An Essay on Mark 15:33-35 & Matthew 27:45-47

This is the fourth in a series of essays coming out every Wednesday in Lent, under the general title “The Last Words of Jesus.” If you are finding these essays helpful, I invite you to subscribe to them, share them, like them, comment about them, and tell your friends about them. Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations in this essay are taken from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition.

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “Listen, he is calling for Elijah” (Mark 15:33-35).

From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “This man is calling for Elijah” (Matthew 27:45-47).

Over the years I’ve encouraged hundreds of people to become regular Bible readers, and quite a few of them have taken me up on it.  Sometimes they take on the “read through the Bible in a year” program, starting with Genesis in the Old Testament.  Sometimes they start with the New Testament, with the gospel of Matthew.  And when I’ve checked in with people who started with Matthew, there have been many times – I estimate two dozen times – when they have specifically noted this particular passage, where Jesus said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

These people have reported their shock and discomfort to me when they read this passage.  I remember how one of them asked, “How can this be right?  I get it that Judas betrayed him:  people sometimes are fickle.  I get it that the disciples all ran away:  people sometimes get scared.  I get it that the crowd was mocking him as he writhed in pain:  people sometimes find cruel enjoyment of other people’s misery.  But how can it be that God would abandon Jesus at a time like that?  Shouldn’t the Bible be teaching us that no matter how unreliable everyone else is, when even your friends and family forsake you, God will never let you down?”

Now there are a lot of things that a preacher might want to say in response to that question, and along the way I’ve said most of them.  One of those things is this:  in terms of the way many people think about it, the Bible doesn’t want to teach you that God will never let you down.  That’s because in terms of the way most people think about it, God is almost guaranteed to let you down, and probably it will be painful.  So many of us go around with the thought that it’s kind of God’s job to make sure that we don’t experience tragedy, that our families will be protected from serious illness, that we don’t end up in a car crash, that we will get established in a good career, that the storms of life will always pass us by.  Not just that:  we expect God to make sure we have a pretty fine life, probably with some challenges but free from disaster.  But blessings and tragedies happen to everyone in this world.  And when the storms of life land on us, if we think that it’s God’s job to make sure that nothing bad ever happens to us, then we are going to be surprised to discover that it doesn’t work that way.  If our minds have assigned to God the responsibility to keep bad things from happening to us, then we will feel severely disappointed with God.  We thought God would never let us down.  And as a result, when tragedy strikes, we might not have any way of processing how God could have allowed this to happen.  The reality people can discover in the midst of tragedy is that the grace of God somehow miraculously sustains their faith in the midst of the storm.  But they do not discover that no storm will ever come upon them.  It comes to everyone, in one form or another.

Another thing that a preacher might want to say is that it was not a surprise for Jesus, when God the Father allowed him to be arrested, and condemned, and crucified to die in agony.  No, that was the plan all along, and Jesus had known for quite some time that that was the plan.  He had come to understand, from reading and pondering on scripture – from his study of the part of the Bible that we now call the Old Testament – that the primary role of the Messiah was to die.  He explained to his disciples, on at least three occasions, that the time was coming when they would make their way to Jerusalem, where he would be arrested, and convicted, and crucified.  Here’s Mark’s take on it:

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again (Mark 8:31).

They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it, for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again” (Mark 9:30-31). 

He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, “Look, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the gentiles; they will mock him and spit upon him and flog him and kill him, and after three days he will rise again” (Mark 10:32-34).

One of the significant aspects to the gospel narrative is the way the disciples hear Jesus saying things like this and find themselves baffled by it.  But I would suggest that Jesus was not baffled by these words he himself said:  instead, he was clear that this was indeed the plan, and he had willingly chosen and affirmed his role in this plan.  

