The Fourth Word from the Cross
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Mark 15:34
This is the only word from the cross recorded in St Mark’s Gospel, telling us something about its profound centrality. It is also probably the one which most Christians remember best, because it resonates with our own experience of times when the heavens were as brass, and God seemed a million miles away.
In both Matthew’s Gospel and Mark’s Gospel, Jesus speaks this word in his own native language, Aramaic: Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani. That in itself is interesting, because this is a quotation from Psalm 22, which he might well have spoken in Hebrew. It was clearly part of the psalms he had learnt off–by–heart in his childhood or youth. I heard recently that Terry Waite discovered that he prayed a great deal when taken hostage, but not very much in his own words – rather in the words of scripture, or psalms, or the Book of Common Prayer, words which he had in his stored memory. At the most critical times, it can be hard to formulate our own prayers, and it is vitally important that our minds, and the minds of future generations, are filled with remembered words which are capable of seeing us through. Psalm 23 on its own will not suffice. We need psalms like Psalm 22 as well.
When Jesus spoke these words, they were also conveying the fact that, at that moment, he was the fulfilment of that psalm. That was also clear from another verse in Psalm 22: ‘They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.’ The cross of Christ was fulfilling this psalm, and the resurrection would fulfil the end of the psalm.
The fourth ‘word’ comes at the heart of the seven. The others lead into it and emerge out of it. But, in terms of timing, it comes near the end of the three hours on the cross, after the darkness of those hours had been experienced. This ‘word’ is an important reminder to us that questioning what God is up to at times is in itself a godly thing. We mightn’t dare to do it by formulating our own words, but the Word of God itself gives us the questioning words we need to put on our lips. It is also a reminder to us that the very time of our forsakenness is a deeply personal moment in our relationship with the God who seems to have abandoned us. So, the cry of Jesus from the psalms is not just to ‘God’ but to ‘My God, my God’.
Some think that Jesus only felt forsaken at this moment, rather than being actually forsaken; that this was an emotional reaction rather than a reality. In my view that is a very superficial understanding. While it is true to say that Jesus is in God’s sovereign will at every moment of his passion, nevertheless this is a moment of actual forsakenness, when he bears the sin of the world on his shoulders.
Alan Cole, the bible commentator, in his commentary on Mark, tries to understand some of the depths of Jesus’ actual forsakenness, when he writes:
There was a far deeper spiritual agony which Jesus endured in the darkness, an agony which we can never plumb and which, thanks to his endurance of it on the cross, no created being need ever now experience. No explanation is adequate other than the traditional view that, in that dark hour, God’s wrath fell upon him….this means that his unclouded communion with the Father, enjoyed for all eternity, was temporarily broken…..
Keith Getty and Stuart Townend put it in two phrases which some find difficult: ‘The wrath of God is satisfied’, and ‘The Father turns his face away’. St Paul puts it like this ‘For our sake (God) made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’