Mark 15:1-41
“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
Truly…
….we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 4:15)
What is your greatest temptation? Is it covetousness? Lust? Greed? Lying? Anger? Jesus faced all those as well as all the ones I’ve left unmentioned. That means for Jesus, like us, there was an enticement to giving-in. And just like us, there was a junction where He had to choose which path he would take. As the Son of Man, like us sons of men, he knew this juncture well.
When Jesus was bone weary at the end of the day when the flesh, as we all know is particularly weak and is longing for some relief or pleasure, he did not open the wine bottle to mute the disappointment that no one really knew or undertsood Him. He didn’t turn on the TV so that he could escape his awareness that He was not climbing an earthly ladder of success or was not looking forward to a family vacation. He could not surf the internet, attend a conference, go to a movie, read a magazine to distract Himself from the reality that even His disciples were nearly clueless. So, how did this Son of Man, living in human flesh, just as we do, face those moment by moment temptations to give-in to despair and turn down the well rationalized, culturally accepted pathways of least resistance?
Are we really conscious of what we are doing to ourselves with all our varied diversions? (If this is an answer you are personally seeking, by all means read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman).
I think at the root of most temptations there is a core complaint that expresses itself with this question.
“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
Yet, Jesus stood in for us in the extreme. He wasn’t just facing run of the mill temptations as we do when we ask ourselves, “Why was I fired? …Why was I was abused?… Why did my spouse reject me …Why am I misunderstood? …. Why do I screw everything up?”…..Why doesn’t my life work?” No, Jesus’ “why” was being asked by the apparent brunt of the ultimate and cruel cosmic prank.
While believing wholeheartedly that He was God’s son in whom God was well pleased, He was asking “why” after having had spikes driven through His wrists and ankles, after having had a thorny crown rammed into His scalp, after having the skin shredded from His back by a lead tipped whip, after having been slugged and spit upon and beaten with a pole, after having been abandoned at His greatest point of human need by His closest friends, after being stripped naked and exposed to a throng of ungrateful mean-spirited mocking souls, after having done His very best and never once yielding to the temptation to ask “why?” until this moment on the cross.
Here Jesus faces down mankind’s primal fear that we have been abandoned to the malignant, cruel and random powers of this world. He looks our core nightmare of meaningless and abandonment in the eye and says, “Abandonment, you are an illusion. I shall crush you forevermore!” By draining the cup of this root temptation down to the dregs He swallowed what we would have had to otherwise drink. That is why the writer of Hebrews goes on to say….
Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:16)
Perhaps our battles with the world, our flesh and the devil will be more victorious if we understand the fundamental battle ground – this juncture where our idea of justice and God’s collide. It will be no small affair to grasp that our time of need, that moment of help, that place where we really need grace is when we are tempted to despair and depression because our circumstances are seemingly intolerable, impossible, inconvenient or unwelcome, where in our heart of hearts we are asking “Why?” Perhaps if we can see that this is our heart’s truest trench warfare we shall become the over-comers we were created to be.
So, when we hear the enemy’s taunts rising up so familiar in our thoughts, we will grasp, at this very juncture, that Jesus paid the price so that we could be over-comers – those who draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that they may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need, people who instead of faltering with a “Why?” instead say,,,
Thank you Father that You have not only become an example of the life that we must attempt to live but that you have become in reality our very Life – Life that establishes our destinies as over-comers – those who have been equipped with new hearts to overcome unbelief, self pity, resentment, fear and hopelessness. Amen.