The first cry of Jesus from the cross which we will consider is His cry from Ps 22:1: ‘My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?’ (Matt 27:46)
It is a cry of dereliction, a cry of desolation. Christians traditionally understand this prayer not only as an indication of how we often feel – abandoned by God in difficult times – but of the weight of what Jesus had to endure in order to bring about our salvation. The Protestant reformer Calvin wrote ‘If Christ died only a bodily death, it would have been ineffectual… Unless his soul shared in the punishment, he would have been the Redeemer of bodies only.’ (Calvin’s ‘Institutes’ II xvi 10) Jesus, who had previously only known the close fellowship of the Father (John 16:32), was alone as God the Holy One could not look on sin. Again, this is a mystery we cannot fully comprehend, for we know that ‘God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them’ (2 Cor 5:19) at this time, but the fact remains that Jesus experienced aloneness and separation from the Father in ways that, because of His sacrifice, we will never have to. He knows more about our suffering, pain and heartache than we can ever imagine:
‘We may faint and we may sink
Feel the pain and near the brink
But the dark begins to shrink
When you find the one who knows
He knows
He knows
Every hurt and every sting
He has walked the suffering.
He knows
He knows
Let your burdens come undone
Lift your eyes up to the one
Who knows
He knows.’ (He Knows’, Jeremy Camp)
So often, when we face difficulties, trials, challenges, illness and pain, our first response is ‘Why?’ It’s a question that we all ask, but it’s a question that God rarely answers as we would expect. ‘Why would God allow this child to suffer in this way? Why has God allowed this good person to die so young? Why doesn’t God do something about the tragedy in the world?’ These are the questions we ask, in tones that range from bewildered grief to fierce anger.
‘Faith in God is not an escape from reality. Faith in God is a plunge into reality in all its dimensions, and not the least of these realities is death,’ Eugene Peterson writes. (‘The Word Made Flesh’, P 244) Jesus’s prayer on the cross reminds us that it’s alright to ask these questions, even if we cannot force the answers. God is not shocked by our questions. There is no prohibition on the topics that we can bring to God.
It’s also worth remembering that though this is the first cry of Jesus from the cross, it’s not the last. As we bring our questions to God, as we talk to Him even though we may feel He has forsaken and abandoned us, we are in a place where, in ways we often cannot articulate, God actually does respond to us and answer us. Ps 22 begins in forsakenness but ends with ‘They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!‘ (Ps 22:31) We may not understand how this transition happens, but we rest assured that God will never walk away from our sin-stained world and therefore that He never will forsake us.
It is a cry of dereliction, a cry of desolation. Christians traditionally understand this prayer not only as an indication of how we often feel – abandoned by God in difficult times – but of the weight of what Jesus had to endure in order to bring about our salvation. The Protestant reformer Calvin wrote ‘If Christ died only a bodily death, it would have been ineffectual… Unless his soul shared in the punishment, he would have been the Redeemer of bodies only.’ (Calvin’s ‘Institutes’ II xvi 10) Jesus, who had previously only known the close fellowship of the Father (John 16:32), was alone as God the Holy One could not look on sin. Again, this is a mystery we cannot fully comprehend, for we know that ‘God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them’ (2 Cor 5:19) at this time, but the fact remains that Jesus experienced aloneness and separation from the Father in ways that, because of His sacrifice, we will never have to. He knows more about our suffering, pain and heartache than we can ever imagine: