“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The haunting “cry of dereliction” is classically considered to be Jesus’ forth “word” from the cross. It is unique among the “seven sayings” from the cross. It is the only “word” that is reported in two different Gospels. It is also the only saying reported in these two Gospels.

In the Gospel according to Matthew and the Gospel according to Mark, Jesus is completely silent during the entire ordeal of his crucifixion with one exception. After six hours on the cross – three of them spent in the mysterious darkness that shrouded the hill called Golgotha during the middle of the day – Jesus breaks the silence with a loud, mournful cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Practicing God’s Absence: A Tradition of Lament

Jesus’ prayer struck a chord with many of his listeners. He prayed the first line of Psalm 22, a lament psalm. Lament psalms are psalms that express struggles, sufferings, and disappointments to the Lord. They consist of three main types of complaints: (1) Troubles within one’s own self – one’s thoughts and actions; (2) Complaints about the actions of others – usually labeled “enemies,” and; (3) Frustrations with God. Many contemporary Christians are surprised to discover that there are more lament psalms than any other type of Psalm (over one-third of the 150 Psalms are lament psalms). The lament psalms enabled the people of God to truly embrace and express their painful feelings to God as an act of worship.

Unlike much of contemporary Christianity, ancient Israel was comfortable in the dark. To those formed by the Psalms, religion was not an escape from real life, but an immersion with God into all the trials and tragedies of human existence.

The contemporary church, on the other hand, doesn’t do too well in the dark. It suffers from the desire to experience unending bliss and happiness. Far too often, the gospel is tangled up with the American Dream and its unmitigated optimism, its positive thinking, its absolute confidence in inevitable and unending progress, and its obsession to control all aspects of life. Whether we chant, “Every day in every way I am getting better and better,” or place our trust in so-called inevitable scientific and social progress, or seek to control every detail of our lives through “proven” techniques to get what we want when we want it, it is clear that we often distort faith so that it is more about happiness than holiness.

Faith does not come without a fight. Hope is empty apart from hardships. Love without lament is superficial – sweet perhaps, but without any nutritional content. We should never imagine that we can have a deep intimate relationship with God without all the doubts, frustrations, and complaints that accompany an authentic relationship – substituting “pious froth” for “fighting the good fight of faith.”

When we purge faith of its dark, difficult, and dangerous qualities, questions arise for which we have no answer: What do we do when the darkness inevitably overtakes us? When we reach end of our rope? When things inevitably fall apart? When we ultimately lose control of our self and our situation? When we can no longer escape the harsh realities of human existence? What resources do we have at our disposal if our religion is purged of all that is uncomfortable, dark, or dangerous?

Israel had its lament psalms. They could freely express their doubts, disappointments, and struggles with God. This kind of expression was woven into their very worship. It was an essential part of the fabric of their lives and faith because they embraced, rather than denied, the darkness.

Jesus benefitted from this tradition. Years of corporate worship had provided Jesus with a way to faithfully and truthfully express his sorrow, doubts, and disappointments to God. And this is exactly what he does with Psalm 22 at the cross.

God-Forsaken Words

It is important to note that even though Jesus is incorporating a prayer from his religious tradition, he is not merely quoting it dispassionately. He is not play-acting. He chooses to use these holy words because they most accurately reflect his experience – an experience that could be summarized in one word: forsaken!

We cannot possibly fathom what this experience entailed for Jesus. His relationship with God was the source of his deepest joy. This was reflected in his “Abba”-language, which expressed his perpetual orientation to God in tender, familial, intimate terms. This language communicated deep trust and love. Now, in the midst of excruciating pain and intense suffering, Jesus experienced his greatest nightmare, that is, the absolute loss of a sense of God’s presence. Consumed by a spiritual void and consumed by this newfound experience of forsakenness, Jesus, for the very first time, abandoned his “Abba”-language and cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Not everyone is capable of experiencing such a profound sense of divine abandonment. The reason is simple: One can only know the pain of divine abandonment if one once delighted in the divine presence! In the hectic pace of our frenetic lives – especially when things are going along well – many of us barely notice the loss of God’s presence. But when things go horribly wrong, or we face great difficulties, or we experience painful suffering – moments when God’s presence is so desperately needed and desired – it is then that we lament the loss of God.

