A funny thing happened when I thought I might die. I knew it would be fine, that it would all work out. It was a knowing beyond knowing. There was a peace in it like none I have never known.
Perhaps part of it was my faith, knowing that it worked out OK for Jesus. That sounds perhaps childish, but it is my truth. This character Jesus has been with me all through my life, a relationship that I can comfortably call a lifetime friendship.
The thing that troubled me most during his passion was that cry before he died – “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” But if we look at the place where he got that from, we can rest in his knowing that it would be fine, and despite the pain and sadness that he was experiencing, he was not abandoned. Psalm 22, which begins with that “My God, My God…” line expresses doubt and fear for several verses before remembering in verse 25 that “God has not spurned or disdained the misery of this poor wretch, Did not turn away from me, but heard me when I cried out.”
Perhaps the deepest mystery was that Jesus could, amid such evidence of abandonment, know that he was loved and cared for and would get through this. My friend Toni is going through cancer in Detroit, and wondering how God will provide for her son. My friend Michael has his newly-minted Doctorate along with a pile of debt and is working as a substitute teacher. Bart wonders when his time is up in the shelter whether he will go back to drinking because he can’t find work and there are seven months left until he receives his Veterans’ retirement pension.
Tomorrow I will meet with my “Men of St. Joseph” and we will have a cup of coffee and look together at next Sunday’s Gospel. Here as we begin Holy Week and see ahead of us the misery, pain, torture, and apparent abandonment of the Godly Son who came to save us, we are skipping to the end of the story to see how it all comes out. Seems like cheating, doesn’t it?
But the “coincidence” that we guys would be reading the ending just as the crisis is forming doesn’t ruin the story for us, but exposes the real mystery. Perhaps it is that Jesus could trust all along what was happening to him because he knew the ending, and that is the message he gave us when he called out his last words. My God! Help me to believe, as I did those weeks when I thought I might die, that your love is that real, your companionship that intimate, that the darkness does not matter at all. Please sit and read Psalm 22. It can change your Holy Week. It can change your life.
What do we do in the face of this mystery? Tomorrow.
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