My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15.34)

The Explanation for the Forsakenness

As Mark's account of the passion of Christ unfolds, we have seen Jesus becoming increasingly isolated — forsaken by more and more people. He is forsaken by Judas, who betrays him. He is forsaken by the disciples, who abandon him. Peter follows into the courtyard of the high priest, but then he denies him. It looks as though Pilate is going to release him, but then Pilate forsakes him too. The people turn on him and demand Barabbas instead of their Messiah. But now, at last, most terribly of all, Jesus is forsaken by God himself: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

A number of inadequate explanations have been offered over the years. Some say this is a cry of anger and disbelief — that Jesus was clinging to the hope of rescue, and when it did not come, his faith failed and he cried out in rage. That clearly cannot be right. Others say it is a cry of loneliness — that Jesus was not really forsaken, he just felt forsaken. But if Jesus says he was forsaken, we had better take it that he knows best and that he really was forsaken. Still others argue it is a cry of victory — that Jesus is quoting the first verse of Psalm 22, and since the Psalm ends triumphantly, this is really a victory shout. That too is far-fetched.

The answer is that we take the words at face value. This is a cry of real forsakenness. Up until this point, Jesus could say: "The Father is with me" (John 16:32). But now the Father is not with him. Now he is absolutely alone in the darkness. God-forsaken.

We need to be careful here about what is not happening. The Trinity is not being broken at the cross. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are perfectly and eternally united — they cannot be divided, cannot be set against one another. There is no separation of the persons of the Trinity here. Nor does the Father stop loving the Son. It is here more than ever — if we can put it in these terms — that the Father loves the Son, because it is in these three hours that the Son is carrying out the highest act of obedience to his Father.

Imagine a child with a dislocated shoulder who goes to the doctor to have it set. It does not matter if the doctor is the child's own mother or father. It does not matter that the doctor is full of love for the child. It is still going to be agonisingly painful to have that joint set back into place. The Father still loves the Son, but that does not minimise the suffering — in some ways it only increases it.

So what is happening? Jesus is entering the courtroom of heaven, standing before Almighty God as judge. He is not standing there on his own account — he is sinless, he has never committed any sin — but he is standing as the representative, the substitute, of every single believer who has ever lived. He is taking responsibility, taking liability, for all your sins if you are a Christian. And during these three hours of terrible darkness, the Lamb of God is the sin-bearer as millions and millions of sins are laid upon him.

Peter describes it like this: "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24). Paul puts it even more terribly: "God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us" (2 Corinthians 5:21). Isaiah prophesied it: "The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:6). The Father does not think for a moment that Jesus is a sinner — but the guilt of our sin is being transferred to Jesus, and the Father is treating Jesus as if he had committed all the sins of all his people. As Matthew Henry put it: "God loved Jesus as the Son, but frowned upon him as the sin-bearer."

The Experience of the Forsakenness

What did it mean for Jesus to be forsaken by the Father? He had been abandoned to betrayal, to mockery, to scourging, to the cross. But all of those abandonments are nothing compared to this one: abandoned to the wrath of God in the darkness. Because the wrath of God is not some abstract principle. It is personal — it is the breaking of fellowship, the severing of that unclouded relationship, that perfect communion Jesus had enjoyed with his Father all his life. It was only broken for three hours, but for Jesus on the cross those three hours must have felt like an eternity.

The Father removed from Jesus all the tokens of his delight in him. He left Jesus to endure the affliction of judgement alone. There is no voice from heaven to reassure Jesus that he is the beloved Son. There is no angel, as there was in Gethsemane, to strengthen and minister to him. There is no help at all in bearing the terrible weight of the guilt of those billions and trillions of sins. Your sins and my sins — the sins we have committed this very morning in our hearts and with our lips and with our actions — those sins are the barrier that shuts out from Jesus the light of his Father's face.

Notice that Jesus does not call God "Father." "My God, my God," he says. It is the first and last time in Jesus' life that he cannot call God Father. His first word from the cross was "Father, forgive them." His last word from the cross was "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." But for these three hours of darkness he has no assurance of his sonship, no sense of God's love. He is sin, he is lawlessness, and he is banished into the black hole of hell.

As Donald McLeod writes: "Because he is curse, God put the whole universe and more between himself and the Son of his love. He banished him to the farthest edges of reality, to a place of outer darkness." This is why a film like The Passion of the Christ, however well-intentioned, is such an inadequate thing — because all it could show is the physical pain, which of course was considerable. But many people throughout history have endured physical pain at least as severe as what Jesus suffered. The physical suffering is not the real pain of the cross. This — the forsakenness — far outweighs all the other tortures combined.

And this is what Jesus laments. He does not mention the beatings, the scourging, the thorns, the spitting, the mocking. The only thing that causes him to cry out in an agony of spirit is being forsaken by his Father. We are told he "cried out" — a very strong verb, a hideous shriek of woe and anguish and distress. One writer describes it as "the why of amazement as he confronts a dreadfulness he could never have anticipated." He had known from the beginning that he would die a violent death. In Gethsemane he had looked it in the eye and shuddered. But now he is tasting it in all its bitterness, and the reality is infinitely worse than the prospect. Never before had anything come between him and his Father, but now the sin of the whole world has come between them.

The Effect of the Forsakenness

It teaches us to hate sin. There is no clearer proof anywhere in the Bible of the hateful sinfulness of sin than these words. As J.C. Ryle said: "All the wailings and howlings of the damned to all eternity will fall infinitely short of expressing the evil and bitterness of sin with such emphasis as these words." We are experts at pretending our sin is not really so very bad — disguising it, excusing it. But here at the cross, all our pretence is stripped away and we see sin in all its evil, horrible ugliness. My smallest sins — the ones I hardly register on my graph of sinfulness — meant that Jesus had to be forsaken by the Father in my place. Are you really going to listen to those words and then let the devil tell you that your sin is not a big deal?

It shows us the horror of hell. This cry of Jesus expresses the horror of what it is to be separated from God. These words give us a window into hell. If you are not a Christian, this is what is in store for you unless you repent — not for three hours, but forever and ever and ever. If God did not spare his own Son when his beloved Son appeared before him carrying the sins of others — if God poured out the undiluted fury of his wrath upon his own Son — what madness makes you think he will let you off if you stand before him carrying your own sins? As one black American Christian slave summed it up, better perhaps than it can be put: "Either I die or he die. He die — I no die." It is as simple as that. Either you die for your own sins, or you give your sins to Jesus and he dies for you — and you do not die. You live.

It reveals the boundless greatness of God's love. Why did Jesus endure this agony of forsakenness? Because he loved us. More than that — it was grace: undeserved love. "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). If you ever doubt for a moment that God loves you, all you have to do is read Mark 15:34. Look at the cross. And as C.T. Studd put it: "If Jesus Christ is God and died for me — if he was forsaken by the Father for me — then no sacrifice is too great for me to make for him."

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