This is true for us; but not for Jesus. As it is impossible for us to fathom the depth of intimacy between Jesus and Abba, it is likewise impossible for us to comprehend the loss of this intimacy. We tend to push God away, or ignore God completely. Jesus had never done this. Peter Storey puts it well: “None of us has known such a friendship with God; none can therefore know what this loneliness— this terrifying sense of absence—meant.”[1]

God-Forsaken Embrace

How strange to consider that Jesus, God’s Chosen One, the one who had heard at his baptism, “Behold, my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased,” experiences the darkness of divine abandonment. God’s Chosen One becomes the God-forsaken One. What could this possibly mean?

At the cross, Jesus experienced the absolute loss of God’s presence – the aching void of God’s absence. In his forsakenness, the sinless One experienced the full weight of the tragic consequences of human sin.

The most devastating consequence – the “burden” and “curse” of sin – is alienation: alienation from God, others, one’s own self, and God’s good creation. This deep existential loneliness is a burden that we all taste, and in our darkest moments, a burden that nearly overwhelms us. Certainly, bodily pain can be intense, but the intellectional and emotional anguish that arises from the alienation of sin can lead to the lowest despair. To be alone, abandoned, in a meaningless, uncaring environment, unloved and unknown, is a spiritual loneliness that is the deepest expression of human suffering – an alienation from creation, self, others, and God.

At the cross, Jesus, the One most intimate with God, experienced the crushing weight of sin’s alienating and destructive power. Like a magnifying glass focusing an intense beam on a particular point, the cross reveals the depth, destructive power, and ugliness of human sin. Injustice, inhumanity, ungodliness, and idolatry all converge upon the sinless Son of God.

But unlike every human before or after him, Jesus’ experience has nothing to do with any sinful actions or attitudes on his part. He is completely innocent. His suffering is completely undeserved. He freely embraces God-forsakenness. The price he pays is not a consequence of his own sin, but a result of his complete obedience to God’s will in spite of (even because of) the sinful response of humans to God. The forsakenness that Jesus experiences is not a consequence of his own sin, but it arises from a freely chosen commitment to love a lost creation back to life by freely embracing humanity at its worst and lowest point.

Here, we see the full mission of God’s incarnate Son. Through the Son, God completely embraces our brokenness, alienation, and suffering. Jesus fully and freely embraces the worst consequence of human sin, that is, complete alienation from God. In Christ, God has descended to the lowest depths of humanity’s greatest problem. “And his penetrating to the heart of darkness means that nobody, absolutely nobody, is alone in the heart of darkness. Christ has been there; Christ is there.”[2]

The abandoned are not abandoned by God! It is in and through full identification with the experience of divine abandonment that Jesus fully reveals God’s desire that none would be abandoned, but all embraced by divine grace. Christ becomes the God-forsaken in order that none would ever have to be God-forsaken!

God-Forsaken Worship

We must not forget that the forth word, although spoken from great pain and incomprehensible depths of suffering, is still a prayer. This cry of desolation, this lament, this complaint, is a prayer. “The agonizing human cry of ‘Why?’ is ‘a cry addressed to God by one who knew that God was there. He still believed.’”[3] This complaint is not an indication of weak faith, but of deep faith. It is the prayer of one who is completely and painfully honest with God. It is the prayer of one whose religion was not an escape from real life, but an immersion with God into all the trials and tragedies of human existence.

Our doubts, struggles, complaints, laments, are indications of depth not despair, maturity not immaturity. They prove we are taking our faith seriously as a means of confident trust in God rather than an escape from reality.

Faith grows when it is stretched, and this rarely happens during times of ease; it mostly happens during difficult periods. Doubt is nothing less than faith taking itself seriously. A faith that does not doubt, struggle, strain, and sometimes almost break, is no faith at all.

Parker Palmer in A Hidden Wholeness suggests that our struggles and frustrations will increase rather than decrease as our faith, hope, and love mature:

The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them, in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.[4]

Make no mistake, prayers of lament from the anguished depths of an experience of divine abandonment are no less than words of worship! The very words regularly used in Israel’s liturgy were offered by the Savior as words of experience, words of salvation, words of worship.

A faith that believes in the light is nothing to shout about. It is easy to believe when all is going well. But a faith that holds tightly to God, that continues to believe, even in the dark, is a faith that is unstoppable, a confident trust that God rewards and admires.

We can trust God – even in the dark. And, because of Jesus’ cry of dereliction, we can take comfort that no darkness can completely separate us from God’s light: “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you” (Psalm 139:11-12).

In C. S. Lewis’ classic book, The Screwtape Letters, an arch-demon (Screwtape) counsels a junior demon (Wormwood) on how to destroy human faith. He warns Wormwood to not get too cocky when his victim experiences dark and difficult times.

Do not be decieved, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of God seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.[5]

© Richard J. Vincent, 2008