April 13, 2025 Words From The Cross: My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me? | Matthew 27:45-49; John 19:16b-30

Today we will reflect on Matthew 27:45-49 and John 19:28-30, My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me? This is the darkest time for Jesus as he takes the sins of the world on himself, experiencing God’s forsakenness on our behalf. The light of the world is hidden in darkness as the sun is darkened for 3 hours, reminding the people of the judgment of God and the Day of the Lord. Jesus cries out with words from Psalm 22; in this psalm which points so strongly to the cross, we hear a deep agonizing cry of lament that leads to a declaration of the Lord’s victory. But the victory comes with unimaginable pain.

Transcript

My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me

Matthew 27:45-49; John 19:16b-30

Noon comes as Jesus hangs on the cross, the middle eastern sun beating down on him. suddenly, darkness covers the land, hiding Jesus’ suffering from those around the cross for three hours. This is just another unusual moment for everyone around the cross, reinforcing in each of them that there is something very different happening here with Jesus’ crucifixion; this is no ordinary crucifixion, nor is Jesus an ordinary man. As we watch, we see the light of the world being engulfed by darkness near the end of his life, separating him from everyone who might offer him some comfort or support; Jesus is truly alone in the darkness!

For the Jews, both the religious leaders and the ordinary people, darkness always brings to mind the presence and work of God. In the Old Testament, the beginning of Genesis reveals that at the very beginning, there was darkness until God creates light. God leads Israel through the wilderness with a pillar of cloud and at Sinai, God meets Israel in a dense cloud that covers Mount Sinai. At the mountain, the people are given a whole way of living to shape them into a people that will reveal who God is to the nations, using them to be a light to the nations, while also warning them that God is a jealous God and will punish them if they reject him. Darkness often pointed to God being at work in ways we’re unable to see or understand. One of the plagues of Egypt was darkness over the land for three days, and echo ahead to Jesus’ death and only on the third day being raised from the darkness of death. Exodus 10:21–22, “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand toward the sky so that darkness spreads over Egypt—darkness that can be felt.” So Moses stretched out his hand toward the sky, and total darkness covered all Egypt for three days.”

Darkness is also connected closely to God’s punishment in the Old Testament. The Lord tells Amos 8:9–10, “In that day,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your religious festivals into mourning and all your singing into weeping. I will make all of you wear sackcloth and shave your heads. I will make that time like mourning for an only son and the end of it like a bitter day.” The Lord is pointing straight to what Jesus is going through on the cross. Looking back to the Exodus, as Israel does, Egypt faces the harshest punishment in the dark of night as the angel of death strikes down all the first-born, striking terror into the hearts of the Egyptians so that they finally set the Israelites free, and even load them with gold and jewels to get them to leave quickly. 

The hiding of the sun and the light of the world through the darkening of the sun, makes the Jews look to the skies for the coming of the Lord and the Day of Judgment. The Day of Judgments points to the coming of the Lord to judge the people for their sins. It’s a time filled with God’s wrath and the terror of his punishment. Solomon writes in Lamentations 2:22, “As you summon to a feast day, so you summoned against me terrors on every side. In the day of the Lord’s anger no one escaped or survived; those I cared for and reared my enemy has destroyed.” While the prophet Zephaniah writes in 1:8, “On the day of the Lord’s sacrifice I will punish the officials and the king’s sons and all those clad in foreign clothes.” Not even the wealthy and powerful will escape the Lord’s judgment, a heads up for everyone. These warnings were always accompanied by calls to repentance and a return to the Lord. It’s not God’s desire to punish and destroy, rather the Lord gives us one opportunity after another to come back to faithfulness and obedience. The warnings also point us past the Day of a Judgment to the time afterwards when the and with be filled with righteousness and prosperity for the faithful. 

In the darkness, we encounter the height of Jesus’ suffering as he carries the weight of the sin of the world on himself, and the hopelessness that comes with sin. as the darkness fades, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Why has the Father abandoned his beloved son? Jesus uses Psalm 22 to cry out to his Father, Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?” Jesus thirsts for his Father’s presence again, for the sustenance that comes from God’s presence through his Spirit. When Jesus knows that everything has been finished, and so that Old Testament Scripture is fulfilled, Jesus says, “I am thirsty.” Jesus’ thirst is not only physical, the living water thirsts for salvation, suffering the thirst of God’s forsakenness for our sakes. 

Jesus is experiencing the pain and forsakenness Israel was warned about in the Old Testament. God’s people were called to forsake the gods of the nations around them and serve and follow the Lord. As we see over and over again, Israel kept forsaking God instead to embrace the idols of those among and around them. God gives them plenty of warnings, such as in 2 Chronicles 15:2 when the prophet Azariah is sent to King Asa, “Listen to me, Asa and all Judah and Benjamin. The Lord is with you when you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you.” The King of the Jews celebrated just days earlier on Palm Sunday, the high king, the one true king is now hanging high on a cross rather than sitting on the high throne. 

As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.” In the darkness when the sun stops shining, Jesus is working in a way we can’t understand or see, and part of his work is taking on the curse of death for us, becoming forsaken by his Father so we don’t have to experience the darkness of being abandoned by God for our sin. We see the agony as Jesus cries out to “My God” instead of crying out, “My Father.” There is a distance between Father and Son, but Jesus never loses faith. At the root of faith is trust to call out to God in the darkest of times, trusting God to respond even when we don’t feel his presence. 

Jesus trusts in his Father for victory, but that does not lessen the pain and agony and weight of our sin at results in his being forsaken by his Father for us. Jesus quotes Psalm 22:1, but as the Jews heard his cry, they also heard verses 14-15, “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.” Jesus, who has always lived in the closest of relationships with his Father and the Holy Spirit since before time and creation, is now experiencing abandonment, even if we can’t understand how this can be. The abandonment, the forsakenness is real. The promises of God to forsake those who forsake him all come to rest on Jesus in the darkness on the cross. 

From the outside it looks like Satan has won, destroying the relationship between the Father and the Son, and yet, as we go back to Psalm 22, we see that Jesus hasn’t lost all hope, he knows his Father’s faithfulness, “You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you descendants of Jacob, honor him! Revere him, all you descendants of Israel! 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. From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly; before those who fear you I will fulfill my vows. The poor will eat and be satisfied; those who seek the Lord will praise him—may your hearts live forever! All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him, for dominion belongs to the Lord and he rules over the nations.” For those who chose God over the idols, God promises in Psalm 27:10, “Though my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will receive me.”

In our darkest hours, God’s more powerful than any other force. It may look like Satan has won, the darkness strikes fear while Jesus’ death looks like God’s promises have failed, and it can be easy to lose hope and believe that evil wins, but in reality, Jesus has crushed the serpent’s head on the cross. The Lord of life cannot be defeated by death because he is the author and giver of life, the king of Palm Sunday is confident in his father, even when taking on our forsakenness. The times of darkness are real, yet we hold onto hope as we hear the psalmist confess in Psalm 9:10 that “Those who know your name trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you.”