“My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?” A Meditation

The events of Holy Week provide an overwhelming amount of material for meditation as each Gospel’s account of Holy Week is recorded. One key moment was Jesus’s cry of dereliction, which both Matthew and Mark record.

Jesus famously cried from the cross in Aramaic, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46; Mk 15:34). What is the significance of that cry? What should we make of it?

The first person of the Trinity is “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Cor 1:3; Eph 1:3; 1 Pt 1:3). Both terms carry over. He is the Father of Jesus his Son. He is also the God of Jesus who is true man (cf. Jn 20:17; Eph 1:17; Rv 3:12). One of the Trinity became one of us. And by his cry from the cross Jesus was referring to actual events. His God had in fact truly forsaken him. This was not some weird inner-Trinitarian split. Rather, we should understand Jesus here as true man, who comprehended in himself and substituted for all sinful mankind. All rebellious and unclean sinners deserve to be forsaken and abandoned by their holy Creator. In the place of all sinners, in our own place, Jesus was forsaken by his God. On the cross Jesus was condemned; he was damned; he experienced the forsakenness of hell itself in the stead of all guilty sinners.

In the fulness of time God sent his only begotten Son into human flesh to become the Davidic Messiah who was abandoned by his God in the place of all those who deserve to be abandoned by the Holy God. He became incarnate to become the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, on whom were laid the iniquity of us all. As the apostle Paul puts it, God sent his only Son into the likeness of sinful flesh and condemned sin in the flesh (Rom 8:3). Jesus who personally was innocent and knew no sin God made to be sin in our place (2 Cor 5:21).

 “Why hast thou forsaken me?” Jesus was not asking a neutral question seeking intellectual information from God. This is a rhetorical question. What was Jesus doing by putting this rhetorical question to his God? He was protesting the alien work of God. Lutheran theology emphasizes the importance of properly distinguishing between law and gospel, and that includes properly distinguishing between God’s alien work and his proper work, his opus alienum and his opus proprium. Every action of God should not be put on the same level and treated the same way. There is a fundamental distinction between the two, and faith recognizes that distinction.

The Scriptures give numerous instances where the faithful would protest the alien work of God, God’s silence and seeming indifference, and God’s anger and the hiding of his face. At Mount Sinai God threatened to annihilate rebellious Israel at the golden calf apostasy. That is what they deserved, for they had just broken the covenant. But Moses stepped into the breach and protested such an action with the rhetorical question of why: “Why, O Yahweh, does your anger burn hot against your people whom you brought out from the land of Egypt with great power and with a strong hand?” (Ex 32:11–13). We see this kind of rhetorical question with the prayers given in the Psalms. Consider, for example, Psalm 10:1, “Why O Yahweh do you stand afar off? (Why) do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” and Psalm 44:23–24 (MT 44:24–25), “Arouse yourself, why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not reject (us) forever. Why do you hide your face? You forget our affliction and our oppression.”

What was Jesus doing with his cry of dereliction from the cross? Jesus was fulfilling Psalm 22. Jesus came to fulfill the Scriptures including the Psalms (Lk 24:44). As the faithful Davidic Messiah, as the faithful Israel, in fact, as the only Israelite who truly was faithful and holy and without sin, Jesus was speaking to his God. He was uttering a protest of God’s alien and strange work. This is what faith does. It believes most firmly that in the very heart of God is only his love and not his wrath, that God’s abandonment is his strange work. Faith protests the alien work of God and holds on to God’s proper work against his alien work.

What was Jesus doing on the cross with his cry of dereliction? He was doing what Hebrews 5:7–8 says: “In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered.” Jesus offered up “prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears” to his God and Father by taking on his lips faith’s response to the alien work of God with the rhetorical question of “why?” But the sequence does not end there. Hebrews says that God heard his prayer. Indeed, God heard Jesus’s prayer by raising Jesus from the dead on the third day, just as Jesus had predicted and just as the Scriptures had promised. God did his proper work toward Jesus by raising him from the dead. Thanks and praise be to Jesus of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Lord, for being forsaken by God in our place and unto our eternal life with God and his love.