Last night, our parish observed Maundy Thursday, the first of three Holy Week observances relating to the events surrounding Christ’s passion. Maundy Thursday marks the occasion of the last Passover Christ observed with his disciples, as well as the first Eucharist. And, while a Maundy Thursday service has obvious utility in helping us to remember something important, it is, strictly speaking, not so much a memorial as it is a participation in a feast which began 2,000 years ago and which continues down to this very day.
This evening in our parish, along with many others across the land, we will observe an ancient Christian devotion known as the Stations of the Cross. This service, more than Maundy Thursday, has as its purpose to remember something– to remember something in an especially vivid way, in a liturgical way that allows God’s people to unite with one another in an extended act of remembering the cost of their salvation. In preparing for the Stations of the Cross this evening, I noted that this act of communal remembering has become increasing popular among Protestants. I am encouraged by this, for such a powerful and beneficial act of remembering is not the property of any one segment of Christendom. Indeed, it never has been; for since the Reformation, Anglicans and Lutherans, and even some Presbyterians, have never relinquished the conviction that Christianity is pre-eminently a religious faith deeply rooted in the events of history. Our faith is not a mere moral code. It arises from God’s mighty acts of judgment in the same stream of history we inhabit this afternoon here in Waxahachie Texas. We can go around the world – as, perhaps, some of you here have already done, and see the places where Jesus walked. We can walk the Via Dolorosa, just as Christian pilgrims have walked it for centuries. And, we can do so for the very blunt reason that it all really happened, and it all really happened THERE.
If, perchance, you have never participated in the Stations of the Cross, I encourage you to try it this evening in any of the local churches which observe it. That remembrance does not belong to any of them. It belongs to Christians everywhere. And, Mother Church says that remembering the great events of our Faith is like eating your vegetables: It’s Good For You.
Having said that, I want to raise for our consideration a question about remembering that arises when one reflects on a particular detail which surfaces in the gospel record of Christ’s Crucifixion. Both Matthew and Mark note that in the last minutes before Jesus died, he cried out in a loud voice Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani! And, both evangelists note that those who heard this thought that Jesus was calling out for help to the Prophet Elijah.
Ethnic Romans wouldn’t have misunderstood Jesus in that particular way. For one thing, they wouldn’t have had much fluency in Aramaic. Moreover Elijah would be nothing to them, so they would never make the connection the onlookers made between what Jesus said and Elijah. No, the ones who misunderstood Jesus understood Aramaic, and their association with the similar sounding words “Eloi” “Elijah” has the marks of long familiarity.
But, on the other hand, why would the Jewish onlookers mistake what Jesus was saying, even though he said it in a loud voice? Without dwelling on the gory details of death by crucifixion, I think it is not difficult to imagine that what escaped Jesus’ lips on that occasion was fairly well garbled by the physical and psychological effects of the torments he had endured for the previous six hours. As the footnotes or marginal references in your Bibles will remind you, what Jesus was speaking as he spent his last minutes alive on the Cross were the opening words to the 22nd Psalm: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
Clearly, Jesus at that moment was remembering as well, he was remembering the opening words of the 22nd Psalm. But, when we look at that Psalm a marvelous possibility arises. What if it were more than the opening words of the Psalm that Jesus remembered? What if, in his final agony, he were instead reciting to himself the entirety of that Psalm? The Magnificat, which the Virgin Mary composed in her teens, contains dozens of quotations and allusions to the Psalter. It would not be an unusual feat for good Jewish sons to have memorized dozens of Psalms. The memorization of long portions of Scripture, particularly the Psalms of David, was fairly common among pious Jews of the day.
I am passing out to you now the text of Psalm 22, and I would like to point out to you some amazing features of it in light of Jesus explicit reference to it in his last moments on the cross. When you consider all of this psalm, not just its opening lines, and when you read it with the knowledge that it was this psalm that occupied Jesus’ thoughts just prior to his death, I think you will realize that remembering can work backwards, as it were. In devotions like the Stations of the Cross, we remember something in the past. But, when Jesus hung on the cross, what occupied his mind was something from the past to which he clung to sustain him at the climax of a horrific season of torture and death in the present.
I won’t take time now to pour over ever phrase of this Psalm now. I leave that for you to do in the quietness of your own thoughts later today. In passing, I simply note the astounding correspondences between the David’s lament and Christ’s crucifixion, even though David and Christ as separated by a span of ten centuries.
