When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?", which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:33-34)
“Christ redeemed us
from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us – for it is
written, 'Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree'” (Galatians 3:13;
cf. Deuteronomy 21:23). Three hours into the shadows of dread that
cloak the earth, Jesus gives voice in this fateful moment – I think
the darkest instant in the life of God from everlasting to
everlasting – to how true he found that message. Having “drunk
at the hand of the LORD the cup of his wrath”,
having drained “to the dregs the bowl of staggering” (Isaiah 51:17), having been denied for it to leave his hands (Isaiah 51:22;
Matthew 26:39), now the curse of wrath reaches critical mass upon the
tree. Yet for the Gospel of Mark, this point is the climax of how
Jesus reveals himself; the baptism and the transfiguration lead up to
this moment, this outburst.
Because Mark tells us the
story of the passion by saturating it with the psalms of lament, it's
no surprise to find the opening words of Psalm 22 on Jesus' lips: “My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34; cf. Psalm 22:1). The lament psalms usually beg God not to forsake us in the
future; it's the worst fate the psalmist can think of. But here,
Jesus takes up the psalmist's place at the lowest of the lows, not
just feeling forsaken but experiencing it as a reality. The same God
who proved himself trustworthy to generations (Psalm 22:4), the same
God who spoke from heaven and empowered miraculous deliverance, now
looks and feels like a no-show.
My God, my God,
why leav'st thou me,
when I with
anguish faint?
O why so far from
me remov'd,
and from my
loud complaint?
All day, but all
the day unheard,
to thee do I
complain;
With cries implore
relief all night,
but cry all
night in vain....
My strength, like
potter's earth, is parch'd,
my tongue
cleaves to my jaws;
And to the silent
shades of death
my fainting
soul withdraws.
(Brady
and Tate 1698:29, 31)
In quoting this psalm,
Jesus wants us to know he's stepping into our shoes in our darkest
moments, the moments when we lose sight of even the smallest joys.
He knows what it's like; God
knows what it's like. Maybe you've watched a loved one waste away –
early, too early, unnaturally early – and you've fallen on your
knees through sleepless nights, pleading with God, imploring him to
heal. Maybe you've lost your job, your pension, your security; maybe
you're at wit's end to make ends meet; maybe everything's out of your
hands. Maybe you've been consumed by self-loathing and self-doubt,
wondering why the world's stacked against you, wondering why God
doesn't tip the scales in your favor. Maybe you've invested all your
hopes and dreams into that last-ditch prayer and felt shattered in
the end, like a sword's pierced your very heart, like your world's a
snow globe rolling off a cliff and the screams of your descent fall
on deaf ears. And maybe, as the pieces scatter out of your reach, as
the universe spins out of control, you've felt these words like never
before: “My God, my
God, why have you forsaken me?”
Maybe you've cried out by day without an answer, maybe you've called
out in the night and found no rest (Psalm 22:2). Maybe you've felt
like no grief was ever like yours. But Jesus on the cross means that
God knows how it feels. No grief was ever like his.
Or
maybe you feel spiritually bankrupt. Maybe you're lost in the dark,
numb to the world, crying out in desolation and desperation and
despair. You think, “If I could just see a spark through the
clouds, if I can only know that there's a light beyond the abyss of
my heart, I can go on living.” And you pray and pray 'til you're
blue in the face, searching for hope despite the nauseating cold
inside, groping blindly for a lifeline when you're convinced you're
as good as dead, begging for even mustard-seed faith when doubts and
disbelief gnaw your soul to tatters – and the minutes and hours
tick by, and days lapse into weeks or months or years, and heaven is
silent as death. And you cry out, “My God, my God, why
have you forsaken me? Why
are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”
I've been there. But most important of all, Jesus on the cross means
that God himself has been in those shoes; he's felt as we've felt at
our lowest. God understands depression, God understands loneliness,
God understands helplessness, God understands despair, God
understands desperation. He's stepped into our shoes at the lowest
place they've ever fallen. God knows what it's like to be
God-forsaken. He asks our questions, he voices our doubts and
burdens, by standing with
us in the depths.
“Clouds and thick darkness are all around him” (Psalm 97:2).
