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My God. Two words. Five letters. So many possibilities. Is it what you utter when you look in horror at what the wildfire did to your property? Is it what you say when you’re on your feet in your living room, with barbecue sauce on your cheek and beer on your breath, when the last play of the game was full of so many silly mistakes that your team gives up an easy win and therefore a shot at the playoffs? “My God.” Is it what comes out of your mouth, muffled by your fingers and tears, because you just did it again? “My God” seems too meaningful a statement to use only when we’re shocked. Even the deepest horrors evoke a “My God,” and yet if we’re going to invoke God’s name without any intention of actually talking to him, that is a serious sin, as God will not hold us guiltless for using his name in empty and meaningless ways (Exodus 20:7). We will hear this cry twice this evening. You heard the first from David. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” You can’t ignore the anguish behind these words. These are the words of one who feels betrayed, set up for failure, left in the lurch – by none other than God! How is this not worse than saying “Oh my God” when taken aback by a jump scare at the movies? David accuses God of forsaking him… as if he shouldn’t; as if God wouldn’t be in his rights to abandon him. How can David take this attitude with God? What can David grab hold of to urge God to be there for him? What can any of us use as leverage to get God to be good to us? Certainly not our past! We cannot say to God, “Don’t forsake me! I don’t deserve it! I’ve been too good to you for you to abandon me!” There is not a single one of us that can say that with a straight face. Yet David leans upon God as if his absence isn’t right, isn’t exactly what David deserves, isn’t exactly what every sinful human being deserves for breaking God’s law over and over again every day for our entire lives. “Why did you abandon me?” You want to be careful what you say around some people, because they have a finely-tuned sense for inconsistency. David comes dangerously close to accusing God of being inconsistent. He says, “Our ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all put their trust in you, and you saved them.” He means to say, “So what about me? You have this history of helping people when they cry out to you, but as for me – I’m shouting out day after day, night after night, and am getting nothing!” Here’s the thing: to insult God for not answering prayer is disrespect to him and blasphemy. But to expect God to answer prayer, to implore him to help, to beg him for rescue – that is not dishonor, that’s exactly what God’s name is for. The emptiest way we can use God’s name is to not use it at all. The most shameful disrespect of God’s character is to forget his character entirely and carry on as if our pain, our problems, our suffering, are none of God’s business. David refuses. David bursts into God’s throne room and demands that he hears him and helps him. How opposite of me that is. I retreat into my little turtle shell when pain, temptation, my own guilt get the better of me. Sometimes we think that God is forsaking us, when what’s actually happening is that as soon as the going got tough, as soon as we started facing fire for our faith, as soon as we got hurt, we forsook God. David doesn’t rely on his goodness to get God to rescue him, but God’s goodness. He says, “God, you’re the one that made me. You’re the one that made me trust in you. I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t ask to be yours. You made this happen. You caused me to trust in you even in my most vulnerable years. Well guess what? Here I am vulnerable again. Under attack by dangerous threats. I am worn out. I am weak. I am miserable. I am guilty. I am hard pressed on every side. You got me into this mess called life on planet earth. You get me out of it.” David is a man whose options have run out. He has learned that even as king of Israel, his riches, his army, his family, his renown, even his own piety cannot save him. Trouble still comes. Danger is still real. You have realized the same thing. You can earn all the money you want, buy all the guns you want, practice all the right habits you want, have all the best stuff and even really good friends – and trouble is still there. You still get depressed. You still get so anxious you can hardly stand it. You still do things that make no sense, do not fit your goals, and leave you feeling disgusting, worthless, and shameful. You and I and David have this in common: our only hope is to turn to the God that made us. To bring him our rawest of emotions, our deepest of struggles, our greatest despair, and to dump it on him as viscerally as David does here. There is a sweetness to the words, “My God,” a certain kind of love. Crying out God’s name is one thing, but crying out that this God is “My God,” “your God” is another. We hear the true irony of this cry when it comes from Jesus on the cross, who cried “Eli Eli, lema sebachthani!” which means, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!” in Aramaic. The language Jesus grew