When God kept vigil

The night before his death, Jesus asked some of his closest followers to keep vigil with him, to “watch and pray.” We’ve been keeping a different kind of vigil in our house as Lent draws to a close: feeding, comforting, changing, rocking our newborn son through the small hours of the night. It’s made for a strange contrast during Holy Week — marking the death of Jesus while we celebrate new life in our family. Becoming a father again has made me wonder what it meant for God to be a “Father” on the night Jesus was sentenced to die.

Some would have us see Jesus’ death as a legal transaction to satisfy the demands of an angry God. They think God sent his Son to the cross to appease divine wrath against us. A just and holy God cannot tolerate the presence of sin, so he poured all his fury onto Jesus, and then he turned his back on him.

But what if God was there all along, keeping vigil with his Son? After all, isn’t that what fathers do?

I believe Jesus died in our place on Good Friday. I believe he bore the weight of sin and death on his shoulders, as he strained for each breath, scratching his already flayed skin against the rough texture of a Roman cross. I believe this was God’s plan of rescue, how he ransomed the world from sin and death.

But if God is in some way a “Father” (there are also maternal descriptions of God in Scripture, to be sure) — and if this term says something meaningful about God’s character — then it has to have some correspondence to the human experience of being a father.

Becoming a father for the second time has reminded me that I could never, ever turn my back on my child. If I did, I would cease to be a father in any meaningful sense of the word. Believe me, there are times — especially in the middle of the night — when I’d rather turn over, go back to sleep, and let my crying son fend for himself. But that’s not what fathers (or mothers) do. We nurture. We comfort. And when there is no comfort to be had — when my son is crying simply because this strange new world is too much for him — we keep vigil.

That’s what I think God was doing the night before his death. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was not a declaration of abandonment so much as a plea for God to draw near. (It helps if you read the whole psalm that Jesus quoted.) Fathers don’t abandon their kids.

When morning came, God did not send his Son to the cross. God himself went to the cross. God died so we could live. And through this death, he showed us the way to live. He showed us what it means to be a father who never, ever abandons his children, even in the darkest hours of the night.

Photo: Randy OHC on Flickr /  CC BY 2.0