Our faith tells us that we're not alone, that God is faithful. But our rioting emotions cry out "How can my Father in heaven allow this dreadful thing to happen? I've been a faithful son or daughter! I thought God loved me!"
I know. I experienced these terrible feelings while watching my son suffer from brain cancer for a year and die; I was just recuperating from that, and then my husband and I have lately endured the suffering of having a daughter go through a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation for breast cancer.
Depression, insomnia, feelings of grief so great we feel we'll go insane, and, worst of all, the feeling of utter isolation, and separation from God - these are all part of suffering.
One of Jesus' great friends, Martha, confronts Jesus with a similar response when her brother Lazarus dies. She almost reprimands him, saying "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." What she means is "Where were you? Why were you absent from our lives when my brother was suffering and needed you?"
Suffering doesn't make rational sense to us. Our reason doesn't want to face suffering as anything that a good God would or should allow. Yet Jesus, true God and True Man, suffered in exactly this same way that human beings do. He chose to empty himself of his Divinity, "taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, death on a cross." (Philippians 2: 7 & 8.)
So often we concentrate on Jesus' terrible physical pain during his Passion, and we forget the terrible psychological, spiritual, and emotional pain that he suffered because he had emptied himself, given up the perfection of Divinity. His most agonizing time on the cross came when he cried out "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?"
Jesus, who had always said "The Father and I are one," was experiencing the complete loss of his ability to sense his oneness with his Father. He no longer experienced his Father's continuing Presence. This was the darkest night, the greatest feeling of abandonment and rejection by his Father, that he ever endured. He not only carried our sins; he carried all the fragility and spiritual darkness of being a limited human being.
Yet Jesus continued with words of trust that did not come from sensing his Father's presence but were spoken in a faith that was an act of his will: "Father, into Your hands I commend my Spirit." Jesus chose to trust His Father in spite of physical and mental agony and the total absence of spiritual comfort.
Some theologians have said that the Father's great agony was the necessity of His withdrawing His comfort from His Son during his crucifixion - so that Jesus could experience the fullness of human suffering. So that Jesus could live out the fullness of faith and trust in His Father in that absence of spiritual comfort. So that Jesus, in every way, would be one with us. What greater love could there ever be for us than this! We can be strengthened by the crucified Christ who also endured feeling abandoned by our Father. We too can choose to surrender in faith and trust to our Father in the midst of our suffering.
We know how the Father ultimately answered Jesus' painful cries; He raised Jesus from the dead; He proved to be Jesus' true Father because He gave His Son new life. In the same way, God the Father proves His Love for us: in spite of our feelings of deadness, abandonment and rejection, when we open ourselves to Him in trust and faith, He brings us countless small resurrections, countless new ways of being alive and growing, until our final death and resurrection. Because of the transcendence of our faith and trust in Him, faith and trust which travel beyond reason to a new way of seeing, we find a new, deeper relationship with the One Who mysteriously is always Our Father.
Pope John Paul II, a noted poet, expressed all this wonderfully:
He (Jesus) often looks at me from out there,
nailing my face with his gaze.
Do you know, do you know, my brother,
how he loves us? Our Father.
But the depth of his words no one knows,
no one knows how far
the farthest reason goes.
how limitless his suffering was -
solitude on the tree of the cross.
No, not the blood on the tree
that blossomed as all labors blossom
in the bread of tomorrow:
only the Father's rejection, that sorrow
of being rejected.
For that cry: Why hast thou
forsaken me, Father, Father -
and for the weeping of my Mother -
I have redeemed on your lips
two simple words: Our Father.
(from "Song of the Inexhaustible Sun" in the collection "The Place Within: The Poetry of Pope John Paul II.")