More than that, he knew that when the sins of the world were laid upon him, he would be separated from the Father.  When he accepted the punishment for the sins of all the world, then God would turn aside his presence from the sins of the world and from the one who was carrying those sins.  Instead of rejoicing in the presence of the Father, with a closer fellowship with the Father than any other human being has ever experienced, that relationship would be cut off.  When Jesus uttered his cry from the cross – My God, my God, why have you forsaken me! – that was not a question seeking information.  Jesus knew exactly why the Father had abandoned him.  The deepest problem with human sin is how it messes up our relationship to God.  Jesus had come to Jerusalem for this specific purpose, to bear the burden of human sin, to lay down his life in acceptance of the punishment of the sins of all the world.  And the severest consequence of this would be to sever the relationship of intimate communion between the Father and the Son.  The plan for the redemption of the world was for Jesus to pay all the penalty of all the guilt of all the sin of all the world:  that would mean that God the Son could no longer feel the sustaining presence of God the Father.  That was not a surprise to Jesus.  He knew that was the plan, and he came to Jerusalem with the specific purpose of fulfilling that plan.

And there’s a third thing that a preacher might want to say:  it really hurt.  The physical pain of being crucified really hurt.  Yet even more, the spiritual pain of not feeling the presence of the Father really hurt.  Jesus had known it was going to hurt, but it’s one thing when you know it’s going to hurt, and it’s another thing when you’re actually feeling that hurt.  And if you’re wise, when you see someone whose heart has been crushed with pain, you don’t take offense when that person says something harsh.  

I have heard people use strong language, in times of loss, in times of deep grief and pain.  I have listened as people cussed me out, or cussed out members of their family, or cussed out God Almighty. It is not pretty, when people say with fury in their voice, “Why the hell did God allow this to happen?  If this is how God is running the universe, he’s pretty damned bad at his job.  He should give it up.  Whatever.  I give up on believing in him.”  

I have mostly learned not to jump to God’s defense; I do not try to answer the question “why did God allow this to happen?”  Instead, I try to hear the deep heartbreak, the anguish of soul, that the bereaved person is feeling, and I try to respond in compassion.  What if the people experiencing sorrow and distress were to say something like, “I feel so bereft.  I’m overwhelmed, and I have no idea what to do or say.”  That would certainly make it easier for Christian friends to focus on compassion instead of explanation.  But in the midst of tragedy and distress, people often don’t say that.  Instead, the emotion comes pouring out as a raging attack on whoever might be nearby.  Sometimes that attack has landed on me.  One thing that has helped me not to take it personally is to pay not so much attention to the bitter content of someone’s words, and instead to listen deeply to the anguish of their soul.  

We can recognize the anguish of Jesus’ soul in these words, and respond to that, rather than supposing that he was asking a question, looking for someone to give him the explanation that would answer that question.

But although a preacher might want to say any of those three things, none of them will be the main focus of this essay.  Each of them is worthy of an extended investigation in its own right:  the line “My God, my God!  Why have you forsaken me?” could be the basis for any of them.  Another time, perhaps.  For today I want to share with you some things about this text that you may never have heard before.

Three somethings, to be exact.  The first is this:  in this moment of desolation, Jesus began to sing a song.  I don’t know how good a singer Jesus might have been.  There’s no direct reference to his singing, other than the quick note in passing that after the Last Supper they sang a hymn before they left the upper room to go to the garden of Gethsemane.  I’m pretty sure that his singing was ragged, there on the cross, because his breathing would have been ragged.  One of the agonies of crucifixion is that as you hang there, your rib cage is fully distended:  that means that your lungs have lots of space, so you can breathe in more air than you ordinarily could.  But it also means that you can’t breathe out.  In order to breathe out, you have to pull up with your arms, and press up from your feet, so that your chest and diaphragm can press the air out of your lungs.  Of course that’s terribly painful because of the nails through your wrists and ankles.  So for a moment you can exhale, as you hold yourself in this position, flexing against the nails that pin you to the cross.  Then you sag back down.  That’s part of the cruelty of crucifixion:  you cannot deliberately hold still and let the pain abate a little; instead, even though you are nailed in place, you must keep pulling upward in order to exhale, so you are continually torturing yourself as you writhe up and down to take each breath.

