Luke 18:13d: “‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’”
Introduction
Help, I have done it again
I have been here many times before
Hurt myself again today
And the worst part is
there’s no one else to blame.
Be my friend, hold me
Wrap me up, unfold me
I am small and needy
Warm me up and breathe me[i]
We are not in control; this bothers us. Further, we are guilty; and we detest it. To be out of control is one thing, but to be guilty, too? Repugnant. Why is it repugnant? Because we like to—nay—need to see ourselves as good and irreproachable. Anything falling short of that is inadmissible. Our person and being, our existence and identity is formed and conditioned on being right and good. Our ideologies must be right so we can see ourselves as good; our actions must be good because we are right. Anything that challenges this association collapses the fragile worlds we’ve built around us where we are king and queen, self-enthroned monarch. We’ve conflated our existence with our actions and thoughts; we are what we do, we are what we think, we are what we say. Thus, admitting we are out of control or, worse, we are guilty is an existential problem. So, we must avoid that confession at all costs.
I wish I had better words. I don’t. I know we’d like to blame something else or someone else for being out of control and guilty. The sheer terror we feel in confessing being out of control and our guilt makes us eager to displace this repugnant feeling somewhere else; someone else is toxic, someone else is the problem, that group over there, that generation above us or that generation below us. It can’t be us ever because that will undo us, unravel us into nothing. Sadly, the very bad news is that we have no one to blame but ourselves. We’ve done this. We’re the issue. Hi, it’s us, we’re the problem. In our inability to be honest—really, truly, terrifyingly honest—we cause problems for ourselves, for others, and for the world. We are out of control, and we are guilty. We are undone; this makes us ruthless.
Ouch, I have lost myself again
Lost myself and I am nowhere to be found
Yeah, I think that I might break
Lost myself again and I feel unsafe
Be my friend, hold me
Wrap me up, unfold me
I am small and needy
Warm me up and breathe me[ii]
We’ll do anything but confess that we are out of control and guilty. Think of our tendency to resist offering someone a true apology when our actions have negatively impacted them. Oh, I was just joking, why are you so serious…Oh, I didn’t mean it… If you hadn’t _____, then I wouldn’t have____, I’m sorry you feel that way…. Or we let ourselves off the hook completely by blaming supernatural forces, The Devil made me do it… We will do whatever it takes to avoid the humiliation of being wrong. Because if we are wrong, then we must be bad, too.
Look at our national situation. We would rather spin tales and myths than admit we backed the wrong horse. We would rather sacrifice our dignity on the altar of Molech than walk back an ideology that is clearly causing not only pain and suffering, but death. We’d rather keep straining forward and pouring valuable resources—specifically other human beings—into systems that are visibly broken and destructive to all existence on earth than embrace deconstruction and Demythology of the self and start anew. We’d rather cut off friends and family (who have loved us) to reinforce our own chosen narratives defending violent people who don’t even care for us a little bit. We would rather lose ourselves to our fear and anger than make “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”[iii] We’d rather shrug and keep enduring chaos and tumult than confront anyone especially ourselves and our captivity and complicity in all this death and destruction around us. We’d rather die than admit defeat. We’d rather kill than declare our guilt.
Isaiah 53:1-9
He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account.
Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people.
They made his grave with the wicked
and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Using the voice of one of the Isaiahs, God brings us to trial, and we are found guilty. God sent God’s self in God’s son, Jesus Christ, and this one is deemed, by us, unattractive to our sensibilities, unworthy of our care and consideration, and only qualified for our repulsion.[iv],[v] Humanity, hook line and sinker, rejected this one who was of God and who was truly good; and not simply a spiritual rejection, but a physical one, handing him over to painful suffering[vi] and death.[vii] Rather than strip ourselves of our clothing, we stripped him; rather than bear the pain of reproach, we reproached him; rather than endure the discomfort of being guilty, we made him the guilty one and sentenced him to death. We are ruthless when threatened with guilt
What was he guilty of? Exposing us…to the core. Jesus exposed our inability to judge between good and evil correctly. The very thing we craved back in Genesis 3, to discern and judge good and evil, comes back to haunt us and we are exposed in our failure. We sent an innocent man, one who upheld the law every minute of every day, to die the death of one who broke the law while releasing the one who did (literally) break the law: Barabas. But not just Barabas; we also released ourselves. In exposing our inability to judge between good and evil, Jesus exposed our guilt, so we condemned him as the guilty one to let ourselves off the hook.[viii] As Luther writes, “His suffering was nothing else than our sin.”[ix] Jesus exposed not only that we did not understand the law but that we also broke it by forcing it to do what it wasn’t intended to do: condemn the innocent and acquit the guilty.[x] In this way we are the ones who caused Jesus to suffer and to be bruised.[xi] But it isn’t only his life and work that exposed us; his death also exposes us. His agony on the cross becomes our agony.[xii] We are exposed, we are naked, we are guilty, and our ruthlessness bears its teeth. Crucify him!
