Bonus Good Friday Homily: Are We Forsaken?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:07)

Greetings, everyone.

This morning, there was a prayer service with the Center for Action and Contemplation, with Richard Rohr, the staff and some extended members of CAC. And I was asked to share a brief homily as part of that prayer service. And Kirsten called me afterwards and thought it would be good to send it out on the Turning to Mystics podcast today, Good Friday. So, I'll do that. That's a great idea. It just takes around 10 minutes. And at the end of the service, what I'll do, of the homily, I'll invite us to sit straight, we'll ring the bell once, and we'll bow, and just sit together in silence just for a couple minutes. And then I'll ring the bell again, and we'll bow, and that'll be the end. So this is a brief kind of contemplative homily. And the text is the Gospel of Matthew. It's one of the Jesus' words from the Cross. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? So in the prayer service today, there was a liturgy of lamentation in which it was changed to, our God, our God, why have you forsaken us? Why are we, why do you leave us forsaken? And so I'd like to explore that, yes. So I'll begin by saying that Jesus, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That he's quoting Psalm 23 And when you read Psalm 23, when you read the Psalm, the Psalm is really a prayer of hope and faith in God that eventually, ultimately speaking, I know that your love will be victorious over all forms of suffering and death. But for right now, I'm still in the midst of my pain and I'm unraveling here. So the prayer is a very human cry, you know, of being forsake, feeling forsaken in the presence of God. So I'd like to, in this homily, trace out the path of human experience along which we come to moments that we're forsaken, so that we can see how Jesus is one with us in our forsaken moments and sustains us in our forsaken moments. So with that, my note will begin.

I begin, the path begins in infancy, this path that leads to the forsaken moment. And it begins when, if we're born fortunate enough into a loving family, a loving father and mother. We emerge in this world in reflective consciousness and our parents gaze and we emerge in the awareness that they see in us a preciousness or a value that cannot be calculated. That they see that they're smitten by us, by our precious presence and of their gratitude that we're in their midst. And as that love goes on and we keep internalizing that love, that then becomes our basic sense of self-esteem. It becomes our basic sense that I matter, my life counts, my life is worth saving. I'm loved because I'm lovable. That kind of quiet confidence in the essential goodness of ourself as a human being. And when we're then led by our parents into faith, it's very easy then to believe that God loves us because we experience God's love for us incarnate and our parents' love for us. And so there's a kind of a natural affinity or a natural trust in God as a loving presence incarnate in the loving presence of our parents, which becomes incarnate in our loving presence to ourself.

Then life is such that as we go on, we're in situations where we're with people who are not loving towards us. They were invisible in their eyes and not seeing that we matter, not seeing that we're precious and not seeing that we're worthy to be loved. They are hurtful towards us or perhaps sometimes even cruel towards us.

What makes it worse is that they treat us in these cruel, hurtful, destructive ways and they show no remorse. That is, they're not aware of us as a person, but they're not aware that they're not aware of us.

They seem to have no problem being cruel and hurtful to us. It extends even more when we start to see that they're also cruel to people who look like us, which is basis of racial prejudice, or they're cruel also to those who believe what we believe or they're cruel to us, to all of us, in terms of all those who show the sexual orientation that we have. Any areas where we are not part of the dominant power culture and are seen by the dominant power culture to be at the fringe, we're estranged and exiled and individually and collectively treated in these cruel and hurtful patterns and ways. And it's in this sense then that it takes a toll on us. And it's in this sense that we feel forsaken. See, that we feel forsaken. And we cry out to God, see, why are you letting this happen? Why is this letting this happen? Why do you delay in coming to my rescue? See, why even broader, why do you let the world go on like this with so much darkness in it? And I know ultimately speaking of your love will be victorious, the lion will lie down with the lamb, and I believe that. But I'm wearing down here, I'm wearing out, I've come to the end of my rope, and there I cry out to God in this forsaken state, in this circumstance, this unloving, hurtful circumstance that I'm in. It gets even worse when it soaks into us, and we forsake ourself. It so gets to us that we're in a traumatizing stance towards ourself. We start believing in ourself, and deep feelings of shame about ourself, or deep feelings of like doubting our worth or our value. It worsens.