God's God-Forsakenness

Good Friday of the Passion of the Lord

    Most people, when they first learned it, were astonished to hear that a saintly woman like St. Teresa of Calcutta, Mother Teresa, suffered great spiritual desolation as she worked to build her Missionaries of Charity. She once said to her spiritual director, “The place of God in my soul is blank.  There is no God in me.”  For someone who loved others so much, in such dramatic ways, I think most struggle to understand how a person could love so generously without a daily experience of God who is love.  And yet, she did.
    As we hear the Passion Narrative–we get John’s version today and we heard Matthew’s version on Palm Sunday–we hear about how Christ took upon Himself the weight of sin.  Not just the sin of His contemporaries, or even the sin that had taken place from Adam and Eve to Him, but the sin of all time.  And since sin is the separation from God, in some mysterious way, the Father allowed the Son, in His human nature, to experience the full weight of sin, which is why, as we heard Sunday, Christ cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Christ goes to the limit of what Bishop Barron calls “God-forsakenness” for our salvation.

    When we think about the pain of Good Friday, we often think of the physical pain that the Lord endured.  We might think about the pain from the nails piercing His Sacred Flesh, or the crown of thorns, puncturing the skin around his head, his hair matting with dried blood.  Or the blood on His back from the scourgings, dried and attached to his tunic, which was then taken from His Body, re-opening those wounds.  We might consider how He struggled to breathe as His Body hung upon the cross, His lungs filling with fluid as He slowly asphyxiated.  Christ redeemed all human pain united to Him by taking it upon Himself.
    But Christ also redeemed all spiritual pain through his own spiritual suffering.  Again, it seems odd to think of co-eternal Son of God going through desolation.  How could God not experience God’s presence?  And yet, in some mysterious way, Christ was allowed to taste the full effect of sin, which separates the person from God and His sanctifying grace and love. 
    Perhaps we have not had such a strong and drawn-out experience like St. Teresa of Calcutta.  Maybe we have never had a moment where we felt like God abandoned us or left us.  But I’m willing to bet many of us have had at least a few moments where we wondered where He was when we needed Him the most.  I bet many of us have had times when we go to pray and we have no desire to be there, and we feel like no one is listening.  God through Christ redeemed even those experiences where we feel the farthest from God, so that, even though maybe we don’t feel anything, we can know that He is there, because He went there already through His own Passion and Death.  
    The temptation in times where we feel like God does not care or is not present is to give up.  We don’t feel like praying so we skip our prayers.  We pray, but we don’t get the response we want or get the response when we want it, so we stop praying.  We pray, but it doesn’t even have the feeling of satisfaction of rest, and there is a tangible lack of the presence of God, so we run away from that experience and change our prayer habits to pray less so we don’t have to feel that lack of presence.  This would be equivalent to Christ coming down from the cross, as the Pharisees jeered at Him to do, because of the pain of His Passion.  
    Instead, God invites us to know that He is present, even when He feels absent, because He has gone to the utter limit of God-forsakenness on the cross to prove His love for us, and to prove that we cannot go anywhere that He has not already been.  And not only that, but He’ll stay on that cross with us, even if we don’t feel Him there, to redeem the experience of desolation for us.
    As you come forward to venerate the cross today, bring any of those times when you haven’t felt good in prayer, or you haven’t received the response you wanted, or maybe you have even felt like God wasn’t there or didn’t care.  Because when we bring those experiences, and any other suffering, to the cross of Christ, we know that, in due time, God will raise us up and give us new life from what we suffered.  Come, let us adore.