Forlornness then and now

The anguish keeps coming. Ukraine, Buffalo, Uvalde. There are no words. Only screams, gasps and tears in a Good Friday world. The crucifixion, then and now, stops the chatter, the distractions, and the illusion that positive thinking will save us.

God-forsaken

The good man who hangs there screams a desperate cry religious people do not expect to hear: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachtani?— “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — the cry of the forlorn psalmist of Psalm 22. The lament is heard in our living rooms on TV, our androids and iPhones. Although the New Testament Gospels do not complete the first verse of Psalm 22, the sense of the words would have pounded the ears of the three Mary’s who stayed at the foot of the cross: “Why are You so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”

On Good Friday we come face-to-face with god-forsakenness. Not just the fear of it, the loneliness of it or the terror of it. The body on the cross bursts every bubble of denial, illusion, suppression, fancy, or flight.

The Hydra and the Savages

It’s a huge leap from John Calvin to Franz Kafka, but they saw the same thing hiding in every bubble. Calvin used the metaphor of the hydra. There is a hydra, said Calvin, lurking in the breast of every human being. Lop off the head of the hydra? Two new heads grow in its place. Lop off two? Two will become four and four will be replaced by eight. “We acknowledge and confess before You our sinful nature — prone to evil and slothful in good,” I remember praying as a child, wondering what it meant. Now I know.

Franz Kafka spoke of our nature in parables like The Savages:

The savages of whom it is recounted that 
they have no other longing than to die, 
or rather, they no longer have even that
longing, but death has a longing for them,
and they abandon themselves to it, or rather
they do not even abandon themselves, 
but fall into the sand on the shore 
and never get up again -- those savages 
I much resemble, and indeed I have fellow 
clansmen round about, but the confusion 
in these territories  is so great, 
the tumult is like waves rising and falling
by day and by night, and the brothers 
let themselves be borne upon it . . .
. . . . .  

And yet the fear! How people do carry their own enemy, 
however powerless he is, within themselves.

Becoming children again

The public enemy hanging from the cross had spoken in ways that had offended:

He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. -- Gospel According to Matthew 18:2-4 NIV.

When Easter eggs break in Uvalde, Ukraine, and Buffalo, the god-forsaken cry from Golgotha (“the Hill of Skulls”) echoes in our hearts. The broken eggs and burst bubbles of 2022 reveal what we prefer not to see: the enemy we carry in ourselves, the hydra that lurks in every breast.

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Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, May 29, 2022.