Isaiah’s prophetic prayer highlights that whether we know it or not, whether we want to admit it or not, we are in agony and are guilty. We are guilty because we believe the mythology that we are in control, because we refuse our creaturely status, because we would rather be ruthless than merciful, we’d rather be right than risk even being a little bit wrong. Thus, this agony is not the product of divine chastisement; it’s the product of our own hands.[xiii] We are caught up in the muck and mire of the tension between being held captive and being complicit. Isaiah says, all have gone astray, we have all turned to our own way. Each of us is called to account for our complicit and captive actions against God’s mission of the revolution of divine life, love, and liberation in the world.
We are exposed naked and we are not in control; [xiv] we are fragile; [xv] we are unsafe;[xvi] we are hurt;[xvii] we are lost;[xviii] and we are guilty; we are stuck and captive, in need of intervention.
However, we’d rather kill than let someone else help us out of our own ideological and mythological quicksand.
Rather than let Christ’s voice call us, Christ’s actions challenge us, Christ’s presence change us, we clamored for Jesus’s death, and we got it. Because we hate being exposed and being guilty, hate being naked and fragile, hate having to be wrong, confessing our being lost and unsafe; the judgment of God is surely upon us. Today, in this story, we are reminded that Jesus bore our iniquity…because he bore our very, very bad judgment informed by the doctrines and dogmas of the kingdom of humanity and not the kingdom of God. The weight of that judgment, as we watch and witness the death of God by our hand, renders us to our own death. Today, our incarceration to our own comfort, to what makes our own selves feel safe, our hardheartedness and stiff-neckedness comes to a cataclysmic head-on collision with God; none of us survive.
Today, we get what we want, we get to let ourselves off the hook and continue down deadly paths of ignorance and denial; by our own hands we realize and affirm our captivity to our ruthless, hopeless, helpless, lifeless, and groundless self-centeredness while we parade about as God proud of ourselves as the world burns down around us. Today, we are dead where we are as we were, stuck in ourselves, curved all the way in. Because, today, we killed God.
[i] Sia,”Breathe Me,” verse 1 and chorus.
[ii] Sia,”Breathe Me,” verse 2 and chorus.
[iii] Step 4 of AA’s 12 Steps
[iv] LW 17:220, “‘There was nothing to attract us, nothing that we might care for. Everything about Him was repulsive.’ See how the prophet toils as he describes His contemptible appearance. It is as if he were saying, ‘The people treated Him in a most horrible way.’”
[v] LW 17:220, “There was a revulsion of seeing.”
[vi] LW 17:220 “He is a man wounded and beaten…”
[vii] LW 17:220, “rejected by men” “…‘one for whom there is no concern whatever, one from whom all turn away.’ This is not an easy suffering. These words cannot be understood as referring to the glory of the Kingdom, nor do they speak of a simple and spiritual suffering. They speak rather of a physical, open, and extremely shameful suffering.”
[viii] LW 17:221, “It was not for Himself and His own sins, but for our sins and griefs. He bore what we should have suffered.”
[ix] LW 17:221
[x] LW 17:221, “The law is that everybody dies for his own sins. Natural reason, and divine as well, argues that everybody must bear his own sin. Yet He is struck down contrary to all law and custom. Hence reason infers that he was smitten by God for His own sake. Therefore the prophet leads us o earnestly beyond all righteousness and our rational capacity and confronts us with the suffering of Christ io impress upon us that all that Christ has is mine.”
[xi] Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah: A Commentary, The Old Testament Library (Louisville: WJK, 2001), 414. “…the confessing community bears testimony to what it has seen and now understands. It was for ‘our sins’ he was tortured; it was for ‘our iniquities’ he was bruised.”
[xii] Heschel, Prophets, 149. “Deliverance, redemption, is what the lord has in store or Irael, and through Israel for all men. Her suffering and agony are the birth-pangs of salvation which, the prophet proclaims, is about to unfold. In answer to the prophet’s servant invocation (51:9), the Lord is about to bare His arm or His might before the eyes of al the nations.”
[xiii] Abraham Heschel The Prophets (New York: JPS, 1962), 151. “Suffering as chastisement is man’s own responsibility; suffering as redemption is God’s responsibility. It was he Who had chosen Israel as his servant; it was He Who had placed upon Israel the task of suffering for others. The meaning of her agony was shifted from the sphere of man to the sphere of God, from the moment to eternity.”
[xiv] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/02/18/exposed-and-naked-we-are-not-in-control/
[xv] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/02/22/exposed-and-naked-we-are-fragile/
[xvi] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/03/08/exposed-and-naked-we-are-unsafe/
[xvii] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/03/22/exposed-and-naked-we-are-hurt/
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