“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”- I can’t think of ANY utterance more hopeless, more despairing, especially since it proceeds from none other than our Lord’s own lips. After all, Jesus is supposedly the MESSIAH, the SON OF GOD whose will he had come to perform. He was said to have lived on the most intimate of terms with God, addressing him as “Abba Father” or “Poppa.” If that’s the case, then why does his “Heavenly Father” never say a word, never lift a finger to save or at least make things a little easier for him as the crowd reviles him and his life slowly ebbs out. Jesus has been a good and obedient son but when he appeals to God for the slightest bit of grace--just some acknowledgment that God is present in the midst of all his suffering and his pain--he receives instead- TOTAL SILENCE! Why is he not given some simple assurance that his God can HEAR him much less cares what’s happening to him? 

If you think back to his baptism beside the river Jordan, a dove had descended, a cloud appeared, and from out of its midst came this affirmation of support for him and his new ministry, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” Similarly, at his transfiguration, when he had begun preparing himself and his disciples for his passion, AGAIN a cloud appeared and from out of its midst came the words, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” Now, if for all his obedience and devotion he winds up on a cross, dying the most horrible of deaths, then why does he not receive any consolation precisely at a moment when he MOST needs it? Why is there no cloud appearing, no dove descending, and no voice again affirming that he is STILL God’s beloved son in whom he is well pleased? If the opposite of love is not hatred but APATHY and INDIFFERENCE, then doesn’t that contradict my claim that our God is a God of love who promises us under any circumstance he will never leave or forsake US. And what’s MORE, if his Father in Heaven can abandon HIM--his only-begotten SON--at that cross, then who’s to say that he won’t abandon US when we find OURSELVES rejected and alone and perhaps nailed to our OWN cross some day? Can you now see WHY this is such an alarming and troublesome scene, not just for CHRIST but no less for OURSELVES?

The complaint that is often made, that God is “missing-in-action” when we most need him, is not new. All throughout the Bible, you find people of faith asking that very SAME question, “God, where ARE you?” whether it is the ancient Israelites while they labored as slaves in Egypt, and then centuries later when they were taken into exile in Babylon; or Job who lamented, “Oh that I knew where I might find him!...Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him…”; or John the Baptist who wondered whether God had forgotten him while confined in Herod’s dark prison. In Psalm 10, the psalmist begins with the troubling question, “Why dost thou stand afar off, O Lord? Why dost thou hide thyself in times of trouble?”(vv. 1&2) No doubt that is a question we’ve often asked OURSELVES as well. It seems that when life is good and proceeding to plan, it is very easy for us to affirm just how sympathetic and available our God is to us. But when the doctor gives us that diagnosis we’ve been dreading to hear, or our spouse ups and leaves us for the next door neighbor, or we’re suddenly laid off from our job of twenty-five years and the prospects of finding another at our age is less than remote, then we find ourselves wondering where God IS and WHY he’s allowed such events to occur to us--his faithful servants--in the FIRST place. That’s when Jesus’ cry from the cross becomes not only HIS cry but OUR cry as WELL, “Why, Lord, have you forsaken ME!”

The origin of that cry is found in the opening verses of Psalm 22, a scripture Jesus would have known well. There are at least thirteen Old Testament texts that appear in the passion narratives of the various Gospels and eight of them are attributed to the Psalms. This particular psalm is a notable example of a “personal lament”- a “lament” being an expression of sorrow or mourning in which the speaker complains that God has remained silent to him while he goes through a period of suffering and tribulation. There are two major parts to it. In the first part, comprised of verses 1-22, he LAMENTS his situation and the silence of God in the midst of it. He is surrounded by persons who seek to destroy him and death is creeping ever closer. We’re never given the specific details of his predicament or who his enemy is, only that he feels that if God were to give him some kind of indication that he is there, some assurance that he can hear him and knows what it is he is going through, then he would be satisfied- but there seems to be none. He cries out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but thou dost not answer; and by night, but find no rest.”(vv.1,2) HOWEVER, WITH VERSES 23-31, the psalm is suddenly transformed into a song of PRAISE in which the psalmist asks the congregation to celebrate his deliverance with him. He then WIDENS his call for ALL THE NATIONS, in fact, all of HUMANITY to praise God including the living and the dead and even the unborn.

