t had a suffering person in his or her office at some point asking, “Why did God do this to me?” or “Why did God let this happen to me?” The question that the psalmist asks and that Jesus cries out is, instead, “Where is God in the midst of my suffering?” More specifically, we might ask, “What do we do when there seems to be no evidence that God is with us?” 
 

      It is precisely here where the inseparability of the psalm and the passion of Jesus can teach us something powerful. Jesus has the psalm in mind on the cross and we read the psalm with Jesus on the cross in our minds. The Jesus who hangs on the cross not only cries out to God, but is God – the one who saves and the one who suffers. In Jesus, God has spoken to human suffering not through arguments of theodicy or divine platitudes about perseverance. Instead, the Incarnate God speaks to human suffering by participating fully within it, taking it on, living it, bearing all the blame and shame and pain of humanity in a moment of ultimate anguish. The paradox is that in those times of suffering when God seems inexplicably absent, it is then that God is most intimately near because God has already been there where we are. It is only the Incarnate God, in the person of Christ, can with any truth at all say to us, “I know how you feel.”  
 

      The basic thrust of the psalm, as well as of the passion narrative, is the connection of suffering and celebration. Psalm 22 is a prayer of lament, but it is also a hymn of praise. From verse 22 on, the writer looks at his suffering from the other side, from the place of restoration and healing, and sees that God never abandoned him in his suffering.  “God did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; God did not hide God’s face from me, but heard when I cried to God” (v. 24). Complaint has thus been transformed into confidence.  
 

      When we stop reading the psalm after verse 1, as many people in the crowd that Good Friday did and many do today, we miss the rest of the story. When we read the entire psalm, we realize that Jesus’ cry is not one of blame but of hope and confidence that the God who stands by our suffering will be the God who reigns. Psalm 22:26-31 paints a picture of the peace and wholeness of the coming Realm of God that Jesus would preach and demonstrate. Even on the cross, Jesus did not give up that vision, but had confidence that God would set the world to rights and that his suffering would somehow be redemptive. The resurrection made that a reality. 
 

      Jesus did not play the blame game, but chose instead to praise God in the midst of suffering, knowing that through his suffering the world would be healed. His invitation to his disciples to pick up their own crosses was an invitation to see our own suffering in the same way. We are called to see our lives, both the tragedies and the triumphs, within the larger context of God’s kingdom.  
 
And when we look at the cross, we know precisely where God is in the midst of our suffering. God has not forsaken us – but is there beside us. That is why on this Good Friday, we are to give God all the credit!  Amen. 
 
Sources: 
 
Mays, James L. Psalms. Interpretation Commentary Series. Louisville: John Knox Press, 1994, 109-115. 
 
Tilly, Charles. Credit and Blame. Princeton University Press, 2008.