2009 PASSIONIST CHARISM RESOURCES - Passionists

4. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
(Mark 15:34)
THE WORD OF DESOLATION
Jesus, who found his purpose and strength in the presence of God, who was sustained by
the immediacy of his relationship with God and who endured all by the tangible power of
God always at work within him, always a centre of vitality and peace, found himself totally
alone on the cross.
Jesus, whose very being was God, found himself utterly, absolutely, despairingly, cut off
from all that gives life and breath, cut off from all that gives purpose and hope, cut off from
the source of his ebbing, cut off, even from himself plumbing the depths of the human
condition, to walk in the place of the utter absence of God, in the place of sinners, in the
place of those who reject God.
SCRIPTURE
What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or
famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? As it is written: “For your sake we are being
slain all the day; we are looked upon as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things
we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither
death, or life, nor angels, nor principalities, not present things, not future things, nor
powers, nor height, nor depth, nrt any other creature wil be able to separate us from the
love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39)
REFLECTION
Few of us will ever have to endure such utter desolation, but there may have been
moments when we feared to be swallowed by the void, and when our lives appeared to be
without sense or meaning, because God had gone. It such times proofs of the existence of
God are no great help. Words do not help much.
These terrible words of Jesus are a quotation from Psalm 22. Someone several hundreds
of years earlier had been in anguish and he or she wrote these words down. Now Jesus
takes these words and he makes them his own. He embraces the experience of desolation
and shares it. Even the experience of the absense of God is somehow brought within
God’s own life.
Someone may ask us: “Why? Why? Where is God now?” And we may be terrified by
finding that we have nothing to say. All the pious words that come to our lips sound worse
than empty. Then all that we can do is to be there, and trust that God is there too.
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