Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me. I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace.”
NL Daily Devotion for Saturday, March 26, 2022
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
“Yet I am not alone…” This gives me pause. In two of the gospels, Jesus is said to have cried out the words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I have always just accepted the idea that at the moment of his horrific death, Jesus believed he had been entirely abandoned by God. I’ve heard sermons on the significance of this. And while I personally believe God was absolutely there, holding Jesus through the whole thing but Jesus just didn’t know it (as so many humans feel in their suffering), I never realized it’s mentioned so specifically in scripture that he did know. Which leads me to wonder if these words of Jesus, spoken before everything went down, were his intellectual understanding of the truth—God would be with him—which would be shaken by the reality of his human suffering and death on a cross. I mean, I intellectually “get” that God is right there with me in my suffering, holding and caring for me, giving me strength. But in actual moments of crisis I have wondered, “Where are you? What gives?” I don’t know, of course. This is all just my wondering about this text. But that’s the beauty about reading and grappling with scripture, isn’t it? There is always more to learn, more to discover. It is an open invitation from God to get to know God more deeply through the inspiration of the Spirit. The Bible is way cool.
What strikes me about Jesus stating that he would not be alone on the cross?
