Matthew 27:46

Virtually every word Jesus spoke from the cross until the very end was a word on behalf of someone else. He thought of others first. He looked at his persecutors and asked for their forgiveness. He looked at the malefactor to his right and promised him salvation. He looked at his mother and gave her a son. As he lived, so he died.

But there was one word from the cross, that in its moment of confusion and despair, Jesus turns in upon himself. He looks up into the blackened sky and utters his bitter lament, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" --which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" None of us can get inside the mind of Jesus and understand the full significance of these mysterious words, but let’s at least explore them for some understanding. Perhaps they will enable us to renew our own sense of intimacy with the Heavenly Father.

What must it have been like? This God-forsaken-ness—who can describe this feeling? Some of us, thinking of past or present experiences, might say, “Surely the worst part must have been inward—mental, emotional, spiritual anguish. Physical pain cannot account for his cry. Mental torture—is there anything worse than that?”

That’s how many of us would answer. We have, at times, felt that God abandoned us. When crushing misfortune crosses our path with untold heartache and bereavement, or when bewildering disappointment necessitated a drastic change in life’s plans, or when we heard no answers to our desperate questions, darkness fills our world, and hopelessness makes each endless day more miserable than the one before it. In these crises of life, it seems no one knows; no one understands; no one cares. We even wonder whether God cares. Nay, we become certain of it—not even God cares!

So there are days when Christ’s cry becomes our cry and we are sure God has deserted us. But we also know times when we have deserted God and abandoned his will for our lives. We could have stood by a friend in need, but we decided instead to protect our own interests and passed by our neighbor on the other side. We could have held tightly to God’s promise to help us, but we gave in to fear and anxiety. We could have resolved to remain faithful to some noble and Christlike cause, but we caved in to the temptations of the crowd. We could have been bolder in our witness to Christ, but we held our tongue instead and let slip an opportunity to confess the name of Jesus. And just then, when we saw Christ look at us more in pity than in anger, we felt the crushing blow of our actions, and as Peter did we also would fall to our knees and say, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” (Lk 5:8).

Some of us take Peter’s words too far. We never fully accept forgiveness, and consequently, don’t know when to give it to someone else. How sad that we can never completely erase bad memories. And wounds caused by wrongdoing are left open and festering. At such times, God’s grace seems too good to be true.

But, does God ever slam the door in the face of the penitent? No! But we have hours when a sense of guilt just lingers in unshakable tenacity. Knowledge of the Merciful Father seems distant and remote, overwhelmed by the heart that can’t see beyond the hurt. My friends, I know, I’ve been there. There is nothing more evil or damning than to be unjustly accused of wrongdoing. It leaves indelible scars and a sense of being unworthy of God’s presence. So what does all of this have to do with Jesus?

It has to do with The Human Jesus: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” These words caused difficulty for the Church in the first centuries when theologians attempted to formulate the relationship between the divine and human natures of Christ. They probably present difficulty for our thinking as well. If Jesus is uniquely and fully divine—God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, as we confess in the Nicene Creed—how could Jesus say, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” How can God the Son say the Father has forsaken him? These very human words of Jesus tend to be an embarrassment for anyone who asserts the divinity of Jesus and his unique oneness with his Father. It makes it difficult to witness to an unbeliever.

However, whatever difficulty these words present in trying to understand the divinity of Jesus, they present no difficulty whatsoever in confessing the humanity of Jesus. Here in these words of confusion and doubt and despair, Jesus demonstrates that he is truly and completely human. Here he identifies himself with us in our humanity. Do we feel lonely and friendless? So did Jesus. Have we experienced sorrow and adversity? So did he. Do we wonder about the future and how things will turn out? So did he. Do we question God and demand to know why? So does he. “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Because Jesus is fully human, he knows our grief and sorrow and struggle with sin. Remember that old song? “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.” Well, nobody does know, but Jesus. That is true not because Jesus is the divine, all-knowing God, but because he is the truly human being—bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh—the marks of crucifixion still on his resurrected body.

The Sympathetic Jesus: When life’s troubles come, and we are tempted to believe that God cannot know what it is like, we need to remind ourselves of these words from Hebrews. The writer refers to Jesus as the Son of God but then writes that Jesus is not “unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Heb 4:15-16).

As God, Jesus immersed himself in our humanity and knew every bit as well, and more, our loneliness, sorrow, doubt, and even despair. God does know what it is like. And God certainly does care. We also need to be reminded that, as God, Christ was one with us in our sin and iniquity. He knows not only our times of trouble, but also our feelings of separation from God because of sin—our sin, not his. Why else would the apostle of God say, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21).

Yes, we experience guilt when we are ashamed of what we have done. Our conscience is soiled, and we cannot rid ourselves of the smell of our sin. But worse, we feel God has driven us out of his garden and locked the gate behind us so we cannot know again the intimate fellowship of a loving father. “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

The Saving Jesus: But of course, he hasn’t forsaken us. He wants us to know the gate to his beautiful garden is open, wide open, and our past can be left behind at the entrance. He wants us to know that he waits within the garden for a friendly and fatherly visit. We don’t know this because he appointed a committee to carry out his plans for our reunion or because he issued a written invitation from a distant heaven. God dealt with our sin in a more radical way. On the cross, in Jesus’ body, God bore our sin—the shame of it, the guilt of it, and the memory of it.

Of course, we have all, like sheep, gone astray, but God has put it all on Jesus and the cross. No more need be done to cancel what separates us from him. There is no other deed needed than Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection for us to know that we are not alone, and God-forsaken in our sin. Not just in Bethlehem’s manger, but on Calvary’s cross, the Word became flesh and dwelt and died among us, full of grace and truth.

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln said, “I have not suffered by the South. I have suffered with the South. Their pain has been my pain. Their loss has been my loss.” What a noble sentiment! But Lincoln wasn’t the South. He did the best he could; he felt with the South—its pain, its loss. But he wasn’t the South in person. His land was not ravaged, his home not destroyed, his blood not shed.

But Jesus went beyond sympathetic association with another’s loss. Would we still believe him had he said, “I can imagine what it must be like to feel forsaken. I’m trying to put myself in your shoes. Be assured that you have my heartfelt sympathy and understanding.” But how that pales in comparison to what he actually said and experienced in person, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

We can be glad that Jesus experienced that? Because of that I know, and so do you, that we live through no days darker than those he lived through. We know there is no sinful stain on our record that Christ’s blood is not strong enough to remove. He shared our humanity in his life and took it to the cross. Now we also share his victory, and that, forever. May it always be so amongst us! Amen.