He Was Forsaken So You Would Never Be

It is noon. The crucifixion has been underway since nine in the morning. The crowd has been mocking, the soldiers casting lots, the religious leaders satisfied. And then, without warning, the sky goes dark.

Not cloudy. Dark. For three hours — from noon to three in the afternoon — the sun refuses to give its light. There is no natural explanation. It is Passover, a full moon; a solar eclipse is astronomically impossible. Something else is happening here, something that requires the physical creation to respond.

The darkness is a sign. It echoes the plague of darkness over Egypt — the judgment that preceded the death of the firstborn, that preceded the exodus, that preceded freedom. Now the true Firstborn of God is dying in darkness, and from his death a greater Exodus will come: liberation from sin, from death, from condemnation.

In that darkness, Jesus suffers in silence. We have no recorded words from the sixth hour to the ninth. Only darkness. Only the weight of the world's sin being pressed onto one person. And then, from the darkness, a voice — loud, human, desperate: "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani."

Three hours of silence in the darkness. Then a voice — Matthew says it was a loud voice, a phone megalē, a great voice, a shout from the depths of his being. "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani."

The crowd doesn't recognize it immediately. Some think he is calling for Elijah — perhaps a mishearing, perhaps a willful misunderstanding. But Matthew knows what is happening, and he tells us: "that is, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

These are the opening words of Psalm 22 — a psalm Jesus would have known from childhood, sung in the synagogue, memorized in the workshop of Joseph. But today it is not a liturgical recitation. It is prayer from the place of actual forsakenness.

The mystery at the heart of the cross is this: the eternal Son of God, who has known unbroken communion with the Father from before creation, now experiences something that disrupts that communion. Not the loss of his divinity. Not the end of his personhood. But something — the weight of bearing the sin and guilt and condemnation of the entire human race — that Jesus can only describe as: forsaken.

He cried it in Aramaic. In the language his mother sang to him. And heaven — somehow, in ways we cannot fully understand — heard and answered. Resurrection was coming. But first, this.

There is a mystery at the center of the Christian faith that theologians have wrestled with for two thousand years: what exactly happened between the Father and the Son at the cross? The Scriptures are careful — they do not flatten the mystery or explain it away. What they tell us is this: Jesus, the eternal Son who has known perfect communion with the Father from before time, cried out "why have you forsaken me?" And that cry was real.

Whatever the divine mechanics of the atonement, what Jesus experiences in those hours of darkness is something he can only describe as forsakenness — the absence of the Father's smile, the withdrawal of the Father's felt presence, the crushing weight of being the bearer of every sin of every human being ever born. The Son of God, who has never sinned, who has never for a moment been anything other than the delight of the Father, is now covered in our guilt — and it feels like abandonment.

Why? Why does it have to be this way? Because the penalty of sin is separation from God. "Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God." That separation — that forsakenness — is what every human soul deserves. And Jesus takes it. He takes it so that you don't have to. He asks "why have you forsaken me?" so that you never have to ask it yourself.

The question of the cross purchases the answer of your life: you are not forsaken. You will not be forsaken. Ever. The God who gave up his Son will not give up on you.