March 31: Why?
♫ Music:
Day 27 - Monday, March 31
Title: Why?
Scripture: Matthew 27:45–53 (NKJV)
Now from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over all the land. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” Some of those who stood there, when they heard that, said, “This Man is calling for Elijah!” Immediately one of them ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed, and offered it to Him to drink. The rest said, “Let Him alone; let us see if Elijah will come to save Him.” And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit. Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.
Poetry & Poet:
“The Task”
by Edward Hirsch
You never expected
to spend so many hours
staring down an empty sheet
of lined paper
in the harsh inner light
of an all-night diner,
ruining your heart
over mug after mug
of bitter coffee
and reading Meister Eckhart
or Saint John of the Cross
or some other mystic
of nothingness
in a brightly colored booth
next to a window
looking out
at a deserted off-ramp
or unfinished bridge
or garishly lit parking lot
backing up
on Detroit or Houston
or some other city
forsaken at three a.m.
with loners
and insomniacs
facing the darkness
of an interminable night
that stretched into months
and years.
WHY?
Meditating on this passage from Matthew’s Gospel is a lot like staring at de Kooning’s Dark Pond. There appears to be some way to make sense of what we see, but there’s also too much chaos to really get our heads around it.
In 1948-49, de Kooning made a series of four dark paintings that all had stark black backgrounds playing host to a jumble of undulating lines of white paint. Even though they appear quite simple in composition, the artist embedded some cryptic subtleties within them. The eye cannot help but trace the varying width, velocity, and opacity of his white lines for some explanation to their movement or shape, but none emerges. While critics can find some identifiable shapes in the other works from the series, Dark Pond remains the most mysteriously stoic of the set. Instead of meaning, the abyss stares back.
And yet, the darkened skies around Calvary surely have a double meaning. Naturally, like Haydn’s somber composition, the darkness covering the land attests to the misery and looming grief of the moment. The strange disturbances (quaking ground, splitting rocks, and disturbed graves) also speak to the inconceivable nature of his suffering. Still, however, the symbol of darkness in the biblical imagination is both one of unapproachable mystery and profound presence. So, this metaphysical thinness around Jesus’ last moments bids us to edge closer.
The mystery seems impenetrable, because we have no access to Jesus’ thoughts or feelings besides his screams and the sparse, desperate words they carry. Perhaps, under such excruciating strains, Jesus cannot verbalize his experience beyond the reflex of claiming Psalm 22’s words as his own: “forsaken.”
Trying to discern exactly what Jesus experiences here, especially in this moment of acutest pain, is certainly impossible for us. Our feeble approximations may not get closer than how Edward Hirsch concludes his poem: “facing the darkness/ of an interminable night/ that stretched into months/ and years.” The sting of utter meaninglessness seems paralyzingly close for him. “Why?” feels like a swirling black hole of doubt and crippling uncertainty, and Jesus did not spare himself from it.
While we may never fully measure the depths of his agony, we must avoid the responses of those present. Either in desperation to end his sufferings or ignorant enjoyment of the tragedy, these remind us how much humanity wants to look away from his sacrifice. As C.S. Lewis explained of Christ’s temptations in Mere Christianity, humans don’t have the fortitude to even consider how much Jesus could actually suffer. We cannot comprehend it. Only the Son of God could face this end.
So, the only proper response is to marvel at his incredible power to love. And never doubt that Christ has power over any kind of seemingly meaningless suffering we’re facing because he has already endured the worst forsakenness for us. In love, he has ensured that we will never suffer alone.
Prayer:
Heavenly Father, give us eyes to see and minds to comprehend more fully the depth of love Christ poured out for us on his cross. Bind us to Jesus, so that we might honor his life, death, and resurrection by following him more closely. Give us grace to quiet our fears and question our doubts when we face trials of our own. Let us instead find a deeper joy through fellowship with his sufferings. We ask it in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
Amen.
Dr. Taylor Worley
Visiting Associate Professor of Art History
Wheaton College
Wheaton, Illinois
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Art:
Dark Pond
Willem de Kooning
1948
Enamel on composition board
46 3/4 x 55 3/4 in.
Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation
Los Angeles, California
Photograph: Brian Forrest
Willem de Kooning’s move to abstraction during the late 1940s was dominated by the so-called “Black Paintings.” These pieces allowed him to test the extremes of abstraction, and develop an artistic vocabulary that enabled the fusion of natural and figurative references using the same mark making. His work like Dark Pond retains a figurative element evoking hidden anatomical and natural forms that seem to be in the midst of a struggle. The restricted palette of black and white allowed de Kooning to experiment with a loose, Cubist-style abstraction, but remnants of the human figures remain visible underneath the swirls of paint.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/483878
About the Artist:
Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) was a Dutch-American Abstract Expressionist artist. Born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, he moved to the United States in 1926, becoming a US citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried. In the years after World War II, De Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to as Abstract Expressionism or "action painting," and was part of a group of artists that came to be known as the New York School. Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, and Richard Pousette-Dart. De Kooning's retrospective held at MoMA in 2011–2012 made him one of the best-known artists of the twentieth century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_de_Kooning
About the Music: “My God, My God Why Have You Forsaken Me” from The Seven Last Words of Christ
Lyrics:
Eli, Eli, Lama Sabactani?
Oh, My God, look upon me;
why have you forsaken me?
Why?
Oh, My God, look upon me;
why have you forsaken me?
Go not from me.
Why art thou so far from my health,
and from the words of my complaint?
Go not from me.
All they that see me,
laugh me to scorn.
Hide not thou thy face from me.
Thou hast been my succor.
Leave me not.
Forsake me not.
Hide not thou thy face, O God.
Turn thee unto me, for I am desolate
and in misery.
Oh, My God, look upon me;
why have you forsaken me?
Why?
Look upon me;
Go not from me.
My hope has been in thee,
O Lord.
Lord, in thee have I trusted.
I have said, thou art my God.
“The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross” is an orchestral work by Joseph Haydn, commissioned in 1786 for the Good Friday service at the Oratorio de la Santa Cueva (Holy Cave Oratory) in Cádiz, Spain. It was published in 1787 and performed in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna; then the composer adapted it in 1787 for string quartet and in 1796 as an oratorio. The seven main meditative sections—labeled "sonatas"—are framed by a slow introduction and a fast "earthquake" conclusion. The priest who commissioned the work, Don José Sáenz de Santa María, paid Haydn in a most unusual way—sending the composer a cake that Haydn discovered was filled with gold coins.
About the Composer:
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) was an Austrian composer of the classical period. He was instrumental in the development of chamber music, and his contributions to musical form have earned him the epithets "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet." Haydn spent much of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Hungarian Esterházy family at their remote estate. Until the later part of his life, this isolated him from other composers and trends in music so that he was, as he put it, "forced to become original.” Yet his music circulated widely, and for much of his career he was the most celebrated composer in Europe. He was a friend and mentor of Mozart, a teacher of Beethoven, and the older brother of composer Michael Haydn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Haydn
About the Performers: The Chanticleer Singers
The Grammy award–winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer is known around the world for its wide-ranging repertoire and dazzling virtuosity. Founded in San Francisco in 1978 by singer and musicologist Louis Botto, Chanticleer quickly took its place as one of the most prolific recording and touring ensembles in the world, selling over one million recordings and performing thousands of live concerts to audiences around the world. Chanticleer’s repertoire is rooted in the Renaissance, and has continued to expand to include a wide range of classical, gospel, jazz, and popular music with a deep commitment to commissioning new compositions and arrangements. Chanticleer is the recipient of the Dale Warland/Chorus America Commissioning Award and the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming, and its music director emeritus Joseph H. Jennings received the Brazeal Wayne Dennard Award for his contribution to the African American choral tradition during his tenure with Chanticleer. Chanticleer continues to maintain ambitious programming in its hometown of San Francisco, including a large education and outreach program, and an annual concert series that includes its legendary holiday tradition “A Chanticleer Christmas.”
https://www.chanticleer.org/about
About the Poetry and Poet:
Edward M. Hirsch (b. 1950) is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry entitled How to Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker called "a masterpiece of sorrow." Hirsch has built a reputation as an attentive and elegant writer and reader of poetry. Over the course of many collections of poetry and criticism, and the long-running “Poet’s Choice” column in the Washington Post, Hirsch has transformed the quotidian into poetry in his own work, as well as demonstrated his adeptness at explicating the nuances and shades of feeling, tradition, and craft at work in the poetry of others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Hirsch
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edward-hirsch
About the Devotion Writer:
Dr. Taylor Worley
Visiting Associate Professor of Art History
Wheaton College
Wheaton, Illinois
Taylor Worley is visiting associate professor of art history at Wheaton College and director of a research project on conceptual art and contemplation. He completed a Ph.D. in the areas of contemporary art and theological aesthetics in the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews and is the author of Memento Mori in Contemporary Art: Theologies of Lament and Hope (Routledge, 2020). Taylor is married to Anna, and they have four children: Elizabeth, Quinn, Graham, and Lillian.