Jack Hardaway
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Today is a question with no answer.
Easter doesn’t answer it, or solve it.
Easter is not the solution to the problem.
Easter is a breathless surprise, but it doesn’t bring sense to the senselessness of today.
Easter is perplexed rejoicing interrupting soul crushing agony.
But today there is only the lament of loss.
Mathew has Jesus last words as an agonized why of forsakenness.
Not rejection.
But forsaken.
No help came.
This is not about if God is real, or good.
Just simply, “Where are you?”
Jesus is Israel hanging on the cross.
The whole history of being bound by the powerful.
Like Job waiting before God, silent before the deep pit.
The suffering in the world.
No sense is made of it.
All we get is Jesus crucified and his prayer of lament, forsaken and alone.
God as a chronic condition.
God as a contradiction.
God as inscrutable.
Fulfillment.
Matthew says that this fulfills something.
No answers, or solutions, only fulfillment.
In the darkness, in the forgotten, God is found there.
In God’s absence God is present in a way that our words and ideas and senses can’t make sense of, Lament is the prayer of faith before the overwhelming grief of life.
This week we walk that way of Jesus’ suffering once again.
There is no solution to the problem.
Just the enduring.
Choosing love even then. Especially then.