Prayers when God Seems Far
Apr 2, 09:47 PM
Today, Good Friday, the day in the Christian calendar that remembers Jesus’ pain and death on the cross, does not strike me as a time for rosy portraits of prayer.
I preached twice today, at noon and 6 pm worship services. We lowered the lights for the services, and in my sermon I retold the story from John’s Gospel of Jesus’ arrest and trial and agony on the cross. I mentioned the mocking taunts from the crowds. At each service black-cassocked men carried down the center aisle with a measured gait an axe-hewn cross weighing hundreds of pounds. There was more silence than usual. More sitting quietly, soberly. Prayers of sadness for sin.
And we chanted or said the one psalm that must capture forsakenness more than any: The psalm a verse of which Jesus himself uttered from the cross, Psalm 22:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
It goes on, "and [why] are so far from my cry, and from the words of my distress?"
I don’t happen myself to be in a moment of God-forsakenness. The drama of Holy Week services I have been living through help buoy my faith, my excitement at what God did for the world in Christ. But I have had such moments, and I will.
In one of my books I wrote of "the dry depths of our spirits." I said that sometimes our life with God has the loamy moistness of a forest floor on a rainy day. "But," I wrote, "our prayer life can also feel like a desert. We try to pray but find we have nothing to say. Our souls resemble arid plains. Or we may be ready to talk, but it seems as if God has gone into hiding or, worse yet, that he has deserted us. At other times we sense God, but distractions war against our focus. Trying to pray becomes such a battle that we give it up." (from The Art of Prayer)
I think of the title of a book I just saw in a bookstore: Why Is God Ignoring Me?
But there is in Psalm 22 what commentator William Carter calls "an undulating quality." That is, the psalmist feels keenly the desolation but somehow also manages to remember God’s goodness. "The groans," writes William Carter of the psalm, "are matched by affirmations of God’s saving love."
And that seems to mirror Jesus’ experience of suffering. I mean, he did cry out on the cross in forsakenness, echoing the words of Psalm 22, but he cried out to God. He prayed through the dry agony.
Carter tells the story of the rabbis who gathered to conclude that God did not exist. How could he, given what they had experienced? They concluded that surely humankind is alone in the universe. Just then, one of them interrupted to say, "We will have to finish this conversation later. It is time for our prayers." Time indeed.