A Facebook Live Video Reflection, a couple of quotes, a poem and a song for a Good Friday meditation.

Reflections by Bill:

Link to Facebook Live Video Reflection.

Quote by Beuchner:

MY GOD, MY GOD, why hast thou forsaken me?” As Christ speaks those words, he too is in the wilderness. He speaks them when all is lost. He speaks them when there is nothing even he can hear except for the croak of his own voice and when as far as even he can see there is no God to hear him. And in a way his words are a love song, the greatest love song of them all. In a way his words are the words we all of us must speak before we know what it means to love God as we are commanded to love him.

“My God, my God.” Though God is not there for him to see or hear, he calls on him still because he can do no other. Not even the cross, not even death, not even life, can destroy his love for God. Not even God can destroy his love for God because the love he loves God with is God’s love empowering him to love in return with all his heart even when his heart is all but broken.

Quote by John Stott:

“I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross.’ In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross that symbolizes divine suffering. ‘The cross of Christ … is God’s only self-justification in such a world” as ours….’ ‘The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone.”

Poem by Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani?

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from helping me,
from the words of my groaning?
Psalm 22.1

Jesus, fully human,
feels the anguish of God’s distance,
the bare landscape of abandonment.
Jesus, fully divine, feels that anguish, too,
the ripping ache of aloneness.
This is not the cry of someone deserted by God
but of one who knows God listens
when we feel that way.
This is the cry of God, brokenhearted for us.
God does not peer into our loneliness from above,
but lives there, suffers there.
The void is the silence of the soul of God,
the desert of our exile,
whose sandstone canyons echo with God’s own sobs.
This is the prayer of a lifeguard whose lungs cry for air
who has dived deep to rescue us from drowning.
This is the cry of a mother running into the flames
for her children.
This is the sigh of the Beloved
whose ear is pressed to the door of our hearts
from the inside.
This is the only voice of hope.

My God, my God,
you have descended so deep into my suffering
that even I no longer see you.

A Song I Love:

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