So Jesus would have been breathing raggedly, and his song would have been ragged:  and indeed, the bystanders do not seem to have noticed that it was a song.  It was Psalm 22.  It’s too long for a preacher to read to the congregation on a Sunday morning.  But I’m going to print the whole thing here, and I encourage you to read the whole thing (because I know that some of us skip reading the whole thing when we see a long passage like this).  Here it is:

You probably noticed how similar the text of Mark and Matthew are, at the beginning of this essay.  They have different word choices in several places, but these are exceedingly minor.  Except for one:  Mark has Jesus saying “Eloi, Eloi,” in contrast to Matthew’s citation as “Eli, Eli.”  Is this significant?  Not in terms of meaning.  And both of them have transliterated the phrase into Greek from its original language.  But Mark started from Aramaic, the language as it was spoken in daily life in first century Israel; while Matthew started from Hebrew, from the text as it is found in the Hebrew Bible.   This is actually what we might expect:  the Gospel of Mark is written in working class Greek, while Matthew is again and again focused on what the scripture says.  As a rough analogy, we could look at a person who reads and quotes the King James Version, and then for contrast look at a person who reads and quotes a contemporary translation like The Message.  They’re both reading the Bible, but they are not using the exact same words as they quote it.

Matthew and Mark both indicate that maybe Jesus only managed to call out the first line of the psalm.  We all know the first line of Psalm 23:  “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”  But maybe we don’t know Psalm 22 well enough to recognize it, when we hear just the first few words.  

When we’re familiar with a song, that’s one of the things we can do:  we can Name That Tune as soon as we hear the first line.  I’ve picked out a few songs whose titles are not in their first line, and if we were in church right now I would not sing them to you, because you’d recognize the melody so easily.  And since you’re reading this, you couldn’t hear me singing them.  So in this version of “Name That Tune,” the clue isn’t the tune:  all you get is the opening lyrics.  I’m pretty confident that if I just recite the words of that first line you can quickly come up with the title:  

1. “When you’re weary, feeling small … ” 

2. “Father and I went down to camp, along with Captain Goodwin … ”

3. “On a hill far away … ”

4. “Oh, the weather outside is frightful … ”

All right.  Anyone who identified all four of those gets a gold star. 

Now if it’s a song we’ve heard many many times, if it’s a song we’ve sung along on when we heard it on the radio, when we hear that song we recognize it, even if we weren’t expecting to hear it right then.  So when Jesus gasps out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” we might perk up and say, “Wait, I know that one: it’s Psalm 22!  Where’s my gold star?”  But maybe hoping for that moment of perky recognition is hoping for a little too much, because many of us won’t actual recognize it.  And the crowd there watching the crucifixion of Jesus and the two other men, apparently they didn’t recognize it either, maybe because of the raggedness of Jesus’ breath, or maybe because they just didn’t know their Bibles all that well:  they heard the first two words, Eli, Eli, which is "my God, my God," and it’s also the first two syllables of אֵלִיָּה (Eliyah in Hebrew, which we transliterate as Elijah in English). So the onlookers said, “Wait, is he calling for Elijah?  Whoa, what if Elijah actually shows up to rescue him!  That’d be so awesome!!”  (I’m supposing they all pulled out their phones to get video in case Elijah really did appear, so they could post it on TikTok or Facebook.)

So the first thing we want to see is this:  in the midst of the agony of his crucifixion, one of the things Jesus did was call to mind a song.  He gasped out the words to a song.

