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

These words we hear every year are the final cry of Jesus, alone and dying a terrible painful death. He has been through a harrowing journey, abandoned by friends who promised they would never leave him, and mocked by crowds who once listened to his teaching. And the ones who have stayed with him to the end cannot touch him in his hour of greatest need. His mother who held him so many times sits at the foot of the cross but cannot hold her dying son. Those who love him most watch as he dies and they can do nothing to stop it.

And in his last moments, he cries out to God, who he has been one with since the beginning of time, asking why he has been abandoned in his time of greatest need.

Today, on Good Friday, we remember the death of Jesus, his final hours and moments of agony. It’s uncomfortable, awkward, and sometimes it seems downright morbid. Perhaps this year there is a question of if this is necessary. Isn’t there already enough suffering in the world? We all wait and watch as the death tolls rise from a virus we are struggling to stop. 

We can do little to keep ourselves from catching it except isolate ourselves – stay alone, which means not seeing friends and family, staying home and on our own for weeks and maybe months. 

And grieving all that is lost – grieving the loss of our normal lives, grieving for illness that has come to those we love, grieving for the possibility of sickness and even death that may come to ourselves and those we love.

Over and over, one of the things that I have heard from others, the thing that I have read accounts of that has scared me most in these days is the way that this virus has left people alone. Not just alone in isolation to avoid contracting the virus, but especially those who are left alone when they are ill in the hospital so that they can avoid infecting others. Alone for days as the disease gets worse and worse, without the normal friends to visit and family to hold their hands, wipe their faces, care for them in all the non-medical ways that we long for. And then, in the end, this disease has brought about the greatest fear for so many of us – dying alone, without family surrounding us, without the opportunity to say goodbye to those we love. Of all the pain and grief and fear that has changed our lives so profoundly in the last few weeks and months, this virus has brought one of the scariest possibilities into a very real possibility – the fear of being alone in our final moments.

And so this year, as I read this story of Jesus dying alone on the cross and calling out to his Father in an agonized voice, it became real and true to me in a way it never had been before. 

And the truth is, I was grateful for it this day. I was grateful for this day because on this day we remember that God didn’t just speak down from on high and tell us everything would be okay. We don’t worship a God who stayed in heaven, safe and far from the pain and fear and suffering in our world. On this day, we remember the fullness of the brutal and beautiful truth that God came into our world and lived through everything we live through as human beings, and then eventually suffered through death alone on a cross. Today we remember that we worship a God powerful enough to transform that cross through the resurrection on Easter, but today we also remember that we worship a God who suffered.

And today, my friends, today I believe it matters to remember that we worship a suffering God. We worship a God who has been through the fullness of pain and loneliness, not out of a sadistic desire for suffering or because some law of nature required it. Our God went through this because this God loves us so much that God wanted to ensure that we would never walk any part of our own journeys alone. God went through this to be with us fully in all of our lives, in all of our days, whatever they bring. 

As Henri Nouwen says in my favorite description of the Jesus’s final moments, “When God himself in his humanity became part of our most painful experience of God’s absence, he became most present to us.”

God went through this to be most present to us.

In these days, we are suddenly facing something that none of us have ever seen. But in Jesus, we know a God who has been through the worst that we can imagine, and will be with us through whatever we will face in this life and in our death. 

On this Good Friday, we remember when God became most present to us. On this Good Friday, we remember that even while we fear what we do not know, we have a God who will never let us go anywhere alone.  On this Good Friday, we remember that God is with us, that God will always be with us, wherever we are, wherever we go, wherever we find ourselves. There is no fear too scary, no suffering too great, no place where we can escape from the love of God that is in Christ our Lord.

So today, even when we would rather avoid the pain and suffering of Jesus, we are asked to stay with him. We stay with Jesus, knowing that he will stay with us forever, that he will never leave us or forsake us. 

As you sit with Jesus in his death this year, may you know God to be most present to you.