Are You With Me—or Not? — March 29, 2026, Sunday of the Passion

Are You With Me—or Not? 

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Matthew 26:14—27:66

An online version of the Passion from Matthew is here.

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It is Jesus’s cry from the cross that is so hard for me to hear. In the garden, he seemed so sure that he knew what was to come. He did plead for relief, then, but it is something else to hear his anguished cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 

“Why have you abandoned me?” I confess, at the lowest points of my heart, it was this kind of cry that I was afraid to utter. Most often, I chose to ignore God entirely—whether it be God’s presence, or some God-shaped hole in my life—I just bricked up a wall of silence, so I wouldn’t have to think about how lonely and abandoned I felt. I long referred to it as “radio silence,” but, when I look back, I’m not so sure who was actually silent—God…or me. But, if Jesus knew what was to come, if it was God’s purpose (a purpose which he is intimately a part of, too, as the God-made-flesh) how can Jesus, of all people, feel abandoned by God? Yet I’ve come to believe, that somehow, that question is its own answer. 

When I went to try and make some sense of this, I noticed an interesting structure in the text, an outline the ancients liked to use, a kind of mirror-image outline, which, for all you Bible nerds out there, is called a chiasm. So, in the Passion, we see, at the trial, is this a big variety of people: Jewish religious scholars, many of whom were Roman collaborators, Roman authorities, soldiers, and, almost an afterthought, there’s even someone from outside the current events, someone from out of the country, Simon of Cyrene, compelled to carry Jesus’s cross. So that’s one part of the mirror. The other part comes way at the end, after the crucifixion, to the last resurrection scene, where Jesus tells some Jewish everyday folks, some women, to bring a message—the Good News—to the Gentiles, and with it is a reminder, that Jesus is with them until the end of the age. So we’ve got Jews and Gentiles (which, in this worldview is everybody) on each side of the crucifixion.

Now this is interesting to me, because way back at the beginning, there’s another scene with some outsiders, some religious scholars, some Romans, some soldiers wreaking havoc on innocent lives. It’s when magi come from the East and inquire about the birth of—catch this—the King of the Jews. And this story has its own Jews and Gentiles mirror—its own everybody mirror, in the lineage of Jesus, the very first verses of this gospel, where Matthew shows that Jesus has, in his background, Jewish everyday folks and, then, these four women, four Gentile women. So there are these two mirrored structures which are also mirrors of each other. 

Ok, I admit: this is high level Bible geek stuff. (I confess my guilt!) But these mirrored structures point are used to point to what’s in the middle. To emphasize this point.

And in the middle of the Passion is Jesus, on the cross, wondering aloud whether or not God is actually with him. Common words, really, found at the bottom of tragedies—both the garden-variety and the world-shaping kind. Where is God when bombs rain from the sky? Where is God when the pollution of those bombs turns the rain to acid, and the playground into a minefield? Where is God when children die of starvation, and their mothers cannot be consoled? But where, too, is God when the news at the doctors’ office is all bad, when we leave the hospice house for the last time, when it seems that all the joy has been drained from the room, from the relationship? Do you see? We cry, God, why have you abandoned me? God, are you with me or not? This is our most human cry, right here, at the center of the climax of the story. And it doesn’t come from Judas or Peter or Pilate, it comes from Jesus.

Now, way back at the beginning, between the lineage of Jews and Gentiles and the Magi setting off a murderous King Herod, is the announcement of an angel that this child would be called Jesus, Emmanuel—would be called God saves, God is with us. It is a promise—a promise Matthew spends the entire gospel keeping. And he keeps it by putting Jesus with us, not in triumph, but at the bottom: at the end of the rope, at the end of our hope, at the close of each day, at the close of every life. And when this gospel ends, the Risen Christ answers his own question, installs an exclamation point at the end of the promise: saying, I am with you always! I. am. with. you. always. Even to the end of the age.

Amen.