LENT 2025 – PART FOUR

4. WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?

 During this week’s Lenten meditation, we are pondering perhaps the most famous and certainly the most searing of all Jesus’ last words from the cross. A cry of abandonment; a cry of loneliness; a cry of utter desolation: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

 Physically, Jesus’ agony is increasing and in this time of desolation, Jesus turns to Psalm 22, a psalm of lament that begins with: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me; so far from my cries of anguish? The fact that the fourth word of Jesus comes from Scripture is evidence that as a human being he had spent his life marinating in the scriptures, knowing them by heart.

 These words of Jesus are recorded in both Matthew and Mark, but we will take our passage from Mark 15. Mark relates that at noon darkness came over the whole land until 3:00 in the afternoon; and at 3:00 in the afternoon, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani,’ which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And when some of those standing near heard this, they said, “Listen, he is calling Elijah!” Someone ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a staff and offered it to Jesus to drink. “Now leave him alone; let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down,” he said. With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last. The curtain of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!”

 The Hebrew words Jesus uses here, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani is misunderstood by those standing around. Eloi means ‘my God’, but they thought he was calling Elijah. They thought he was getting delirious and therefore they gave him some vinegar, which was a kind of an anaesthetic.

 We must understand that Jesus has been hanging on the cross now for at least three hours, during that terrible darkness and his suffering must have been intolerable: his lips must have been parched, his throat like sandpaper, he must have experienced terrible thirst and so he must have barely croaked these words out.

 As Christians we understand that God is triune. We believe that Father, Son and Holy Spirit have been in complete union and perfect fellowship with each other for all eternity. They have been one forever, until now. As part of the payment for sin, it appears that the Father for sure, but probably the Holy Spirit too, have withdrawn from Jesus. They have turned their backs on him in a way that from all eternity had never happened within the Godhead. The theologian John Calvin said that that was hell and maybe that is why the darkness descended to kind of indicate in some physical way, as a sort of parable, what Jesus was experiencing on the cross; not because of his sin, but because of ours.

 In this fourth word of Jesus we come to the heart of the gospel: how Christ became our substitute and sacrifice, the one who tasted not just death, but hell and separation from God on our behalf so that we don’t have to go through this.

May we not keep this good news to ourselves, but share it far and wide, in word and deed, with great joy and thanksgiving to all people everywhere.

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