Jesus Asks a Question: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

Jesus Asks a Question: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

The Grand Inquisitor. Messiah Jesus was a Master of asking questions: some were open-ended, others were very pointed; some were out of curiosity, others were challenging; some seemed rhetorical, others seemed painfully obvious; some were to reveal Himself, others were to guide the other into self-understanding; some were intentionally provocative, others were to kick-start a conversation; some questions were asked to explore a topic to deepen understanding and stretch toward the truth; some were leading questions that He designed to suggest a particular answer, and others were questions in response to questions asked of Him; some were hypotheticals to stimulate the imagination, other questions were used  by Him as stepping stones to think logically from one point to the next. Jesus used questions to dignify the listener, letting that person know that He is taking that person seriously and listening carefully. Many of His questions were acts of friendship and used to pursue a more profound intimacy with someone. Jesus asked very few yes-no questions, and since time was usually irrelevant for Him when He was with people, He rarely asked a “when” question. Several biblical scholars have studied the gospels with Christ’s questions in mind, and they have literally counted a total of 307 questions in His various conversations and teachings. It seems that a worthy spiritual exercise when considering the many questions of Jesus is that we ask ourselves… should I take His questions personally, as if He was asking us that question right now?

The Question. ‘My God! My God! Why have you abandoned me?” (Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34; quoting Psalm 22:1). A literal translation could be, “God of Mine! God of Mine! To what end do you leave me behind?” The other half of Psalm 22:1 is asking much the same thing… “Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my groaning, my anguished cries?”

 Forsaken (Greek, “enkatelipes”): deserted; left in the lurch; abandoned; forsaken; left behind; left helpless in dire circumstances.

Our Dead God, But Not For Long. Remember back in the mid-1960’s when certain philosophers and scholars authoritatively declared that God was dead? If they were looking at Jesus on the Cross when they said that, they wouldn’t be far from the truth. God did die on the brutal tree of Roman execution, but of course that’s not the end of the story. “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.” The last words of the Son of God when dying on the Cross are profound and powerful and indicative of Christ’s character and mission. His last words before death were all in Aramaic, because Aramaic was the language of the common people in Israel during that time.

Early Christian tradition believed that much of what Jesus said while desperately dying on the Cross was in fact Scripture. Jesus was said to recite, either silently or out loud, all the verses between Psalm 22 and Psalm 31. He started His recitation from the first verse in Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God…” and then recited all the verses to His closing words in Psalm 31:5, “Into your hands...” Since Jesus was a scholar of Scripture and a faithful Jew, it makes wonderful sense that Christ’s final words were mostly Scripture. The final words of Christ on the Cross, all seven of them in order, are:

Last Words (Tenebrae) by Andrew Peterson, video created by Melody Nowowiejski

(1.) The Word of Forgiveness (Luke 23:34): “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.” 

(2.) The Word of Salvation (Luke 23:43): “Assuredly, today you will be with Me in Paradise.” 

(3.) The Word of Affection (John 19:26-27): “Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother.” 

(4.) The Word of Distress (Matthew 27:46): “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” 

(5.) The Word of Weakness (John 19:28): “I thirst!” 

(6.) The Word of Triumph (John 19:30): “It is finished!”

(7.) The Word of Faith (Luke 23:46): “Father, into your hands I commit My spirit.”

All the land was covered in darkness for three hours as Jesus hung on the Cross, dying a torturous death. And then with his last breath, He loudly cried out His parting words to His loving Father. He charged the Father with deserting Him when needed the most, by the One He least expected would do such a thing. This cry of abandonment was a cry from the human heart. Jesus, so fully human that He appropriated our nature and submitted to the devastating emotional experience of true separation from the only Person in the world He trusted. And yet, according to Luke, Jesus never wavered in His faith in the Father, as we can see from all of Psalm 31:5… “Into Your hands I commit My spirit. For You have redeemed Me, O Lord, faithful God.”  

“My God! My God! Why have you deserted Me?”

So on the one hand, in the process of bearing the sins of the world on the Cross, of carrying God’s curse on mankind, Jesus bore upon Himself the brunt of sinfulness before God. The fact is that the separation between God and man certainly had to be a part of the sacrifice of Christ.  In His humanity, owning our experience in life of suffering and distress, He experienced in His humanness alienation from God. He spoke these words identifying with all of us in our human condition. This last word of Christ was a cry from His human heart. We can understand Christ’s sense of being cut off from the Father while standing in for our sinfulness. Perhaps this human feeling of Jesus was how He was meant to bear God’s wrath. Isaiah 53:4 states that the suffering servant “was smitten by God and afflicted.” And in Is. 53:10, we read, “It was the will of the Lord to crush Him and put Him to grief.” Certainly Jesus felt that grief fully to His depths. And the prophet Habakkuk asked the painful question, “Lord, why do you remain silent when the wicked swallows up the Man more righteous than he?” (Hab. 1:3).  God’s inaction in the face of the Son’s helplessness, was perhaps the most painful aspect of the Cross. Jesus so fully appropriated our nature that He experienced true separation from God in His humanity.