up speaking, because this cry to God the Father grows up out of a very dark place, a place of the deepest kind of pain. The wounds were one thing, but the feeling of being truly abandoned by God the Father – that is a pain that is unimaginable. Yet it was the reality for Jesus on the cross. David placed his suffering into the context of God’s history with mankind. What about Christ’s suffering? After God had rescued Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and countless others from their own sin, why does he seem to break the pattern when it comes to his own Son, who had no sin to be rescued from? Why does Jesus prevail upon God his Father with those words of relationship, “My God!” and hear no answer? Because the entirety of human history hinged on this event. All of God’s promises hinge on this cry of Jesus from the cross. The Father abandons his Son on the cross, in the place of all sinners who deserve to be abandoned. The Father punishes the Son for the sins of the entire human race. That is a brutal pain that cannot be depicted on a movie screen or a canvas, but is put on display in the guttural cry of a dying man, “Lema sebachthani” The Father sacrifices the Son. The Son willingly gives his life, and by his cries we see what giving himself up meant: giving himself up to an unbearable separation. To be completely cut off from God’s goodness. He went through it for you. So that God can become your God. So that you will never be cut off from God’s goodness, no matter how much you’ve sinned. No matter how far you’ve fallen, God will never abandon nor forsake you. He is your God, your God. No matter how much you deserve what’s happening to you right now, it is not the sign that God has changed his mind, and now he’s going to treat you according to what you deserve. By the anguished cries and sacrifice of the Son, he has removed your guilt forever. By abandoning Jesus on a cross, you have the promise that you will never be abandoned. No matter where you have been, no matter where you’re going, God will be there too, with all his goodness and his love, with all his forgiveness. David saw that salvation, that rescue. He switches tone halfway through the Psalm, showing his prayers were answered; showing that even when it seems God abandons his children, he never actually does. David demands that we tell about how God saves people over and over and over again, never abandoning his beloved creation. He shows that his prayer was not a disrespectful shameful one, but shows us how to use the right and privilege we now have as redeemed children to cry out to God our Father, as our Father, and beg him for help. He shows us what it means to live what we confess: that we are lost without God, helpless and weak – but since we have God’s guarantee of love and rescue, we can cry out to him ; we must cry out to him; we must demand his rescue and forgiveness; we must take up his name on our lips; we must entrust our whole selves: body, mind, and soul, into his care – because he alone can be trusted to actually help us. He will never leave a single cry unheard, unanswered. He will never leave his children uncared for. Nor did he do that to Jesus. He did not leave Jesus on the cross; did not leave him in the grave; did not abandon him to the realm of the dead that he should see decay. But that’s a story for a different day. That’s the next scene in this redemptive drama. For now, we follow Jesus’ body to the grave and marvel at what he was willing to go through for me and you. We take our seats and watch through Jesus’ seven words from the cross what he was willing to go through to put the words “My God, My God” into our mouths whenever we are in pain or suffer. To teach us to use those words not in an empty way but in their fullness: that we can lean into God as our God and expect nothing but rescue and love from him. We pause here, but we do not stop. Our journey tonight ends on Sunday. So, come with us now.

Your picky eater skeptically scowls as he pokes at the chicken on his plate. You know what he likes. You know he would like this. You know he can’t just have mac-n-cheese every night of the week. But as he takes longer and longer to even put a shred of that chicken to his tongue, you get desperate. You command, “Just eat it!” and that’s it. Your outburst ensures he’s never going to try it. It has now become an emotional issue.  There are different schools of thought on how to handle picky eaters. Go the hard way, offering the black-and-white choice in hopes that the kid learns that a cup of peas is better than a cup of nothing. Rewards work for some people: offering a heaping helping of ice cream if they at least try what’s on their plate. What method you handle this problem with will differ, but the problem is clear: how do you get a kid with a limited palate to accept your prediction that she will love a dish, when she seems so sure she will hate it? How do you deal with someone who is happy with their ignorance and unwilling to accept your guidance into the unknown? How does Jesus do it here? It wasn’t a wild guess that an observant Jew would want to celebrate the Passover properly, but time was of the essence. It was the morning-of, and the disciples weren’t sure about the logistics of the situation. But Jesus has thought of this already. He gives them step-by-step instructions, that once they follow, they find out that Jesus, once again, was a hundred steps ahead of them. That’s how much he cared about this meal he would celebrate with his disciples. However, this was but the first time that day that they would see that Jesus has more information than they do. The disciples secure the room, the herbs, the bread, the fruit, the wine, the lamb. They get to work preparing. To find the room and get everything ready took from morning to night. Then comes the time to sit and start. Now, the Passover meal had always had a set agenda. The host would take each food item, before distributing it would speak a prayer or message, and the guests would partake. Wine and lamb meat were not every-day things. The disciples’ mouths are watering. This is a joyous party that they’ve celebrated every year of their lives, and now they’re excited to celebrate it with their dear mentor. But their smiles fade and the color drains from their faces as they hear his opening remark. Their hearts begin to pound when he uses that word, that awful word. What could Jesus have said that would have crushed their joyful spirits so much as his announcement that one of them sharing the table would betray him? And even though he sees the shock and horror in their eyes, he ruthlessly declares again that it is one who shares the intimate friendship of partaking in this most special meal who would squander that same fellowship in an act of betrayal. One after the other they deny that they could be that one. “I will never betray you!” While there was only one Judas Iscariot, you don’t have to read too far ahead in Mark’s Gospel to realize they were exaggerating their loyalty to Jesus, as we all do. Like a groom promising faithfulness on his wedding day, not realizing that this means even when an attractive female keeps trying to catch his gaze and seeks ways to get him in private conversation. Like a soldier making promises of faithfulness to his duty, except for when there’s a high probability that if he exaggerates his back pain he can get medically discharged. Like a recently-confirmed teen who once stood here and promised faithfulness to the Word of God all her life, except for when the church her friend goes to doesn’t make as big of a fuss about closed communion or fellowship and she is drawn in by their kindness. A picky-eating kid has the problem of not being open to new experiences that might delight and surprise him. We are picky with our truths, and it’s usually the ones that make us feel good or look good – picking truths that emphasize how loyal we are, how compassionate, how ethical our decisions are – not accepting that there’s a much darker side to being human. We are capable of much worse betrayals than we realize. It starts with defecting from the truth we’re given from the One who knows better. Even when he tells us how things are going to be, we might say, “Surely not!” And although he is that One, Jesus doesn’t elaborate what that act of betrayal was going to be. If he outed the betrayer, maybe they would have tried to stop him, tie him up, kill him if they had to. But he won’t give any clues. Except for this one: The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born.” Jesus doesn’t talk like normal people talk. That’s because he knows a lot more than your average person. Therefore, he has more to say than your average person. Your average host wants everyone at the table to be relaxed, happy, and having a good time. When Jesus is the host, he wants to serve us what is good. What is good always involves revealing what we need to know, whether or not we are too satisfied with the truths that we’ve picked to hear it. Judas needed to hear this. Like God calling to Adam and Eve in their shameful disobedience, “Where are you?” Or to Cain, whose hands were still covered in his brother’s blood, “Where is Abel?” Jesus is calling to Judas, already well underway in his shameful plot of betrayal, as if to say, “Where are you? Where is your heart? I can see you, Judas. Your sin is not as secret as you think it is. I know you’re going to do it. In fact, it is so certain that you’re going to do this that it has become a part of an eternal plan written in the will of God, written in Scripture, but I am calling out to you, even though I know you won’t listen.” Jesus knows more than we do. Jesus knows evil. He sees it. He hates it. He wants to get rid of it, wants us to get off the path of evil, will call out to us to repent of it and escape it whether we hear that or not. He knows evil, even meets it face to face, but is never overcome by it. He is the seed of the woman stepping out into the path to be bitten by the snake so that he can in turn crush its power over us and fulfill God’s promises of salvation. He is the mommy holding the spoon full of things we don’t understand, but calls us to trust that what he serves is good – what he says is good, even when it hurts and scares us. And out of love, a love that understands what we do not– out of a love the goodness of which has