That's
the curious thing about the gospel. God feeling God-forsaken. The
king, lifted up on a throne to rule – but the crown is sharp and
bloody, and the throne looks like shame and blood. He belongs at the
Father's right hand, aglow with power and glory; and the cross
doesn't contradict that, the cross inaugurates
it. For this God,
the real God, the only God worth calling 'God', to start ruling is
to suffer pain and shame and abandonment; it is
to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the downtrodden and the outcasts,
with the broken-hearted whom he came to bind up (Psalm 147:3). When
God becomes flesh, it's to be “a man of sorrows, and acquainted
with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). There's the beauty of the gospel.
Jesus suffered pain, he suffered shame, he suffered abandonment –
not to abolish them for his people, but to redeem
them into a way of hope. How can the persecuted be called 'blessed'
(Matthew 5:10-12)? How can it be that “if you suffer for doing
what's right, you are blessed” (1 Peter 3:14)? Because Jesus was
persecuted, and in the midst of persecution, we can choose to grow
closer to him through
that persecution. And if we're drawn close to our Lord, then that's
a blessing greater than all the harm persecution can do. As the
Christian philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams writes about suffering,
and especially the final suffering of martyrdom:
God in Christ turns martyrdom into an opportunity for intimacy and
identification with him. … The more the believer loves his Lord,
the more he wants to know what it was like for him, what it is like
to be him. The cross of Christ permits the martyr to find in his
deepest agonies and future death a sure access to Christ's
experience. … Moreover, as the believer enters into the love of
Christ and shares his love for the world, he will be able to
appreciate his own suffering as a welcome key into the lives of
others. … For Christians as for others in this life, the fact of
evil is a mystery. The answer is a more wonderful mystery – God
himself.
That's
the answer, that's the costly mystery. Jesus voluntarily
walked into that dark night of the soul. He stepped into the
perceived and practical absence of his Father, drinking the cup of
God's wrath, “so that by the grace of God he might taste death for
everyone” (Hebrews 2:9). And here's a thought: if the sufferings
of God-made-flesh can redeem suffering, then the God-forsakenness of
God can redeem God-forsakenness. When we feel like we're plummeting
into the void, when we can't understand why God seems silent, we may
shake our fists at the sky – or,
we can actually identify with Christ on the cross. Cling to that
cross, cling to that prayer, cling to those words! Don't pray them
in opposition
to Jesus; pray them with
Jesus: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus stood in the darkness and the fog to meet us there, in the
lonely walk through the valley of the shadow of death, in that
friendless place between the crown of thorns and the jeering crowd,
out in the hinterlands where all blessings come hidden. The great
Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, pointed out over four
centuries ago how true this is: If we feel spiritual joy all the
time, then maybe we love God only for the way he makes us feel.
Maybe we'll distort our faith into an endless pursuit of one
spiritual high after another, neglecting the cross and everything it
means. That was a temptation even in the first century or the
sixteenth century – how much more for American consumers accustomed
to having hundreds of TV channels or clothing brands, used to instant
long-distance calls and to fast food and to immediate gratification
of all sorts?
And so, St. John suggests, it may be the kindest thing God can do to
seem to hide in silence, training us in costly patience as a mother
weans an infant, teaching us to love him for his own sake and not for
any ulterior motive of pleasure, whether worldly or even spiritual.
God “seeks to bring [us] out of that ignoble kind of love to a
higher degree of love for him”, he “turns all this light of
[ours] into darkness, and shuts against [us] the door and the source
of the sweet spiritual water which [we] were tasting in God”, to be
led “through these solitary places of the wilderness”.