We note, for example, verse seven of the Psalm:
7All those who see Me ridicule Me;
They shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying,
8"He trusted in the LORD, let Him rescue Him;
Let Him deliver Him, since He delights in Him!"
These are words which the gospel writers report the mockers around the Cross to have used to taunt Jesus as he was dying.
Or note the complaint of verses 14 and 15, in which many students of history recognized as reporting the subjective experience of those who die by crucifixion. Or what about the details mentioned in verses 16 through 18?
They pierced my hands and my feet …
I can count all my bones … giving us a view of Christ’s body from his own point of view as his head hung in exhaustion.
They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.
Any one of these correspondences might be dismissed as happenstance. But all of them together? Well, happenstance won’t do for an explanation. Something far more important is at work here. And, whatever is at work here – whatever it is that puts into a lament composed by David dozens of details which are faithfully reproduced in the Crucifixion of Jesus a millennium later – whatever it is, that thing is what Christ was clinging to as his body hung from the Cross near his moment of death. David was remembering something that had not yet happened, and Christ was remembering something which a thousand years before had painted the ghastly situation in which he found himself.
How, pray tell, would this be a help? Why would Jesus’ mind return to that Psalm he had memorized as a boy? Where is the comfort in THAT?
This is not a difficult question to answer. Have you ever had the experience of choosing to do something you knew was right to do, and you chose to do it, because of its rightness. And, then you get into the middle of the difficulties and you begin to wonder – how did I get here? What am I doing here? What was I thinking???
When I was much younger, my favorite book of the Bible was Ecclesiastes. I was a pretty morose fellow in my youth, given to depression and a pretty pessimistic outlook on the universe. Ecclesiastes was a great comfort to me. And, do you know why? It was a comfort to me because it assured me that I was not the crazy one – Ecclesiastes showed me – and it still shows me – that the world and all it contains really is a vapor, and given over to sorrow and futility. It’s NOT me, for crying out loud. The world REALLY IS like that!
Surely this is part of why Christ found the 22nd Psalm a comfort when he was about to die on the Cross. For all its agony and torment, Christ’s experience that Good Friday was, after all, not something unexpected, the Cross and Christ’s agony on it was NOT something unconsidered, it was NOT something wildly and disastrously miscalculated. Jesus himself had explained countless times to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, that he would be betrayed, condemned to die, and crucified. After his resurrection, he went back to the Old Testament Scriptures with the disciples on the Emmaus Road, patiently explaining to them that it was NECESSARY for Christ to suffer all these things so that the Scriptures would be fulfilled. And, most definitely, among those Scriptures was the Psalm you now hold in your hands.
It is a telling detail about our Lord’s humanity, that in the worst of his agony, his mind flew back to this Psalm, partly to reassure himself that he was still in the will of His father.
But, there is another reason why this Psalm sustained Jesus on the Cross. You will note that I have printed the text of this Psalm in two different font faces. I have done this to make the change in the tone of the Psalm visually obvious, for the tone does indeed change radically. Even in the middle of a verse!
The first half of verse 21 is the last howling cry for help:
21Save Me from the lion’s mouth
And from the horns of the wild oxen!
And the next words are these: “You have answered Me.”
From that point on there is no more lament. From a howling cry for help, the Psalm leaps to an exulting paean of praise. Lament turns into a loud, long, and sustained boasting in the salvation of God. This, my friends, is David’s remembering of the resurrection 1,000 years before it happened. Among the Old Testament Scriptures to prophesy the resurrection of Jesus from the Dead, this surely is one of the most amazing. And, surely this too was on Jesus’ mind as he was about to die.
In closing, I point you to the last two verses of this Psalm:
30A posterity shall serve Him.
It will be recounted of the Lord to the next generation,
31They will come and declare His righteousness to a people who will be born,
That He has done this.
A thousand years before Jesus died and rose again, David foresaw something like a Good Friday luncheon at Central Presbyterian Church in Waxahachie, Texas, when an Anglican priest would join with his Presbyterian siblings to remember what Jesus was remembering as he died that first Good Friday. From David’s perspective, from Jesus’ perspective, WE are that people who would be born, WE are those of a generation far into the future when it would be recounted of the Lord, that He had done this.
As you reflect on the amazing grace and power of God our Father, to preserve by His Spirit in the Scriptures this testimony of the passion and victory of His Son, take courage as Jesus did in his worst suffering, that ”27All the ends of the world shall remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations shall worship before Him.” May this Good Friday be for you what that first Good Friday was meant to be for all those Jesus came to save.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
