“Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:5).

We are looking at passages from the lectionary this summer, and this week the lectionary includes one of my favourite passages in the New Testament, Romans 5:5. Apparently today is also Trinity Sunday in the church calendar, and I hope to say something helpful about that too in relation to this passage (but probably not too helpful).

As some of you may have gathered by now, I’m very interested in theology for some reason or another. As with any interest, it can be a bit lonely if you don’t have friends to share it with. Thankfully, I do have a couple theology friends (though I wouldn’t say a few). These are friends with whom I mostly talk about theology. By they way, I’m always looking for more theology friends, so let me know if you’re interested. Anyway, I have a friend in California who shares my love of theology and he once shared something with me that I consider fairly profound. He said, I want to live in the dialectical tension between Mark 15:34 and Luke 23:46. That is, he wants to live in the tension between a Jesus who’s final words from the cross are “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and a Jesus whose final words are “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Do you notice a tension between these two phrases? I’m convinced that we need to do justice to both sayings if we are ever going to understand the Christian faith or make it our own.

But how can we make sense of both? To make sense of both we need to ask questions like, Is there hope for the godforsaken? Can we find hope in a godforsaken place? Can we find a hope that is stronger than all that assaults it? Can we have a clear-sighted sober view of the world, with all its injustices and catastrophes and still cling to a hope that is neither naive or overconfident? Is hope at bottom self-deception or can it rest on truth and power? I think that our passage today in Romans points us in the right direction. Paul writes,

hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

A philosopher who I appreciate (and consider a theology friend), named Paul Moser, has called this verse the most significant statement in Christian literature pertaining to knowledge of God. In this passage, we find the firm foundation for Christian hoping against hope. And that foundation is an act of God that reaches each of us in the present. This verse describes a basis for hope that actually impinges upon our individual and collective experience. It is the love of God poured into our hearts, today, through the Spirit of God. Elsewhere, Paul names this Spirit the Spirit of Jesus, without hesitation or distinction. So we could instead say that Christian hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Spirit of Jesus that has been given to us. Our experience of the love of God comes by way of the Spirit of Jesus, and this is the Spirit of someone who felt godforsaken and yet who also entrusted himself into the hands of his Father.

Today I want to try to explain what I’ve just said in a little bit more detail. That is, I want to describe my basis for Christian hope, or at least what I take to be Paul’s basis, and try to explain what I think it might mean to live in the tension between Mark 15:34 and Luke 23:46.

What does it mean to feel godforsaken? I’m sure that many of us have felt this, and I fear that those of us who have not yet tasted godforsakenness may yet encounter it. In fact, we often do all that we can to avoid this experience. We put it out of our minds. We even avert our gaze when we encounter those struck by it. But the central image and source of power in the Christian faith is the cross of Jesus Christ, and Jesus found himself—we might even say placed himself—among the godforsaken. So as Christians we can’t look away from the godforsaken experience without compromising something central to our faith.

Let me suggest that the feeling of being godforsaken is, perhaps among other things, a feeling of deep disappointment and even confusion that comes when God does not meet our expectations. We expect something from God and it doesn’t happen. God will protect us, and yet we are harmed. God will provide, and yet we go hungry. God will vindicate us, and yet we are ridiculed. God will heal us, and yet we weaken. God will bless our plans, and yet they fail. God will favour his people, and yet the wicked prosper.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that this experience of godforsakenness inspires a large portion of the writing that we have come to call scripture. Consider the long story of the people of Israel, as we find it in our Bible. Jacob’s descendants, the people of Israel, are delivered from slavery in Egypt. After a long journey through the wilderness followed by generations of turmoil, they eventually form a kingdom of their own. This kingdom reaches an apparent zenith during the reigns of David and Solomon. But then it immediately divides into two kingdoms. Several generations later it comes to shipwreck at the hands of godless Babylon. The people are sent into exile and the temple of Israel’s God is destroyed. A major portion of our Old Testament is dedicated to exploring this national experience of being godforsaken. What could it possibly mean for God’s special people to face such a national catastrophe? Out of this painful collective experience an expectation forms that God will send Israel a saviour, that is, a Messiah or a Christ. The New Testament authors and the early Christian movement embodied the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth was in fact this long awaited Messiah. Jesus somehow was the one who would rectify the national experience of godforsakenness. And yet this Jesus is himself crucified and finds himself godforsaken! So in many ways, at least from a certain perspective, the cure seems worse than the disease.

A common scriptural thread, as I see it, is that those who wrestle with God—notice that this is the biblical meaning of the name Israel—do not simply ascend from one victory to another. Instead, God leads those who follow on a surprising path to places that are paradoxically best described as godforsaken, at least from the perspective of what we might have previously expected God to do. There is always a temptation in Christianity to embrace what some have called a theology of triumph, a theology on which we now live in the golden age where God is no longer dangerous and the path forward is assuredly peace and prosperity. However, I am convinced that the truth and the future belong to a theology of the cross, a theology that does not hide or obscure the godforsaken experience of Jesus.

