How a Rhetorical Question Changed My Perspective of Worship

The Son of God was dying. He hung limp on a cross, occasionally mustering His strength to push upwards into a position where He could inhale. Everything hurt: Jesus had been beaten multiple times, mocked with a crown of thorns, and then nailed to a cross. And that was just the physical pain. Beyond that, Jesus’ Father had been forced to turn His back on His own Son. The union of the Trinity that stretched back to the eternal past was broken. Jesus could feel that brokenness in every fiber of His being. With great effort, He cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

These were not the only words Jesus choked out while nailed to the cross: the Bible records several sentences that give us clues about what He was thinking while He died. We see Jesus’ love for His mother, we see His mercy both for those who asked for it and for those who did not, and we see a sense of completion. I imagine that Jesus gasped out the words “It is finished” with a wave of relief. Because it was true. The Sacrifice was made.

So we have some insight into Jesus’ thoughts, but I wonder what else flickered through His exhausted mind as He hung on the cross. Did He wrestle with the temptation to wipe the planet clean in a blast of fire? Did He struggle to see through the pain to the importance of His sacrifice? Did He think of the billions of people His death and resurrection would spare from damnation?

Did He think of me?

I grew up going to church, singing worship songs on Sunday mornings and the occasional Wednesday night. I was taught that worship was a way of life and not just a form of singing. That was good news for me since I was not, and am not, particularly musical. But it was also bad news since I am even worse at living a life of worship to God than I am at singing.

When it actually came to the “worship” portion of a church service, I learned that it was easy to just not participate. You can slip by relatively unnoticed without ever opening your mouth. This is especially true if you adopt a reverent expression, looking like you are really paying attention to the words or are too busy praying and meditating to do any actual singing. And you know what? There were plenty of times when I was actually praying or meditating, when the reverent expression on my face wasn’t just Sunday-morning stealth-mode.

But somewhere along the line, I had a thought: if Jesus was eternal and all-knowing, then, when He was hanging on that cross, could He hear me?

You could probably kick this idea around for hours. Jesus is eternal, so it’s unclear (at least to me, a mortal) how He experiences time. Maybe He experiences multiple moments simultaneously. But then, when He was on the cross, He was human which may have involved voluntarily subjecting Himself to linear time. But He is all-knowing, so even if He couldn’t literally hear me, He did know I would (or would not) sing. But He also had a human brain and may have only been able to focus on one thought at a time (see Mark 5:30 for a possible example). Additionally, from Jesus’ cries about being forsaken by God, it is even less clear what contact He had with eternity.

My brain bounced the idea back and forth but very quickly realized that the answer to the question does not matter. The point is not whether Jesus could literally hear me as He died on the cross. The point is that Jesus can hear me now, can see me now, knows my every move now. And He is the same Jesus who hung on that cross, who voluntarily died for me.

I still don’t sing all the time. But I try to participate more than I used to. But, if there is a chance that from the cross Jesus threw His mind into the future to listen to my little church, I want to be in the mix.

I’m not trying to claim that my personal voice is definitely on Almighty God’s “most played” list. But thinking of Jesus on the cross, alone and in nightmarish agony . . . I just want to tell Him how great He is, how thankful I am, how sorry I am for putting Him there. I know I can never pay Him back, but I want to spend my life trying. I want my voice, my actions, my life to be in the mix with the billions of others throughout the centuries that have sought to live their lives for Him. And it’s not because my voice is so great; it’s because Jesus is so great that He deserves what I have. That’s worship. And I don’t know that anything puts me in that frame of mind like the thought of my God as a blood-soaked near-corpse hanging on a tree . . . on my behalf.

Could He hear me? Did He think of me? For all practical purposes, I believe the answer is “yes.”