[AI translation] In our evening services, we followed Jesus along the path of suffering, and so, step by step, we arrived with him at Calvary. If only we could live in the reality of the depth of His immeasurable sufferings, and if only we could accept the fruit of those sufferings with great gratitude! Both the greatest depth of suffering and the deepest reason for our gratitude are expressed in this cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" How much anguish there is in that little word, and how much grace in the answer! Let the Holy Spirit of God show us now in the gospel of salvation!We used to say that for us Reformed Christians, Good Friday is our greatest feast. We are right in the sense that the truth of the gospel is concentrated in the cross. All of Christendom - all over the world - gathers around the cross of Christ on this day. And it could not do better. But do we really see that cross in the way it really is? We are used to imagining the passion and death of Jesus in a certain artistic representation: we see our Saviour on the cross through the eyes of Dürer, Rembrandt, Rubens or Munkácsy. Then we see the figure of Jesus surrounded by the superimposed glory of nineteenth-century veneration. With the halo around his crown of thorns, which his immeasurable suffering has just earned for him.
Well, that real crucifixion was different. And it is important to try to see it in its raw reality. What happened on that Friday in the year 33 or 35, from about 7 o'clock in the morning until about 6 o'clock at night in Jerusalem: not such a reverently beautiful picture, but a very terrible, very serious reality. He who was hanging there in terrible agony on the cross, in the eyes of the people around Him, was not the glorious Christ, but a perilous evil-doer. Amidst an angry crowd He is dragged to the place of destruction. They point to Him as a rebel, a godless, a fanatic, a subversive, who is going his well-deserved way. He is not accompanied on his journey of pain by the adoring army of Christianity, for there is none of that yet. Even some of his relatives steal glances at him. Those who believed in him are now hiding in some remote hideout. In great desolation, he walks his way alone. And not just outwardly, but inwardly, spiritually. He carries the crushing weight of his own truth all alone. Then stretched out and nailed to a gallows. For the cross - this symbol that has become a saint - was the gallows on which the most dangerous rebels, slaves and murderers were executed. What a terrible image: the Kingdom of God, the Truth of God, was then represented on the gallows on this earth, the only place for it among men. And that gallows was set up along the highway. Everyone passing by felt almost called upon to throw at least one stone or some mocking, perhaps cursing word at it. And many did, in what they thought was justifiable indignation.
Who can look into the sea of anguish that rages in the soul of Jesus? Now come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God." (Mt 27:41) Tell them that it is precisely because he is the Son of God that he will not come down from the cross. Tell them: Men, I do not want to save myself, but you: therefore must I die like this? No! Why should he say? They would not understand now anyway! Now you have to fight this battle alone, abandoned, without compassion, amidst mockery. Alone with God. "And from six o'clock there was darkness over all the earth until nine o'clock." A terrifying, cosmic mourning fell on Golgotha in broad daylight. A stunned silence fell around the cross. And in that silent, black darkness, there hung Jesus on the tree. He could no longer see the sky. As if the dark forces of the underworld were pulling him down! As if God no longer wanted to know about him! His friends had left him. Now even God is turning away from him! Has God abandoned him too? For three hours, there was a terrifying absence of light. Jesus could stand it no longer. He cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And the evangelist notes that Jesus cried out with a loud voice. It was not a dying sigh, but a scream of terror, like someone drowning in the waves. The sharp, shuddering wail filled Golgotha. Who can imitate the terrible pain that Jesus expressed with this cry? For this is the horror of horrors, hell itself, the curse of damnation: to be abandoned by God!!! Jesus spoke these words in the language of his time. The evangelist translated it for us. But what use is translation here? We don't understand anyway. No man can understand the true meaning of these terrible words, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Why do we not understand? Because we cannot understand the other great mystery: the communion of Jesus with the Father. What He Himself said, "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30): "He who has seen me has seen the Father." (Jn 14,9) And because we do not understand this, we cannot understand what happened in that darkness when this union with the Father - was broken! This was the most terrible agony for him. To be separated from the Source of Life. Not the nails in his flesh, not the insult of the mocking enemy, not the physical agony of being crucified, but the fact that he had lost the presence of the Father for a time. He was completely submerged in the waves of God's judgment. Indeed: he has descended into hell! "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" My God, O my God, why, why, why? Because man has forsaken God. It is because man has broken away from the Fountain of Life that he had to break away from the Fountain of Life. He had to descend to such a terrible abyss to find us, to be one with us. It was from this abyss: from this state of separation from God that we had to be lifted up. That is how truly, completely God reached out to us, came after us, into our godless life, our death, our damnation!
