Posted on Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - 11:39 am:

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Some from His own nation had given Christ over to the Romans. Judas betrayed Him. Peter denied Him. His disciples all forsook Him when He needed them most. All of that He could take. But when God also seemed to abandon Him, His heart broke. Jesus cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).

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Nothing can separate a person from God (Rom. 8:35-39), except sin (Isa. 59:2); which means that Christ felt a separation to the depths of His soul as He bore “the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2b). “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6b). As an eternal member of the Trinity, Christ had always been enfolded by the wondrous love of the Father and the Spirit. How awful His separation from them now! His loneliness was intense. From the heights of eternal love He had plunged into abandonment to save humanity, whatever the price to Himself, knowing most would reject Him. There’s no greater love than this!

[...] Christ felt abandoned, wrenched from the Father, as if no longer the Son of God. The terrible load of sin so abhorrent to the Father and the Spirit, and so horrendous to Christ, cursed Him, crushing out His life. Sin-bearing separated Jesus from the fellowship He longed to have and desperately needed with the Father and the Spirit.

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All through His life on earth Christ had clung to God alone, a power outside of Himself. He depended solely on God (Father and Spirit) in a union that knew no separation, and sometimes required whole nights in prayer (Luke 6:12). Fellowship with God was heaven to Him in a world so unlike His first home. Christ found escape from the depravity all around Him by communing with God. He sensed the Father so close that He could say: “The Father is in me, and I in the Father” (John 10:38b).

Total Abandonment
The Man Jesus came to the brink—where He needed God the most. Yet precisely at the time of His greatest need He felt utterly abandoned. It is impossible to comprehend the unutterable anguish of that terrible loneliness. To watch Jesus suffer and die as a man must have caused intense pain to the Father and Spirit, as they suffered together with Him. Christ’s cry is the most pathos-filled experience recorded in the Gospels. Although He’d previously spoken of His resurrection (Matt. 16:21) and of His return at the Second Advent (Matt. 16:27), during those awful hours on the cross He could not see through the darkness to the resurrection and the Second Advent. He felt that the “separation [from God and the Spirit] was to be eternal.”4 Christ was willing to perish in order to save humanity.

And He would have done it just for you!

Each member of the Trinity suffered at the cross. And it wrenched the heart of Deity to hear the Man of sorrows cry out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). The “payment” for human guilt meant that Christ bore the punishment for all sin. He experienced what would have been our total abandonment by God. There was no other way.

It was not an angry God punishing human guilt, but a heartbroken Father and Spirit suffering with Christ as He alone was the sacrifice for sin. None will ever understand the depths of shared suffering of the Trinity during the hours Jesus hung on the cross. Only faintly does it come to mind in the words “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16a).

At Last, Hope!
All the Trinity were present at the cross. [...]

Just before death, in sheer faith, Christ again spoke to God as Father: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Wonder of wonders, the helpless human Jesus, possessing full divinity within, never gave in to depend on His own divinity, but hung on to the divinity of His Father, even though as Sin-bearer He felt God-forsaken. Who can understand the depth of the sacrifice involved?

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Posted on Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - 4:17 pm:

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He could not see through the darkness to the resurrection and the Second Advent.

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"For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."
--Heb. 12:2

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Posted on Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - 3:41 pm:

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According to A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture by Dom Bernarnd Orchard, et. al, p. 903:

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Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani are the opening words in Aramaic...of [Ps 22]. Doubtless our Lord continues the psalm in silence. The fact that the words are a quotation removes the dogmatic difficulty. The psalm is not a cry of despair but, on the contrary, a hymn of supreme confidence in God despite profound suffering. As in our Lord's case the divine 'foresaking' in the psalm is no more than a poetical expression of acute physical and mental pain to which God has 'abandoned' the psalmist without, however, having 'turned his face away', Ps [22], 2, 25. In our Lord's mouth, indeed, the words are not even a complaint because his intention is simply to show that the fruitful martyrdom of the innocent psalmist was a shadow of his own."

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