But on the other hand, Jesus was not ever abandoned by God, ever. That is unthinkable. They share an unbreakable, eternal bond of love, an everlasting union with each other. The relationship enjoyed between the Father and the Son was indivisible. They couldn’t be separated by anything in any way. On the Cross, Jesus was humanly distressed but not in spiritual despair. Notice that Jesus cried out, “My God! My God! Their relationship was intact, and the Son remained convinced that the Father was indeed His, even while He lay dying. In fact, Jesus on the Cross did what observant Jews tended to do… When a Bible verse from the Hebrew Bible was quoted, it was considered a topic sentence of a larger passage. The first line of a portion of Scripture served as the working title of the extended passage, just a start of further discussion. The Jewish listener was trained to continue that first line by reciting the entire passage to the end.

The Cross Fulfills the Prophecy. When Jesus cried out the first line of Psalm 22, either He continued reciting that prophetic psalm to the end, or He intended for those who were listening to complete it, or perhaps even both. One tradition has Jesus starting Psalm 22 with His cry of abandonment, and then continuing to recite that psalm aloud to the very end, right there on the Cross. And what would have been brought to mind by listening to Jesus recite Psalm 22? A compelling and specific description of crucifixion centuries before it was even used in executions! Scorned by all around Him (v. 6), bones out of joint (v. 14), severe dehydration (vs. 14-15), gambling for His clothing (v. 16-18), naked in shame (v. 17), all these graphic pictures in Ps. 22 of Christ’s crucifixion hundreds of year before it happened.

Triumphant at the End. But Jesus didn’t stop reciting Ps. 22 with His apparent abandonment in verse 1. Jesus understood in His divine soul that victory was His in the end, and that He was not truly deserted by the Father. Look at some of the closing words of triumph He surely recited from the Cross…  “You have rescued Me from the horns of the wild oxen! For He has not despised or disdained the suffering of the Afflicted One; He has not hidden His face from Him but has listened to His cry for help… Those who seek the Lord God will praise Him; Your hearts will enjoy Him forever!” (Ps. 22:21,24, 26).  No, the Father didn’t turn His back on his Son. The Son wasn’t a temporary orphan. There can be no division of the indivisible.  Jesus knew the heart of the Father, even as He appropriated human distress. Jesus closed His testimony on the Cross by stating that He was the fulfillment of Psalm 22, all of it, from beginning to end! Jesus didn’t end His human life with a whimper but with a bang, with joyful confidence and a triumphant assurance of final victory.

The Breathless One. What if we didn’t know the end of the story? What if we didn’t yet know about the empty tomb? Yes, it’s true that Jesus predicted His rising from the dead on a number of occasions with His Twelve. But tell that to the traumatized disciples, who just lost their best friend. Tell that to His mother, who grieves over her precious son. A sword has pierced her heart, indeed. The Son of God gave up His spirit. He relinquished it. No one could take it away from Him, He had to agree to let it go, He waved the white flag of surrender. He deliberately became lifeless. He died. His heart stopped beating. His organs broke down for lack of oxygen and blood supply. The Son of God literally became breathless, the One who gives breath to all created persons. An early church tradition maintains that Jesus looked like an old man when His dead body was taken down from the Cross. He had aged in His suffering and with the burden He was carrying.

Sacrilege. The death of the Son of God is nonsensical. Illogical. It doesn’t make sense. Life and death don’t mix. Death and Jesus don’t fit. It is somehow sacrilegious. Death is the ultimate indignity for the Giver of life. As the final result of sin, the death of Christ is the conclusion of sin’s victory over God. Death is an extreme impurity experienced by the only Pure One. Death defiles the world, making a dead person unclean and mortally defeated. Was Jesus unclean when He died? After all, death is this world’s vile pollutant. For the time being, the Son of God was defeated by sin’s final consequence.

Paid in Full! After assuming the most fundamental of human weaknesses, thirst, Jesus groaned, “It is finished.” As He entrusted His spirit to the Father, He surrendered, His mission accomplished, His earthly task completed, His purpose fulfilled. In the Greek, “finished” means “paid in full.” Christ’s death finished the work of creation. His death paid in full the penalty of our sins. His death accomplished the miracle of forgiveness.