If
we wait upon the Lord when every other voice calls it hopeless, if we
sit in sorrowful silence without deserting the God who seems absent,
then when the cloud lifts, we find that God is closer than we ever
dreamed – not in
spite of
the distance, but because
Christ our God was already at our
side of the chasm, suffering with us so all our suffering could be
suffered with him – and “if we suffer with him, we may also be
glorified with him” (Romans 8:17). If our hope is to “reign with
him” (2 Timothy 2:12; Revelation 20:6), it has to begin on the
throne where he was crowned: the cross, the cross, where he called
out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
But the story isn't done. When we meet God in the raging storm,
where all is dark and cold and where we can't find him, if we meet
God in the God-forsakenness of the cross, we have the blessed
assurance that the darkness will not be forever: “For a brief
moment I abandoned you, but with deep compassion I will bring you
back; in a surge of anger, I hid my face from you for a moment, but
with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you” (Isaiah 54:7-8). Now, that moment, brief to the Lord, may demand patience
from our shortsighted and easily worn-out hearts. Mother Teresa
famously spent most of her ministry in despair because she couldn't
feel God's presence with her – for nearly half a century. In one
letter, hear what she wrote:
As for me – what will I tell you? I have got nothing, since I have
not got him whom my heart and soul longs to possess. Aloneness is so
great. From within and from without, I find no one to turn to. …
If there is hell, this must be one. How terrible it is to be without
God – no prayer, no faith, no love. The only thing that still
remains is the conviction that the work is his. … And yet … in
spite of all these, I want to be faithful to him, to spend myself for
him, to love him not for what he gives but for what he takes, to be
at his disposal.
She later penned the remark, “If we feel like this, I wonder what
Jesus must have felt during his agony, when he went through all these
unspoken and hidden wounds.” But through all that great aloneness,
Mother Teresa didn't turn her back on God, or on the poor he called
her to serve; she didn't give up the communion of believers, she
didn't drop the habit of prayer, she kept her arm outstretched to God
through all the decades of the dark night of her soul. It may be a
soul-tormenting wait, but that isn't how the story ends.
Jesus wasn't pulling words out of context. He knew very well how the
twenty-second psalm goes. Yes, it runs through scorn: “All who see
me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads” (Psalm 22:7).
Yes, it runs through opposition: “Roaring lions that tear their
prey open their mouths wide against me” (Psalm 22:13). Yes, it
runs through weakness: “I am poured out like water, and all my
bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted
within me. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue
sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death”
(Psalm 22:14-15). Yes, it runs through spectacle: “All my bones
are on display; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my
clothes among them and cast lots for my garment” (Psalm 22:17-18).
It runs through all these, but where does it end?
But
you, O LORD,
don't be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me.
… For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted
one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry
for help. … All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the
LORD,
and all the families of nations will bow down before him, for
dominion belongs to the LORD,
and he rules over the nations. (Psalm 22:19, 24, 27-28)
This
isn't the surrender of prayer; this is persevering
in prayer!
If we're praying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
with Jesus,
then we have the certain hope that the end of that prayer – in
God's time, not ours – will be the same as it was with
Jesus.
There is
light at the end of the tunnel, there is
a sun behind those clouds, and even if it takes years of patient
discipline, God will not despise or scorn any suffering we co-suffer
with Christ. And faith in spite of feelings will yield a harvest for
God from all families of nations – starting right here where we
are. We seldom get the luxury of an explanation for our suffering,
including the pains of our souls. But what we need isn't answers so
much as to draw close to the
Answer, the Answer made flesh who dwelled among us, full of grace and
truth (cf. John 1:14). We can draw near to him at the very moment of
our felt distance from God, and we can refuse to fall away, hoping
beyond hope in the sure promise that, even if we die in this Answer,
so we shall rise in him as well (cf. Romans 6:8; 2 Timothy 2:11).
But
yes, it's hard. It's hard to “wait on the LORD;
be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait on the LORD”
(Psalm 27:14). Yet we do have the promise that “those who wait for
the LORD”
in meekness “will inherit the land” (Psalm 37:9-11; Matthew 5:5)
– maybe in this age, but for sure in the age to come, the
everlasting sabbath of God's people (Hebrews 4:9-11). That puts the
pain of our souls in perspective, but it doesn't make it any less
painful – for us or for Jesus, hanging on the cross, awash in the
burden of our sin, our alienation, our isolation, our desolation. Go
to him, no matter how you feel. If you feel light, go to him and
remember the cost. If you feel heavy, if you feel alone and adrift,
go to him and grow close to the one who understands. There he is –
there, on the cross, despised and afflicted, his arms stretched wide
to welcome us in, as he calls out: “My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?”
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