Doubt and the Cross

Mark 15:16-39

            Last night we encountered what true humanity looks like. It looks like Jesus praying to God to remove from his lips the cup of suffering; it looks like vulnerability, humility, and grace. It looks not like strength as we so often imagine it, but instead it looks like the power of giving up power—a power that does not seem at first like it is power at all.

            Now, today, we encounter what happens when a person is fully human: He gets crucified. On the cross Jesus shows that greatness looks like failure. It is shouting to the heavens, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s all the things that make us question God in similar words. “Is your God in Belgium?” an atheist asks mockingly on Facebook. Is our God with victims of genocide? Is our God in the streets of Chicago riddled with gun violence? Is our God with car crash victims whose only fault was an icy road or a drunk driver? Is our God with those who have cancer… a miscarriage… Alzheimer’s? Is our God anywhere at all?

            Today is the day that can either confirm those assumptions or challenge them, because this Good Friday is about the God who meets us first and foremost not in life’s victories but in life’s crushing defeats. This is the God of the cross. It’s not a very attractive God on the surface, but it’s the only one who really stands up to criticism because it’s the only one real enough to meet us in despair—where we truly need it. This is the God who points to death and says, “I’ve been there.” I’ve been there. This God is found in our failures far more surely than in our victories, because it is there that we discover our utter dependence. This is the God, who we know in Jesus Christ, who shouts from upon the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

            Jesus doubted. 100% doubted. Being human is no easy task—even for the Son of God. It’s one thing to say “God is with me;” it’s one thing even to know in your heart and in your head that God is with you; but it’s quite another in that moment of terror and inexplicable loss to have certainty. You can’t do it, no matter how hard you try, because Jesus couldn’t do it. Even the Son of God doubted on the cross. Today is the day in the church year where we stand on the precipice and admit we don’t know a thing. We believe in God… most of the time. We trust in God… most of the time. But, ultimately, your relationship with God is not dependent on how perfectly you believe. Thank God, because none of us believe perfectly. Perhaps if we did then we wouldn’t have to worry about what perfect faith is, but since none of us believe perfectly, and we know that doubt is part of being human, then we had better rid ourselves of this notion that doubt is the opposite of faith. After all, Jesus had doubts. Jesus, who was God-incarnate, doubted God, doubted himself. Who are you to think that you are better than Jesus?

            In this broken world, doubt is not the opposite of faith. It’s part of it. The real question is whether that doubt turns you toward prideful certainty—we do crave certainty. Or will that doubt turn you back to the traits that make us human—the same traits Jesus showed us in Gethsemane last night: vulnerability, humility, grace. Shouting to the heavens is vulnerability. It’s easier to pretend you have it under control, to never let on that you don’t have it all together. It’s easier to be prideful than humble.

            The easy road does not lead to the cross, which means it never will lead to God. That’s where we find God—like it or not. So, yes, God is in Belgium, because that is the place where suffering and death and the hardest road leads. And, yes, God is in inner-city Chicago and the slums of Darfur, and the most hopeless, disease-ridden places on the planet. And, more than that, God stands alongside you who are depressed and anxious and addicted and broken, and yet we ask the banal question of why God doesn’t fix it all, missing where the hardest road leads, missing that God has fixed it. He has made it right. We just don’t see it—not yet—not until the veil is lifted from our eyes when we walk the hardest road ourselves. Not until we admit we are part of the problem—the whole problem really—will we see things how they are. So terrible things still happen—terrorism and suicide and cancer and car crashes; wars and storms and earthquakes and tsunamis; lay-offs and divorces and abandonments and addictions; depression and heart attacks and hunger and malaria. All of these still hold on. But tonight we testify that this is not proof of God’s absence but exactly where we find God at work, because resurrection requires death.

God stands alongside the least and the lost and the lonely and the little and the dead, because God has been there. He’s with the doubters, because Jesus was one. He’s with those crushed by the weight of sin and guilt, because he’s already bared it on the cross. We trust because of the cross, because of our weakness. We do this humbly, broken, uncertain, doubting, because that’s what human beings do. That’s what Jesus was. Human being, God—wrapped in one.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Because any of us could feel that way, and so we needed a Savior who felt it first.