While suspended from that cross with the sun beating down upon him and his body wracked with feverish pain, Jesus thinks back to the complaint made by the psalmist centuries before and finds in him someone whose words perfectly describe his OWN feelings as well. But this is where the problem arises. If Jesus had stopped with just the first two verses of that psalm and no more, then this fourth word from the cross would be a cry of complete hopelessness and despair. When you hear Jesus cry out from that cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then the inevitable conclusion seems to be that he has IN FACT been abandoned by his God. Having become the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, our own Calvinist theology dictates that God MUST reject his son because he has become our sin and sin is a violation of God’s own holiness. For the sins of the world to be completely dealt with, his holy nature DEMANDS that Jesus must die and this includes God having to distance himself UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY from him. Sin cannot abide in the presence of a holy and just God and so God HAS to turn his back on Jesus, or at least that’s what we were taught in Sunday School.

But there may yet be ANOTHER way of looking at this scene of Christ’s dereliction. You see, in Jesus’ day, when the Jews cited scriptures, they didn’t identify certain passages by quoting chapter and verse for such divisions hadn’t been invented yet. It would be another twelve hundred years before chapters and verses were incorporated within the scriptures. Therefore, they referenced a passage by simply quoting it, especially the first line. So the book of Genesis, in Hebrew, is not called “Genesis” but “In the beginning.” Exodus is called “Names” because it opens by listing the names of the sons of Jacob who had gone to Egypt when Joseph was the overseer there- that’s the way the rabbis taught back then. Therefore, when Jesus says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he’s referencing not just the first two verses of Psalm 22 but the ENTIRE PSALM. His hearers would have understood that he was reflecting upon and praying its entirety, ALL of Psalm 22, and not just the opening lines. 

Now a psalm of lament like Psalm 22 usually begins with a complaint to God with the psalmist declaring the wrongs and injustices that he has experienced. It usually lasts for a stanza or two before it changes entirely with the psalmist remembering the works of God. Thus his lament ends on a note of hope and praise. Where he would begin by recounting his troubles, it would conclude by expressing his complete confidence in God. This is what happens in Psalm 22. It starts out with the psalmist feeling forsaken and abandoned, “Why have you forsaken me? I cry out by day, but you do not answer.” But THEN, he makes a shift from a cry of forsakenness to one of complete confidence in God’s deliverance. Beginning with v. 22, he says, “I will tell of thy name to my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise thee: You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you sons of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you sons of Israel! For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; and he has not hid his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him.” As a result of his belief in God’s faithfulness, he is able to declare to his brethren, “From thee comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him. The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the Lord! May your hearts live for ever!”

The truth is that the psalmist is never REALLY forsaken. Where he begins his lament by declaring how he happens to feel at that time, he then recalls God’s faithfulness to him in times past and suddenly his tears dry up and his complaint turns into a song of PRAISE. He “knows that he knows that he knows” that God can NEVER turn his back on his own children. God may remain SILENT at times in the midst of our troubles or suffering but that is not the same as God ABANDONING us. Though silent but for a moment, our Lord maintains the assurance that God HAS NOT nor EVER WILL desert him. If this is the case, then it transforms our traditional understanding of Jesus’s cry from that cross so that it is NO LONGER a cry of dereliction and forsakenness but rather AN EXPRESSION OF CONFIDENCE in the LOVE and FAITHFULNESS of his God--his HEAVENLY FATHER--whom he knows can NEVER abandon him, NEVER cast him off, but rather remains ever present to him DESPITE his silence. 

And WHY would God remain silent to Jesus as he slowly succumbs to the forces of death? As the great German preacher and theologian Helmut Thielicke said about this scene:

But now hear the great mystery of this silence. The very hour when God answered not a word or syllable was the hour of the great turning point when the veil of the temple was rent and God’s heart was laid bare with all its wounds. Even when He was silent, God suffered with us. In His silence He experienced the fellowship of death and the depths with us. Even when we thought He did not care, or was dead, He knew all about us and behind the dark wings He did His work of love. We live in the power of this Golgotha night of silence. Where should we be without the cross? Where should we be without the knowledge that God sends His Son to us in the silent depths and valleys, that He is our Fellow in death; that He has indeed His high thoughts, that they come with power at Easter in glorious fulfillments surpassing all our expectations? (The Silence of God, p. 14f.)

