Fourth Word from the Cross: 'Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?'

A Sermon originally preached on Good Friday 2013

This Fourth Word from the Cross takes us into much deeper, darker places. As we have gazed into the deep pool of the Passion, we have seen more recognizable reflections of ourselves and of our own lives near the surface. But here is something else. Here is something more unsettling.

Jesus cries out in the depths of abandonment. When Matthew and Mark recount this Word, they are writing in Greek, but choose to record Jesus’s words of anguish in the words of Aramaic that would have come directly from his mouth: ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani’: that is, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ The Aramaic words are harsh and foreign, unknown to us. They would likely have been as unfamiliar to many of the original readers of the Gospels.

Perhaps Luke and John are not as comfortable with this Word of abandonment. They don’t even record it at all. In Matthew and Mark, however, it’s the only thing Jesus has to say. And it’s jarring. Has God really abandoned Jesus? For all that he is God’s dearly beloved Son, in whom God is well pleased, has he been left to suffer this horrific death in complete abandonment, forsaken by his friends, his followers, and now even God?

Or is Jesus saying that it feels like God has abandoned him? He knows that he hasn’t, because he knows God better than any other human being has ever known God. But nevertheless, in this black day, it feels so bad that Jesus is on the very edge of despair. He will teeter on the brink, and before being completely lost in its blackness, even though he dies, he will be saved by the coming Resurrection. Is that what Jesus means?

Some people argue that we shouldn’t take this cry in its literal sense. They say that Jesus is simply quoting the 22nd psalm, and that he didn’t really feel abandoned at all. If you literally believe in God forsaking or abandoning Jesus, it would be to believe that Jesus really wasn’t the Son of God.

What is at stake here is the question of whether evil will lead to victory. The way that Matthew and Mark paint the picture is a particularly bleak one. After spending the night before praying for God to intervene, Jesus hangs on the cross with a measure of discouragement. He is quoting a psalm that is something of an emotional roller coaster. It begins with the note of abandonment, but by the end of Psalm 22, the tension has been resolved. The speaker in the psalm is one who has been committed to God since birth and has consistently relied on God. So his present predicament is a particularly poignant one. For the first time, God has not responded, and seems to have forsaken him. That situation is about as appropriate as you can get for Jesus on the cross.

Yet it is the silence of God that seems most uncomfortable here. It is what torments Jesus the most. Of all the seven words from the cross, this is the one most laden with emotion. To all appearances, God has abandoned him to his tormentors, and seems to be taking no notice of the scene playing out at Calvary.

Here, in his agony, Christ is about to die for the sins of the world. Here he takes that great weight onto his shoulders, and it would be fair enough to assume that this great burden is what feels like God’s abandonment. Perhaps he is setting an example for us, for how we ought to bear our own trials and minor agonies, knowing that there is nothing we can go through that Christ hasn’t already suffered.

But there is something even more profound going on here. In this death and despair, he is not just setting us an example. He is identifying with us. In this Word, he has entered so incredibly deeply into the pain and darkness of the human condition. Our sins have alienated us and cut us off so far from God that in becoming like us, Jesus can hardly but lose sight of the Father.

Right here, in this cry of dereliction, is the mystery of the Incarnation. If Jesus did not become fully human, than everything else in his life: the birth in Bethlehem, the time spent teaching and healing in Galilee, all the miracles, even the Resurrection, are nothing but parlour tricks. Smoke and mirrors. For the Word to become flesh and dwell among us, he must enter fully and completely into the human condition.

This cry of abandonment is our cry, uttered through Jesus’s lips

He is like us in all things, except sin. Here on the Cross, though, he has committed no sin, but he feels the full consequences of sin. Here he reveals what it is to be human: a broken creature, and a sinner before God. He came to be like us, to identify with sinners. At the River Jordan, he is baptized by John, though he has no sins of which to repent. He comes to take his stand with us. In the Judean wilderness, he is tempted like us, and again shows that he is made like his brethren in every respect. For all his closeness to humanity in Galilee, he is never closer to us than at this point. Here he is completely baptized, which literally means submerged into our humanity and our death.

And the great paradox is that we are baptized into his death. Where death was once the ultimate symbol of the brokenness of Creation, and of all the alienation of sin, now it is something new. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. We are no longer individual units, living and dying to ourselves, in consequence of our own brokenness and our own life. St. Paul says ‘One has died for all, therefore all have died. He died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.’

Here we have Christ’s Incarnation, Baptism, Death, Resurrection, and our own new life in his Body the Church. Without this great connection and fellowship, without Christ’s sharing in our humanity, none of this makes any sense at all. This cry of abandonment is our cry, uttered through Jesus’s lips, and this, too, is a mystery. Peering into the pool, we find mystery after mystery, and this is perhaps the deepest and darkest. Yet in its inscrutable inky blackness, there is also the seed of glorious resurrection and new life, waiting to be fully revealed.