Today I’ll be sharing this reflection on Jesus’ Fourth word at West End Collegiate Church in NYC.
FOURTH WORD
Mark 15:33-34
And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Lately I’ve been reflecting upon the classic Joan Osborne song, “One of Us.”
The song begins asking,
“If God had a name, what would it be?
And would you call it to his face?
If you were faced with him in all his glory
What would you ask if you had just one question?
If God had a face what would it look like?
And would you want to see,
If seeing meant that you would have to believe
In things like heaven and in Jesus and the saints and all the prophets
What if god was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Just trying to make his way home
Like a holy rolling stone
Back up to heaven all alone
Just trying to make his way home
Nobody calling on the phone
Except for the Pope maybe in Rome”
To me this Markan passage, this fourth word of Jesus, reflects what God would look like as one of us. It is an image of Christ at his most vulnerable, hung suspended above the world, crushed by the weight of others’ iniquity, and utterly alone.
Jesus became one of us. He became that stranger on the Ancient Near Eastern bus just trying to make his way home, and for one moment, he did it alone.
But Jesus knew he wasn’t meant to be alone. His cry for justice tells us this fact. In situations of crisis and tragedy, we know we’re not meant to be alone.
This community, our community, knows deeply this cry for justice, this cry to not be alone. Just recently, in the wake of hurricane Sandy, our friends and neighbors knew the bitter sting of loss, they were touched by crisis, and they asked, “Will you forsake me?”
And this community, our community, responded with the knowledge that our friends and neighbors were not meant to be alone, that they should not have to cry, “Why have you forsaken me?” because we would be there with food, with shelter, with ourselves.
Jesus became one of us, perhaps in this passage in the most tangible way, in the shared bond of crisis, when in the deepest parts of ourselves, we know we are not meant to be alone.
Joan Osborne asks, “If God had a face, what would it look like?” I think it would look like this, like a community of people who are there for each other in times of need, who take up the call to make sure no one has to be alone.
Jesus felt loss. We feel loss. But together, we are not alone.
This is what God would look like, if he were one of us.