I believe that the evidence we have in the New Testament suggests that Jesus himself was in fact surprised by God and allowed his expectations of God to change with time. Jesus was not born with all the answers, obviously. And he didn’t die with all the answers either. Jesus began by preaching pretty much the same message as John the Baptist: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” He began his work with a genuine offer of reconciliation from his God to the people of Israel, and especially to the leaders of his people. Jesus believed that Israel is God’s vineyard, and its leaders the tenants assigned to care for that vineyard and to produce fruit for the owner. In the past, Jesus believed, God had sent messengers (the prophets) to the tenants of the vineyard but the leaders had always rejected and mistreated them. As Jesus proclaimed his message, he was truly surprised that those with the greatest faith were not even members of how own people of Israel. Recall his surprise at both the Roman centurion and the Syrophoenician woman. Before long Israel’s leaders attributed his miracles to the power of Satan and not to the God of Israel. As in the parable of the vineyard, Jesus began to understand that God’s love for Israel required one final climactic offer of reconciliation. God was sending a son and not just a servant, and Jesus was this very son. Whatever Israel and its leaders did to Jesus, the son, would count as being done to God, the Father.

Remember that Jesus wept over Jerusalem. He wept knowing that, because of the hardness of heart of the people and its leaders, even God’s best offer of a son would be rejected. Jesus shared God’s deep love for Israel and wanted nothing more than that they would embrace his Father by embracing him. And yet, Jesus believed that God’s love for Israel would require him to provoke the leaders and inevitably die at their hands. Luke describes Jesus telling some people in the crowd to not weep for him but to weep for themselves. The death of Jesus would be the judgment of God upon a world at war with God, a world that hates God often without even knowing it. God’s judgment upon the world was to permit the world to destroy its own saviour, to bring human sin to the point of a moral apocalypse, or decisive unveiling. And so Jesus finds himself godforsaken, having truly wondered up to the very last moment whether God would protect him and find another way. Awaiting a rescue that never came, Jesus resolved at great cost to obey his Father until the end, no matter the outcome, out of a shared love for Israel and concern for the holy name of is Father. In the end his God and Father withdrew all protection and the worst became actual. By obediently sharing in God’s love for God’s beloved enemies, Jesus finds himself paradoxically godforsaken.

This all seems very bleak, and so it should. I’ve mentioned already that the cross of Christ can be described as the day of God’s judgment upon the world. It is an unveiling of our proclivity to oppose the love of God manifest in the person of Jesus. Jesus died because we prefer to cling to our ways of being and living and thinking and organizing when confronted by the righteous love of God manifest in a living breathing person. He died because he challenged the authority of those who claim to mediate knowledge of God to others by way of their elite interpretation of tradition, scripture, and priesthood. He died because even though the crowds enjoyed when he humiliated and embarrassed their leaders, Jesus nevertheless refused to give the crowds the prosperity and victory that they demanded in the form they expected. Remember that they wanted to crown him king by force, if only they could appropriate his power and influence for their own purposes. Jesus died because Pilate feared being brought low in the eyes of Caesar more than having the blood of innocent people on his hands. Jesus died alone because, at the crucial moment, the men who he called disciples didn’t share his experience of the Father as an ever-loving divine imperative. Remember how he implored them to pray with him in the garden of Gethsemane. Sadly, they couldn’t truly conceive of a future in which God would require the life of God’s chosen one. They were a stumbling block first to him and then also to themselves. Only a few of his women followers remained with him to the end.

What then does it mean that Luke describes Jesus as saying “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” especially against the backdrop of godforsakenness? It was obedience to the love of God that led Jesus to die among the godforsaken, and it wasn’t simply in his last moment that he entrusted himself to his Father. His whole life is spent enacting this phrase. His mission to Israel is a mission driven by the love of God for Israel, a mission of costly reconciliation. As it becomes clear that his mission would cost him his life, Luke tells us that Jesus “set his face toward Jerusalem”. The whole process of coming to realize that obedience to God would cost Jesus his life was a process of entrusting himself to God. And this process led Jesus from the height of popularity and potential to the actual depths of godforsakenness. We only find this phrase about commending his spirit to his Father in Luke’s Gospel. But the actions to match it are found in all four Gospels. The whole trajectory of the life of Jesus is perhaps best summarized by “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Put another way, Jesus demonstrated with his actions, even more than with his words, that he considered his Father to be worthy of worship, that is, worthy of unqualified trust and obedience. Perhaps without fully understanding exactly why God would require his obedience unto death, Jesus knew that his Father was worthy of that obedience. Jesus knew better than anyone before or since the character of Israel’s God as the God of unqualified holy love. It was the love of God for Israel that drove Jesus to the cross, and Jesus knew this love at first hand through his communion with his Father. What could possibly possess a person to appropriating for himself these words of Isaiah, as Jesus does in Luke’s Gospel:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Jesus knew God and knew the character of God first hand through the power of the Spirit of God. He knew the one who he obeyed. He embraced the character of his God including God’s concern for the those who most regard as godforsaken. God was, to Jesus, a near and present will-to-love and the Spirit of God was the driving wind in the sail of his willing obedience. That is, we can say that the love of God was poured out into the heart of the man Jesus of Nazareth by the power of the Holy Spirit given to him.

