A Kretzmann Goodie

My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?

There are few unique events in history... The same patterns occur and recur... Here, however, is a moment in the story of man which is unique... Suddenly on a Friday afternoon a man was forsaken of God, cut off from the living and the dead, utterly and ultimately alone... The sudden emptiness in those shadowed eyes... The sudden flood of every sin of every soul from Eden to Chicago raging in a broken heart... It was then, much more than afterward, that He died...

You see, this is sin... It is not merely a matter of murder and adultery and gossip... Something to do or not to do!... It is always loneliness... It is cutting yourself off from God... It is a deliberate turning away from truth, from goodness, from heaven...

You see, this is redemption... All this He took into Himself, alone there in the dark... He became sin for us... A mystery?... Yes, but only a part of the great mystery which began in a stable and was now ending on a cross... Above His "Eli, Eli" was the sound of tearing veils, of falling walls, of the glad crying of those who now had a home again after the long loneliness of sin... They would continue to wander, groping, stumbling, falling, in all the black ways which men will walk when they turn away from God - to the countinghouse, the Maginot line, and the West Wall... But there was a way back now, beyond Jerusalem and beyond thought and hope to the place where the open arms of the cross had become the gates of heaven.

(O.P. Kretzmann, *The Pilgrim*, p. 47)