About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Matt. 27:46)
‘He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now,’ the religious leaders jeered (v. 43). Full of irony, what they really mean is: ‘He can’t really trust in God. If he did, God wouldn’t have let him go to the cross!’ Jesus’ anguished cry: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ almost seems to justify their charges.
But the opposite is true. Jesus is quoting a psalm of David. Throughout Psalm 22 David simultaneously cries to God in the most abject despair, while demonstrating his trust in God. It’s not that the despair means that David is not trusting in God. It’s precisely in his despair that he trusts God all the more! Jesus understands the meaning of the text, and as David’s royal heir, He now uses the same words. He is the Davidic King who is trusting in His heavenly Father as he cries out in a despair even greater than David’s.
While He cries out, the heavens become dark, a way of symbolising that the wrath of God is upon Christ as He goes to the cross. We remember Matthew’s words laced throughout his Gospel that have anticipated this event. He speaks of Jesus as the One who will take away our sins, and who came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many (Matt 1:21; 20:28). Just a few hours earlier on the night that He was betrayed, Jesus Himself says that His blood ‘is the blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins’ (Matt. 26:28, NKJV).
Jesus knew what He was doing when He went to the cross. He wasn’t taken by surprise. But in the bleakness of the hour, as all our sin is upon Him, and He feels utterly abandoned and alone, the person of the Godhead who bears our guilt cries out in the most amazingly bleak despair – while simultaneously trusting in God. God knows, Matthew knows, and the readers know that it was that trust in God that prompted Jesus to say in the garden: ‘Not my will, but yours be done’. Jesus’ trust in God took Him to this very place.
Jesus cried ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ so that, for all eternity, you wouldn’t have to. As the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote so eloquently: Yea, once, Immanuel’s orphaned cry His universe hath shaken – It went up single, echoless, ‘My God, I am forsaken!’ It went up from the Holy lips Amid His lost creation, That of the lost no son should use Those words of desolation!
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Cowper’s Grave’, in The Complete Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, BiblioBazaar, 2009, p.59)
Today, know that in your deepest moments of despair, ill health and grief, God will never forsake you. You can trust him in the darkness, you can cling to him in obedience because, just as at Calvary, he is working his purpose out and he is in control.
Elizabeth McQuoid is Commissioning Editor for Keswick Ministries and part of Deeside Christian Fellowship in Aberdeen, an independent evangelical church.
This is an extract from The Cross - a 30 day devo-tional in the Food for the Journey series by Keswick Ministries, published by IVP ISBN 978 1 789 741 919.