A second aspect we want to see is that this song Jesus chose is a prayer.  Psalm 22 is a fairly extensive psalm:  31 verses.  I told you it was kind of long when I asked you to read the whole thing, and I know you probably experienced it as ‘long’ when you read it.  (You did read the whole psalm, didn’t you?  Hey, I could have assigned you to read Psalm 119, which is 176 verses long.  You’re getting off easy.)   All of Psalm 22 is a prayer.  It is the lament of a man who is suffering at the hands of others, and he calls out to God in his distress.  The people who are hurting him physically are also hurting him emotionally, jeering at him and mocking him, and they call out that he should get God to rescue him:      
      
            7 All who see me mock at me;
                  they make mouths at me, 
                  they shake their heads;
           8 “Commit your cause to the Lord; 
                   let him deliver —
	         let him rescue the one 
                   in whom he delights!”

The description of the suffering in Psalm 22 is quite stark.  It sounds very much like the psalmist is being crucified, with his shoulders and wrists and ankles all out of joint, with terrible thirst, with his ribs protruding as he hangs on the cross, surrounded by people who hate him and are actively killing him and gloating as he dies.  He has been stripped naked and his captors are dividing up his clothing for themselves:

         14 I am poured out like water,
	          and all my bones are out of joint;
	      my heart is like wax;
	           it is melted within my breast;
	   15 my mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
	           and my tongue sticks to my jaws;
	           you lay me in the dust of death.
	  16 For dogs are all around me;
	           a company of evildoers encircles me.
	          My hands and feet have shriveled;
	  17 I can count all my bones.
	           They stare and gloat over me;
	  18 they divide my clothes among themselves,
	             and for my clothing they cast lots.

So the second thing we want to see is that in the agony of his crucifixion, Jesus brought to mind a song that he had learned, because it expressed a prayer that he wanted to pray.  Maybe he only had the strength to say the first line out loud, but then managed to say the rest of the prayer in silence, within his own soul.  Or maybe not:  maybe he was in too much pain, and simply let himself feel the rest of the psalm even though he could no longer recite the words in the silence of his heart.  

And the third thing that we want to see is that even though the psalm begins with this line of blurted emotion – my God, my God, why have you forsaken me! – it is a psalm of astonishing faithfulness, and even though it gives full painful acknowledgment of the weight of suffering, it finishes strong, with the assurance that the Lord will make everything all right in the end.

          27 All the ends of the earth 
                  shall remember and turn to the Lord;
               and all the families of the nations
                   shall worship before him.
           28 For dominion belongs to the Lord,
                    and he rules over the nations.
          29 To him, indeed, shall all 
                   who sleep in the earth bow down;
                 before him shall bow all 
                   who go down to the dust,
                    and I shall live for him.
           30 Posterity will serve him;
                    future generations 
                   will be told about the Lord,
           31 and proclaim his deliverance 
                   to a people yet unborn,
                    saying that he has done it.

That is:  in the midst of the agony of crucifixion, Jesus grabbed onto a song that he knew, a song that expressed the situation he was in with remarkable clarity.  

    • It is a song that starts out unafraid to cry out to God with strong language, in the middle of an immensely painful situation.  

    • It is a song that in the middle looks plainly at how bad things have gotten:  I’m being killed by people who hate me.  

    • It is a song that at the end sings praise that all the ends of the earth will bow in worship before the Lord, and even though we all die, it sings in confidence, “I shall live for him!” – which is to say, even though my enemies are killing me, even though they will succeed in killing me, I shall nevertheless live.  And all down the ages, future generations will proclaim that God is the one who has delivered us from our lostness and made us the children of God.  

That’s a pretty good song.

Jesus knew that song.  Psalm 22 has never been the most popular psalm, but Jesus had read it, and sung it, and he had learned it by heart.  And in his moment of need, he had that song.  

What’s your song, that you would sing in your soul in your deep time of need?  It could be one of the psalms.  It could be one of the great hymns of the church, such as It Is Well with My Soul, or Like a River Glorious. It could be a contemporary Christian chorus, such as I Will Praise You in the Storm, or If You Ask Me To.  What is the song that even when you are in too much pain to sing it out loud, you could still let it play steadily in your soul?