In the end, Jesus placed all his hope in his Father as the God of the living. There were certain religious leaders who came and debated with him about whether there was any hope beyond the grave. In three of the Gospels Jesus tells them that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God of the living. That is, those who walk with God in this life enjoy a fellowship that is stronger than death, and that fellowship is the true basis for their hope. Hope in a hopeless place stems from first hand knowledge of God’s character. Hope isn’t cheap or feeble. Christian hope is living hope because it is the hope that stems from fellowship with the living God and an experience of the character and power conveyed to us by the Spirit of this God.

Let’s return to Romans 5:5, which I consider a summary of the basis for Christian hope. Hope does not disappoint us, not because God behaves as expected or because we can see the end from the beginning and the beginning from the end. No, hope does not disappoint us because we know at first hand the character of the God of the living, the one upon and in whom all our hopes rest. We hope because we have knowledge at first hand — through our experience of the love of God in conscience and in encounter with one another — knowledge that the world is governed by a God who is actually worthy of our worship, a God who is trustworthy and who acts out of the utmost love and concern for all people, even and especially those we regard as godforsaken.

I’ll finish with three remarks. First, we need to be careful when we use the word God. Words mean, to us, whatever we decide they mean, to us. There’s nothing to stop me from redefining everything in my vocabulary, other than the fact that none of you would be able to understand what I’m talking about. That said, the words we use can either illuminate or obscure certain crucial elements in our experience, and that is true of the word God as well. With that said, I’d like to share the definition of God that I have found very helpful, and I learned it from the philosopher Paul Moser who I mentioned earlier.

God is whatever, or whoever, turns out to be worthy of worship, where worship is unqualified trust, obedience, and adoration. Put another way, someone or something qualifies as God, in my sense of the word, only if it is worthy of my unqualified trust, obedience, and adoration. God is God because God is worthy of worship, and the worthiness is key. All sorts of things receive worship without being worthy of worship. The biblical word for these is “idols” and the worship of them is “idolatry”, and that is true even when we spell the idol G-O-D. So we do well to ask ourselves, is that which we worship, whatever or whoever it happens to be, actually worthy of that worship? If not, then we should stop.

Once we talk about God in these terms, we need to ask ourselves, what does it take to be worthy of worship? The answer, it seems, is often described using the word “holiness” or “righteous love”. God, if God, is worthy of worship and therefore trustworthy. If there is a God, then there is something that we can and should trust without reservation, and if not then there isn’t. This means that if there is a God then that God is doing—right now in our actual world—all that can be done to extend and promote righteous love to and among all people, including and especially the so-called godforsaken. A God who hated God’s enemies or those at the margins would not be trustworthy to them, and therefore would not be worthy of worship and would not qualify as God after all.

Now for my second remark, this time about the Trinity. The good news, at least at a practical level, is that the Spirit of God that conveyed the personal power and presence of God to Jesus, is the very same Spirit that Paul describes as conveying the personal power and presence of Jesus to us today. That is, the same Spirit they make the righteous love of God a real presence and power in the life of Jesus comes to us today to pour out the love of God into our hearts. The Spirit of God and the Spirit of Jesus are one and the same — that is my doctrine of the Trinity in case anyone was wondering — and this Spirit reveals at the existential and experiential level that we live in the presence of and under the care of a God of righteous love, a God worthy of our worship.

It is the demanding love of God poured out into our hearts by this Spirit that both attracts us to Christ and then also alarms us. This same love is something we enjoy, something we trust, and yet something that leads us outside the city among the godforsaken. Because the God who is worthy of our worship loves those that the world has rejected, and we are rarely in a position to see clearly exactly where the love of God will lead us. What we do know, usually, is what the love of God requires of us in the present moment, and that the future is in the hands of a God worthy of worship, a God of righteous love.

And this leads me to my final remark. Our experience of the love of God is an experience of the Spirit of Jesus challenging us in our conscience, and this experiences grows richer as we obey and embrace the Spirit of Jesus in conscience, just as he embraced and obeyed the Spirit of his Father in his own conscience. We will quickly discover that the Jesus we worship is a real and present danger to the status quo in our lives and communities. A wonderful place to read more about this is in the epistle of First John. Time and again that short text connects love and obedience to knowing God and hope in God. For instance, in 1 John 3:14 we read,

We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death.

The love of God poured into our hearts is then, to us, something very practical. As Albert Schweitzer wrote, “We can only bring so much of the Kingdom of God into the world as we possess within us,” and, “To be a Christian means to be possessed and dominated by a hope of the Kingdom of God, and a will to work for it, which bids defiance to external reality.”