If Thielicke is right, then Jesus regarded his death, not as some unwanted and undeserved tragedy, but as the CONSUMMATION of his life and ministry, the FULFILLMENT of his Heavenly Father’s will. He seemed to know that the path down which he traveled was filled with rejection and agony and even death. He said that he had come to give his life a ransom for many, and that the Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. At another point, he said that greater love had no one than he who would lay down his life for his friends. 

In the years to come, his death as some kind of atoning sacrifice became the central theme and cardinal tenet of the Christian church. The Apostle Paul would tell the Corinthian church that God made him who knew no sin to be sin our behalf, “that we might be made the righteousness of God in him,” while John declared in his own letter, “Herein is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” It seemed without question to those early Christians that Jesus’ life had some sort of redemptive purpose to it and that his death on that cross was the culminating act of that achievement.

Throughout history, many attempts have been made to try to make sense of his death. The reality is that there is no one theory of atonement (“atonement” being the theory or explanation of how God reconciles himself with us) that can ever FULLY explain the mystery of God’s love as revealed in the cross and the death of God’s Son. Over the years, I have seen my OWN understanding of Christ’s cross evolve, and where at one time I was convinced that it involved satisfying a divine demand for blood and justice, I’ve since come to think otherwise. INSTEAD, I NOW see it as a story that expresses the depths and lengths God will go to reveal just how much he loves us. Yes, there is a sacrifice involved but it is the love of one who lays down his life for his friends rather than one appeasing the wrath of an angry God. Behind that act of sacrifice was not divine hatred against human sin but holy love for human sinners. It was God caring for us SO much that he was willing in the person of his Son to take our sins upon himself and suffer for them cruelly upon that tree. That cross is the greatest symbol of selfless, sacrificial love there is for by means of it, God saved humanity, forgiving them and offering them reconciliation. 

By the Creator becoming one with his creation and then allowing himself to suffer and die at their hands, it reveals for all time not just the height and depth of his sympathy but it assures us that when the Son suffered, GOD suffered TOO. Through that cross, Jesus demonstrates complete and perfect solidarity with us, thus becoming our brother in EVERY WAY; through that cross, the Son of God IDENTIFIES with us by not only being BORN like us and LIVING like us and EXPERIENCING HUNGER and THIRST and REJECTION like us, but even SUFFERING and DYING like us in the most painful way imaginable. In this way, we now know with ABSOLUTE ASSURANCE that his God and ours, his Heavenly Father as well as our own, ALSO understands what it means to suffer and die. It is proof that we are not talking about a God who stands afar off from his world--aloof and distant from all its problems--but we are dealing with a LOVING God, with one who became human in order to dwell among us. We know a God who in his love for us determined to experience FIRST-HAND what it is like to be frail, mortal, and human, and that includes both suffering AND death. Here is someone who wants to be one OF us, one WITH us, one who will ACCOMPANY us and STAND BY OUR SIDE REGARDLESS how perilous the road may be on which we travel. In this way, he becomes a comrade of the outcasts and a brother of the blind; a companion of the lonely, the suffering, and the dying EVERYWHERE!

As a result, we now know that God really DOES understand the difficulties and demands that human beings all over this world go through, and not just UNDERSTANDS but he pledges to STAND BESIDE US and WALK WITH US IN SOLIDARITY every step of the way along our OWN life’s journey. It is proof to us that God really DOES understand: God UNDERSTANDS our rejection; God UNDERSTANDS our loneliness; God UNDERSTANDS our sorrow; God UNDERSTANDS our temptation; God UNDERSTANDS our abandonment; God UNDERSTANDS our hunger; God UNDERSTANDS our poverty; God UNDERSTANDS our persecution; God UNDERSTANDS our pain; God even understands DEATH ITSELF! In short, he understands US! God understands it all because through his Son, Jesus Christ, he EXPERIENCED it all, and as a result, we are assured that he LOVES us and that he will be there FOR us, to help us through whatever trial or circumstance we find ourselves in REGARDLESS of how terrible or extreme- both now and forever. May we ever console ourselves with this promise, a promise PROVEN we could trust when our LORD--in the waning hours of his OWN death--confidently and victoriously exclaimed, “Father, into your hands I now commend my spirit!” Let us pray…

Lord Jesus Christ, who in your great passion experienced the utter depths of human anguish, grant that even in those time we are forced to bear pain, physical or mental, we may be drawn into deeper sympathy with the pain and grief of others. In this way, we may enter into a new sense of union with you and your redeeming love even as your Son does with us. This we pray in your name. Amen.