I should say one more thing.  There is a common misconception about how the atonement works, where people think of it as an example of child abuse.  The notion is this:  God is really mad at you, but then he beats up on Jesus, and then God isn’t mad at you any more.  Just like when an earthly man is upset because his boss yelled at him at work, he comes home and yells at his kid, and when the kid yells back “What’d I do?” the father slaps him across the mouth and the kid runs off crying, and now the dad feels better because he no longer feels like the one on the bottom.  

But the salvation established for the world in the death of Jesus is not like that.  It is not like an adult beating up on an eight-year-old child.  Just from a human perspective, Jesus was a fully adult human being, and he was fully aware of what he had signed up for.  He came to Jerusalem knowing that his mission was to die for the sins of the world.  This is a man going bravely to his death, knowing that fulfilling his mission will cost him his life.  

And from the divine perspective, which is where the most important part of the action takes place, this is the judgment on the sin of the world.  Justice must be established, for it will not do for the Righteous Judge to say, “Your sins and crimes and transgressions have caused pain and suffering for many people in this world, and you deserve to suffer pain and death for what you have done.  But I have decided to forgive you, to let you off without paying any price at all.”  This would be a terrible injustice to those you have hurt, as they cry out for the righteous wrath of God to make things equal.  

Instead, God insists that justice must be done.  The full punishment for every crime must be established:  no one will dodge the justice of God.  As the old King James has it, God desired to be both just and justifier (Romans 3:26):  which means that the penalty must be paid for all those sins, in order to balance the accounts for all those sinners.  In the eternal counsel of the Trinity, that decision was reached:  and then God the Son said, “I, I myself will pay it.”  The letter to the Hebrews comments on this, urging us to look “to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2).  Jesus died on the cross, it says, “for the sake of the joy.”  What was that joy?  It was the joy of taking the necessary action – costly as it was – to save the world.  

Oh.  In case you didn’t get a gold star for knowing all four of those songs where I quoted just their first line, the answers are on the last page of the book, or at the back of the essay, which is where we now are.  Number 1 is “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” by Simon and Garfunkle.  Number 2 is “Yankee Doodle.”  Number 3 is the old gospel hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross.”  And number 4 is one of the classic Christmas songs that is about winter rather than Christmas, “Let It Snow.”

And if you remember the first stanza of “The Old Rugged Cross,” you can recognize that it is almost a commentary on that verse from Hebrews we were just looking at:  

     On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
     The emblem of suffering and shame;
     And I love that old cross, 
          where the dearest and best
      For a world of lost sinners was slain. 

Sometimes we learn our theology from long essays like this one.  Sometimes we learn it from the songs we sing.  This hymn, for example, prompts us to sing about three important points.  

1. In the time of Jesus the cross was an item of severe suffering and deep shame.  As we have noted, there was terrible physical pain; and there was also the shamefulness of all the people seeing that you had been condemned as a wicked criminal.  (We may note how this contrasts with the way that much of present day America celebrates the cross, putting it on necklaces and steeples and sanctuary walls.)

2. The meaning of the cross is that this is where Jesus, the dearest and best, was slain for a world of lost sinners.

3. There is an implicit connection between these two points:  Jesus deliberately and gladly chose to take on that suffering and shame because he knew that in order to save the world he had to die.

Which is to say, with the letter to the Hebrews:  for the sake of the joy that was set before him, Jesus endured the cross, disregarding its shame.  If you get that into your soul by reading an essay or by singing a hymn, either way is fine.  Just so long as you get it.

So here’s two points to ponder.  First, what’s your song?  You need a song.  A song you can know by heart, and sing out loud or in the quiet of your soul, when everything falls apart.  Ponder on that question, and find your song.

Second, Jesus asks an important question:  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  As we have noticed, there is a lot of background involved in understanding that question.  But in the end, it points us toward a fairly short summary:  “The plan was working:  Jesus was saving the world.  It hurt like hell, but he thought it was worth it.”  Ponder on the cost of saving the world, the cost of saving all the sinners, the cost of saving you and me.  And be thankful.

Next week: I Am Thirsty.