to be tasted to be seen, he takes bread. He gives thanks, calling our attention to the gracious providence of God Our Father that sustains our lives and hearts, all according to Passover Protocol, but this is not: as the bread is broken and given, he says, “This is my body.” Brothers and sisters, steel your hearts. Keep yourself from hearing these familiar words in the comfort of their hundreds of utterances. Be as amazed as the disciples were that such a person could say such a thing about food. “This is me,” as he breaks it and gives it as fully as his body would be beaten given over to death. Given for you, as he passes his bread-body to the friends gathered in fellowship around the table. The disciples are not comfortable in this moment. They are confused. Instead of an explanation, Jesus takes the cup. Passing a cup of wine was Passover Protocol, but this was not: “This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many.” Pause for a moment with the disciples at the evening they are having. Jesus is filling each person’s plate with heavenly things – revelations of God’s will and how he will use betrayal in his plan of salvation – and now, upon a holiday filled with festive spiritual hope, during a meal that thousands of worshippers are celebrating across Jerusalem, recalling the Passover lamb that saved their ancestors from death and slavery, Jesus speaks this word of covenants and blood, but not of lambs, nor bulls, nor goats, but of himself. His body and his blood are the new covenant. This new covenant of hope and peace. Of forgiveness and rescue. Of the kind of freedom that a celebrater of the first Passover could only imagine. Jesus brought it to reality. His sacrifice for all people, ratified through the faith that yoked your heart to this new covenant of God’s contract to be gracious to you and bless you and make his face shine upon you. If you think it’s hard to get a toddler to eat a new food, how about getting a stone-cold sinful human heart to understand, love, and trust in a new unfathomable spiritual reality? That God can use evil and betrayal for good? That rescue from the dominion of the devil’s darkness is not only possible, but your new reality in Christ? That a body that goes broken to its grave is your salvation, and that blood spilled on the ground at Golgotha is a covenant with God, an eternally-binding agreement that God makes with sinners never to leave them nor forsake them, never to punish nor eradicate them? Jesus loads up our plates with good things, but they are things we have never seen before, things we could never know unless they were fed to us. We are the hospital patient that is so weak he can’t feed himself, so he has no choice in the matter of what food is lifted to his lips. Jesus does not abuse the power of giving us whatever he wants us to eat. He fills us only with good things. In a few moments, Jesus himself will be placed in your hands. “This is the true body of our Lord Jesus Christ, given into death for the forgiveness of your sins.” Jesus’ blood in a small cup, “Shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins.” You are not a spiritual toddler. You’ve had this meal before. You know its goodness. You know you need the medicine, because you know the lostness it saves you from – the sinful ignorance it cures, and the covenant of your Savior’s blood it ratifies. Jesus says, “it is.” We have already become used to accepting that Jesus knows more than we, and tells us things that are hard to understand and yet true. Should we stop now? Should we question that what we receive in this Supper is anything other than his body and blood in with and under bread and wine? Would a Savior who has spoken such unfathomable spiritual truth now pause to accommodate our rational minds by saying, “It’s just a symbol guys”? Do his words, “Given for you” only apply to the cross? Do they not apply also to his continual giving of himself for our forgiveness and blessing at each celebration? As Paul states, is this not a participation in his very body and blood, to be enjoyed as the disciples did: among a group of struggling sinners who fail and fall and are in need of strength? Is this not God’s communion with us and our communion with each other as joint-partakers in an eternal covenant of freedom and salvation? So, the toddler tries the chicken, and immediately his eyes are opened. He is reminded of all the good things he has ever eaten, how this is the same yet so different. His trust in his mommy is ratified because he now has this extra piece of evidence that she can be listened to, that sometimes she knows things that he doesn’t, and can speak to greater realities of deliciousness than he can imagine for himself. The table is almost ready. We are almost ready to celebrate. You are almost ready to hear those magnificent words spoken through a man but spoken by your Savior: This is my body and blood. This is the new covenant of grace and righteousness and forgiveness. And the most amazing thing that you could hear, Jesus also speaks, “I give this … for you. All this: myself, my body, my blood, faith, forgiveness, life, fellowship with me, solidarity with each other – I give it for you.”