You're Never Alone
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night but find no rest.”
Growing up in church, I struggled with the thought that God had to abandon Jesus on the cross. I was taught that as Jesus became sin — as a substitutionary sacrifice for us — God had to forsake Him for the punishment to be full, to be complete. I struggled with that thought just as I did with other teachings that presented God as a punisher, one who demands retributive justice, one who can be cruel.
There was always a great divide between what I sensed about God as a haven – kind, gentle, and loving – and the God I was taught. I was taught that God can’t be in the presence of sin but must punish those who reject Him and turn away from them. I was taught that God was unable to overcome an enemy that He had actually created. God was also powerless to accept one who did not say the right words or think the right things about Jesus. None of these ideas made much sense to me.
Later, I learned that Jesus’s cry from the cross meant the opposite of what I was taught it meant. In Jesus's time, quoting the first line of a Psalm was shorthand to reference the entire Psalm — a practice referred to as “metalepsis.” His hearers would have understood the message in its full context.
As soon as I learned this, I ran to Psalm 22, to read it through to its completion and to see that Jesus knew God was with Him in the darkness. Jesus was never alone.
“For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; He did not hide his face from me but heard when I cried to him.”
Jesus was crying out to tell us that even in death, God was with Him. He was giving his last breaths to testify to God’s love and God’s presence.
Again and again, I’ve learned that so much of the Godview of the Christianity that I was raised in is unnecessary. At best, it was often based on a plainly incorrect interpretation of scripture, and a deeper look unraveled the confusion. At worst, it was intentional misrepresentation meant to instill fear and thus the framework for control.
I’ve learned that if it doesn’t sound like love, it’s not love. And, if it’s not love, it’s not God. I don’t have to accept something as true when I know in my bones that it isn’t. And how do I know God loves? Because I’ve experienced God’s love for me — concretely, specifically, repeatedly, undeservedly, unasked for in many cases, in spite of my rejection of and resistance to it. And I’m not special. God loves us all this way.
I no longer view the cross as punishment, but as embrace. God, as Jesus, entered into our darkness as us, fully human. God did this because he so loved the world — a world in which suffering exists because freedom exists so that love can exist. Love is always a free choice or it is not love.
God experienced – and continues to experience – suffering as us, through us, in us, with us. God chooses this freely, willingly, to show us that the way through suffering into new life is to choose to forgive the suffering itself — because without the possibility of suffering there could be no possibility of love. And love is worth our very lives. Love is life. This is the way of the cross. This is the way of Jesus.
As James Finley says, “God sustains us in all things while protecting us from nothing.” I’ve come to believe that it’s only through seeing God present in our suffering that we can truly be free from the fear that causes us to choose ways of responding to suffering that are not loving. And even in our fear, when we choose not to love, God is there. God has not, could not, and will not ever forsake us.
God is not safe, but God is good. It’s the same thing to say that reality is not safe, but reality is good. Or to say life is not safe, but life is good.
Our task is to never look away from our own suffering. We must not forsake ourselves by refusing to feel, refusing to grieve, and thus refusing the treasures in the darkness. It’s only human to want to avoid pain, just as Jesus did when he “sweated blood” in the garden, knowing where his choices would lead. Yet, Jesus chose not to flee from suffering. So must we.
If we don’t learn how to embrace our suffering, we’ll only cause more of it as our unredeemed pain and fear are projected onto others. We’ll only scapegoat. We’ll only crucify the innocent.
Choose solidarity with your own suffering. Choose solidarity with others in their suffering. Choose solidarity with God in God’s suffering.
Choose not to forsake, not to blame, not to punish — but to grieve. Solidarity with suffering is the only way to find the light in the darkness and, through the darkness, to emerge into resurrection light. And as you do, know that you are never alone.
“But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me; my Lord has forgotten me.” Can a woman forget her nursing child or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these might forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.”