And not only to share this fate with us, or to contemplate our misery, as a king contemplates a slum, or a judge contemplates a prison cell, but as one who takes it all over completely and finally from us and for us to himself. So that is not the question for us: My God, why have you forsaken him, but: for whom? And it is only by falling on our knees that we can truly acknowledge this: for your sake, for mine, for my sake, for mine! Because the Lord has cast all our sins on Him, and He stands accused on our behalf before the judgment seat of God, the penalty of our sins being passed on Him in that agonizing death. Therefore, Jesus not only feels as if the Father had abandoned Him, but He expresses the agonizing fact itself, the fact of total separation, the agony that awaits the unatoned sinner after death, exposed to all the torment of the power of darkness, which we deserve for our sins alone. That is what He has taken from us, that is what He has redeemed us from! Here was not a general crucifixion, death and burial, as there have been so many on this earth, but here Jesus went through hell in this crucifixion, in this death. Here was a redemptive death. For someone else, in place of someone else, He took the judgment, the punishment, He took the place of someone else, He replaced someone else. Someone was saved from the hell, the damnation that awaited him, redeemed here by this death. You know who? Who is the one for whom God made such a terrible sacrifice? - You! Therefore that death was damnation itself.
So he left us for a relatively short time so that we might live forever in the grace, presence, fellowship of God. So that never, ever, should a believing soul have to say what He said, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" There come times in everyone's life that are similar to that darkness of Calvary between six and nine o'clock, when we feel as if all the light has gone out, as if the darkness of despair has spread its darkness over us, as if the reality of God has departed from us. Hours in which our hearts understand, more than ever, this anguished cry of Jesus, "Why have you forsaken me?" At such times, take just one look in your soul at the One whom God has truly abandoned - for you, precisely so that you may never, ever be abandoned again. Say at this very moment with the Apostle Paul: "I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom 8:38-39).
At the moment of Jesus' death, something happened which has a great symbolic significance: the tapestry of the temple - the thick carpet which separated the sanctuary of the temple, the holy of holies, the dwelling place of God, from the rest of the temple - was torn in two from top to bottom. The symbol of separation, of separation from God, was torn asunder. The partition that separated the Holy God from the mortal sinner and his world was broken down. The way was cleared. No one is now excluded from the presence and nearness of God. The door of the heavenly realm has slammed shut on earth. Into this life of our separation from God, the air, the life, the power of eternity is now flowing! No longer is there heaven without earth, and no earth without heaven. No more up and no more down. This world and the hereafter are one world. The temporal is permeated by the eternal, and the visible is carried by the invisible. There is no depth of life on earth, no agony, which is not penetrated more deeply by the grace and love of God on the cross. There is no longer any darkness that is not pierced by a ray of eternal light. Indeed: God is here among us! This is God's answer to that painful MIRROR cried out in agony of death: "Why have you forsaken me?" It is so that through that dreadful gap in death the earth may be filled with God, with divine energy, with new life, with eternity.
In His person was concentrated all our sin, so that in His person also might be concentrated all the wrath of God, all the judgment of sin. Therefore, here is also the source of God's redemptive power. This is redemption! This is grace! What is redemption? The energy of God: a new, purified life can be lived through it. What is grace? God's energy: it can be breathed in through prayer, like fresh air. And what is the Christian life? The same: the energy of God in man. To believe in Christ is to live by the redeeming power of the living God. And this is possible, free, since the tapestry of the church is torn in two from top to bottom.
So let us not just celebrate Good Friday, let us not make it a celebration of a moving service, from which we go home with the good feeling that we have been good Christians again today, but let us open ourselves to the opened heavens, let the power of the word of the cross pass through us, let it enliven us at home and in the world, in all our ways, for His glory!
Amen
Date: 3 April 1953 Good Friday.
Lesson
Mt 27,31-56