Good Friday
April 18, 2025
St. Dunstan’s
The Rev. Patricia Templeton
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
This opening line of the 22nd psalm is one of the most plaintive cries in scripture.
It’s a cry of agony, despair, and abandonment.
It is the cry of Jesus as he hangs dying on the cross.
Jesus, who at age 12 astonished the religious scholars by his knowledge of scripture, must have known many psalms by heart, including the very next one, the 23rd.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me.” Those words that are so familiar to us must surely have been known to Jesus.
But the cry that comes from his lips this day, the words that flow from his heart are not words of comfort, but despair; not assurances of God’s presence, but an agonizing lament of God’s absence.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Oddly enough, it comforts me that this is the psalm that comes to Jesus as he hangs on the cross. I take comfort in knowing that in his darkest hour Jesus is not glibly sure of God’s presence, but wonders if God has abandoned him.
It reassures me to know that at the hour of his death, on the verge of the magnificent moment of the resurrection, Jesus is at his most vulnerable and human.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I wonder how many millions of times throughout history, in countless places of death and despair, illness and loneliness, poverty and desperation, these words have been cried out.
One place I am sure these words, or some form of them, are crying out today is from the prisons of El Salvador. You see the picture on the front of your bulletin, Jesus on the cross super-imposed over a photograph of prisoners crammed into that notoriously dangerous and evil place.
They include almost 300 people who have been illegally shipped there by our government. Our dictator is paying their dictator $6 million to warehouse those he does not want in this country.
The most well-known of these political prisoners is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was abducted from his home in Maryland by immigration officials, in front of his wife and young children, even though he was living here legally. The administration claims he is a member of a terrorist gang, although there is no credible evidence of that.
The immigration agents had no warrant. Garcia was never charged or given due process. He never had access to a lawyer or a day in court. He was simply bound in chains, and sent to El Salvador, even though years ago a court ruled that if he were sent back he would likely be killed.
The administration later admitted that Garcia’s deportation was an administrative error, but has defied court orders to have him returned.
And he is not alone. Earlier planes have carried 248 people, that we know of, from this country to the hell hole in El Salvador.
Others in this country have been abducted off the street by masked, armed men, and sent to be warehoused in Louisiana, including immigrant students who are here legally.
And just this morning I saw a news story about a doctor, born in and a citizen of this country, who received an email from immigration authorities demanding that she leave the country immediately. Another citizen, a Boston immigration lawyer, received a similar email.
Some of you might be thinking that this is a political sermon. You’re right. It is. Not political as in Republican vs. Democrat. The situation we face is not about partisan politics. The situation before us today is good vs. evil.
We are in this church tonight because almost 2,000 years ago an innocent man was executed by the state. The Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, knew that Jesus was innocent, and that killing him would be wrong. But he washed his hands of the matter, and handed Jesus over to die.
In one gospel reading for Good Friday, Pilate sends Jesus to see Herod, another Roman governor who was over Galilee, who then sent him back to Pilate. Luke’s gospel tells us that on that day Pilate and Herod became friends; before that they had been enemies.
This Holy Week we witnessed our leader basically washing his hands over the fate of Garcia and others, as he met in the Oval Office with El Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele,
known as a dictator who ignores the rule of law and the constitution. The two strongmen praised each other and their growing friendship.
We cannot ignore these happenings while listening to the story of Jesus’ death.
Almost 2,000 years ago, God turned the cross, the instrument of defeat and death, into a sign of liberation and new live.
“The cross is the most empowering symbol of God’s loving solidarity with ‘the least of these,’ the unwanted in society who suffer daily from great injustices,” theologian James Cone writes in his book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree.
“Christians must face the cross as the terrible tragedy it was, and discover in it, through faith and repentance, the liberating joy of eternal salvation.
“But,” Cone quickly adds, “we cannot find liberating joy in the cross by spiritualizing it away, by taking away its message of justice in the midst of powerlessness, suffering, and death.”
In other words, we must always look at the cross through the lens of what is happening in our world today. Holy Week and Easter give us the opportunity, the mandate, for introspection. This is a time to recommit ourselves to God’s values of liberation, mercy, and justice, of caring for the marginalized, or as Jesus called them, “the least of these.”
If we cannot see that the crucifixion and Holy Week are reflected in the events of today, if we can’t see that they are a challenge to us to stand up to the evil of our day, then why are we here?
Theologian Robert Jones summed it up in a column this week.
“There is a simple theological word to describe the disregard for the value of human life, abandonment of moral principles, and contempt for the rule of law we are seeing from the Trump administration: evil,” he wrote, then added, “This is not a word I use lightly.”
It is not a word I use lightly, either. But on this Good Friday we are confronted by the evil of 2,000 years ago and the evil that is happening now before our eyes.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the few German Christian leaders who spoke out against Hitler, has this to say about how we are to confront evil.
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” we hear Jesus cry.
And this week we also hear the message of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer, to her husband. “God has not forgotten about you.”
And as followers of the one who was crucified, neither should we.
Amen.