“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (NRSV, Mark 15:34)

These words of the dying Saviour have in them a mystery which we shall never fathom.  They come from the infinite depths of his sacrifice; they are an expression of that inner spiritual darkness which overwhelmed his soul and of which the darkness that enveloped Calvary was a fitting symbol.

At noon, when the sun was at its brightest, an eerie change came over the land.  The sunshine faded into an uncanny light which quickly passed into an ever deepening gloom.  The people in the streets of Jerusalem looked apprehensively upward.  The priests, busy with the sacrifices in the Temple, called for torches to be lit.  Then as the unnatural night closed in on the scene, the crowd at the Cross fell silent.

For three hours the darkness lasted and then, as it began to lift, that cry of anguish was wrung from our crucified Saviour, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (NRSV, Mark 15:34).

Let us think of what Jesus had given up.  Always he had been detached from material things, and for three years past he had lived a life of poverty, having no place to call his own, depending on the help of others for the very necessities of life.  And on Calvary he has given up all he has left – his clothes, his Mother and his friend.  And now he has even given up the comfort of the sense of his Father’s presence, and to do that meant to plunge his soul into “a horror of great darkness” (Genesis 15:12).

He had come to offer himself and all he held dear as the perfect sacrifice for the sins of human beings, and in so doing he held nothing back, not even his most precious and cherished possessions.  And of these the most precious was the sense of oneness with his Father.

The night before, he had said to his disciples, “…you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone.  Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me” (NRSV, John 16:32, our emphasis).  But now for the first time he felt as if his Father had abandoned him, and that in his hour of greatest need.

On the Cross we see the cost to God of the sins of human beings.  As sin, both in itself and in its consequences is separation from God, so in offering himself on our behalf, Jesus voluntarily underwent, not indeed separation itself for that was impossible, but the full sense of separation.

Of his own will he deprived himself of the consciousness of his Father’s presence as he identified himself with sinful humankind, and bore our iniquities, and experienced in his own sinless soul the final consequences of sin.  What that meant to him who had always enjoyed the awareness of an inner undisturbed communion with his Father, we shall never know.  But to him it was the agonising horror of his whole life.  And so, as the light returned on Calvary, he expressed that agony of soul in the words of the 22nd Psalm which foretold his Crucifixion. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (NRSV, Mark 15:34).

St Leo has written that those were words not of complaint but of instruction.  For in Gethsemane he had already accepted the cup of suffering and of sacrifice which he was now drinking: “…not my will but yours be done” (NRSV, Luke 22:42).  So those words on the Cross were uttered for the whole world to hear; uttered so that we might understand the true meaning of sin and its results.

For it was the sense of the world’s sin, of the moral pollution of humankind that possessed his innermost being and blotted out the blessed consciousness of God’s presence, and brought this great darkness upon his soul.  He felt unutterably lonely and abandoned.  Yet he never lost faith; with his will he clung to his Father, and when he spoke it was. “My God”, still “My God”.

That experience of being abandoned by God has to be shared and undergone, though to an incomparably lesser degree, by every Christian soul.  There has to come at one time or another, the time of testing when the whole of religion becomes empty and dead; when God himself seems infinitely remote from us and our daily life; when we pray but there is “…no voice, no answer, and no response” (NRSV, 1 Kings 18:29).

Our minds become filled with torturing doubts, possibly about the very existence of God, certainly about his personal care for us.  He is God, yes; but what does that matter if he is no longer my God?  Can it be that religion is a gigantic delusion, and that our feelings of abandonment are a belated awakening to cold reality?

For at such a time of spiritual dereliction, our feelings seem to belie all that we have ever been taught about God’s concern for his own.  Where then is the Father’s love; the comfort and tenderness of the Good Shepherd; the joy and peace bestowed by the Holy Spirit?

The love and care of God are there all the time, for they are part of his very nature and being.  What has happened at such a time is that God has withdrawn from us the awareness of his presence so that we no longer have the sense of being supported by him.

Such is God’s trial of the faithful soul.  It is not hard to serve God when we get comfort and peace and joy.  But can we serve him just for what he is, not for what he gives?  Can we serve him out of utter darkness for no other reason than that he is our God and that we love him for himself?

This, then, is the opportunity to prove to God what our love for him and our faith in him are really worth.  And at such a time we may be thankful that we have something sure and real in our very midst, to which we can confidently anchor ourselves – the Blessed Sacrament.

For, whatever our feelings may be the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a visible and tangible pledge of God’s love and presence which has come down to us through the centuries from the very hands of Our Lord himself, only a few hours before those hands of his were nailed to the Cross.

When, therefore, through our frailty we are victims of doubt and despondency, let us turn to this steadfast and objective bond which not merely spans the centuries and links us to Jesus as he was that Maundy Thursday night, but also unites us to him as he is now, the living Lord in Heaven, present in his risen and glorified Body in the most Holy Sacrament of the Altar as he is upon his throne of glory.