After a significant episode, Fr Parker is still sort of absent! But he plans to upload his homilies for Holy Week 2022, so that's a thing. Full text below!

There is so much of value in the readings from today’s Mass, but perhaps what has called to me the most is the Psalm Response, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” By the measure of the world, this response is sorrowful, dark, and maybe even seems evil, but our Christian imagination challenges us to read more deeply into this proclamation of faith, into the whole of the Psalm it points to, and how that relates to the whole of the Christian mystery which we celebrate today.

I call the response to today’s Psalm a proclamation of faith because people who do not believe in God do not think he forsakes them; people who do not believe in God simply fail to consider God at all. For a true atheist, God is not absent, dismissive, good or evil, but rather, God simply does not exist. Thus, the Psalm response is a proclamation of faith, even if it’s a proclamation of faith in a God who seems distant or even entirely absent.

In how the Psalm is presented in today’s liturgy, there are only four stanzas. The actual Psalm is much longer, but the Church presents this summarized version around the main themes of the full Psalm. This shortened version really emphasizes just how drastic the turn that occurs in the final stanza is. The speaker turns from describing the mockery of the crowd around him, the feebleness he feels, and the injustice he faces at the hands of those who have condemned him to a great proclamation of faith and desire to evangelize:

I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; 

 in the midst of the congregation I will praise you!

 You who [stand in awe of] the Lord, praise him!

 All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him!

 Stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!

The world would tell us that those who feel forsaken by God should do their best to change their feelings; the world would tell those who feel forsaken by God to forsake Him back. “If your God is really a God of love, why would you feel forsaken?” “Your God has abandoned you because you don’t fit into some idealized and impossible mould that you are supposed to embrace.” “If you really feel forsaken, if you really feel sentenced to death and despair, isolation and loneliness, ‘let this God rescue the one in whom he supposedly delights!’”

In the world, even some of those who claim to have a faith in the same God might tell you to change your feelings if you feel forsaken by God. “God loves you, and that should be enough.” “God wouldn’t give you more than you can handle.” “You just need to deepen your faith so that you can know that this is all part of the great plan that God has for you.”

I’m here to tell you that these pieces of atheistic advice and pious platitudes are both equally wrong and equally dangerous—equally wrong and dangerous to a lived authentic faith because the God whose scripture proclaims professions of faith like “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” can handle your feelings. Like a mother who nurses a fussy baby, a father who does not abandon a teenager who spits hatred at him, a true friend who can handle absence, or like sons and daughters who still fall deeply in love with their moms and dads as their physical and mental health declines in old age, the God whose scripture proclaims “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” can handle your feelings, whatever they are. The God of the Old Testament and the New Testament, the God of the Jews, the God Incarnate in Christ, Jesus Himself, embraces and loves you no matter your feelings and patiently bears them out beside you, embracing you in suffering in the same way that any lover embraces his or her beloved. While feelings of abandonment or forsakenness are legitimate, they certainly do not reflect the reality of an always-present God who loves each and every one of us. God will patiently bear your feelings as feelings do what feelings do: change and adapt to the circumstance.

The circumstances of the Scriptures certainly point to the legitimacy of feelings that God has forsaken us. Isaiah speaks of the torment he endures for being a believer. He is beaten, his beard is pulled out, and he faces insults and is even spit at, but his faith endures, He knows the Lord helps him and he “shall not be put to shame.” St Paul’s great Philippian Hymn speaks of the humility of Christ, who is empty in the form of a slave and put to death on a Cross, yet “every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord.” The great Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to St Luke describes how Jesus’ suffering is so intense that “his sweat became like great drops of blood.” Even hanging on the Cross, Jesus is mocked by one of the criminals He is crucified beside. Our God can handle these feelings of forsakenness because He is a God who calls for forgiveness for those who have wronged Him. He is a God who embraces the conversion of the other criminal, who in just the last moments of his life seeks to meet and encounter the mercy of God. The power of God is manifested in this great show of mercy. This great show of mercy, love, and endurance that demands, as Jesus proclaims in our first Gospel today, “if we were silent about it, the stones would shout it out.” Christ’s kingship is manifest in moments where we might legitimately feel forsaken, and with the great love that His kingship contains, we need not worry about proclaiming it because even “the stones would shout out” if were unable to do it.

The circumstances of the world today, like the Scriptures, certainly point to the legitimacy of feelings that God has forsaken us. Two years of isolation, a new war filled with heinous crimes, and many of us are still reeling at the news we heard over the summer about Residential Schools. Yet the Lord is acting in all of this; the local Church is emerging and the universal Church has discovered new ways of reaching people; good people are still doing good things in Eastern Europe, and even doing good for those who would seem to not deserve it; the Residential School crisis has given the Church the invitation to live legitimately the call to reconciliation that it needs to embrace!

What Holy Week reveals to us, and what it is especially revealing as we celebrate Palm Sunday, is that God is bigger than our sorrow—that God is bigger than our expectations. Christ’s kingship is revealed today, but He doesn’t come as a figure of worldly power or prestige. He is finally ready to reveal his kingship and proclaim it with vigour, but His kingship is not what we would expect. His kingship hangs on the Cross and admits criminals who cry out to Him in need Like the stones, we too need to shout out, “Lord remember me when you come into your kingdom,” or “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We need to cry out to our Lord the proclamation whatever state our faith finds itself, trusting that He can work with that, trusting that He is our God, beside us on the Cross.