Matt 27:45–56 — The Forsaken Son

The Death of Christ

So we come now to what may be the holy of holies of the gospel narrative. This is the very death of Christ himself. This is the moment that Christ has been telling the disciples about ever since Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. When Jesus began to pull the disciples aside and say, yes, I am the Messiah. Yes, I am the Son of God.

But the Son of Man is going to be betrayed and he is going to be killed. and he is going to suffer many things. He is going to suffer greatly, not only at the hands of men, such as the Jews and Pilate and so on and the soldiers, he is going to suffer many things at the hand of God himself. But he will be raised on the third day as Jesus predicted. He will be vindicated even though for a moment he is rejected and cast off. And so we feel, do not we, like we must, this is like holy ground. We have got to take off our shoes because this is the holy of holies. This is the inner sanctum. This is the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is it.

Everything Jesus has come to do is culminating right here in his cross and in his death. He was sent on a mission from the Father from the very moment when he was conceived in the womb and born of the Virgin Mary. He was on this mission to go to the cross in order to atone for our sins and to reconcile us to God. He is giving himself as a ransom as he said back in Matthew chapter 20.

In verse 28, he said, And here we see him. He is serving, is not he? He is serving us. He is serving us in the most awesome way imaginable. of bearing the load of God’s wrath that we deserve for our sins, so that we might be forgiven, so that our sins might be taken away, so that we might be reconciled to God. This passage is amazing. It has two layers to it. On the one hand, we have the public aspect and the focus on everything that is going on around Jesus, whether it is the bystanders mocking Jesus or the people who are hearing him cry out and saying maybe he is calling for Elijah.

The Great Reversal

Darkness over the Land

We also have these cosmic signs, the darkness that lasts for three hours from the sixth hour until the ninth, that is from nine o’clock in the morning until, sorry, from noon, the sixth hour is noon, until three o’clock in the afternoon. The three hours of darkness We also have this reference here to not only the darkness, but also to the curtain of the temple being torn in two from top to bottom, and even the earthquake that happens. These are cosmic events? This is something awesome happening. Now, this is all the external layer, where everybody can see what is going on, and it is awesome, and there is something really amazing happening here.

It is so incredible that even the centurion, it says in verse 54, and those who were with him as well, meaning the other soldiers, and they were there keeping watch over Jesus from the moment when they crucified him until the moment when he died. They were filled with awe when they saw these cosmic signs, the darkness, the earthquake, when they heard the way that Jesus cried out with a loud voice. And they saw all these sights and these almost like apocalyptic things that are happening in the world around them, and they are filled with awe, and they change their mind.

Remember back earlier in the passage that they were mocking Jesus. They took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, they stripped him naked, they put a scarlet robe on him, they took some thorns and they wove it into a crown, a mock crown, they put it on his head, they took a reed, they put it in his hand like a fake scepter, and they bowed down to him as if he was the king and they said, Hail King of the Jews! But they are all doing this in scorn and mockery. But now, after seeing the way in which Jesus died and seeing the darkness and the cry and the curtain of the temple being torn in two and the earthquake, seeing all this, they changed their mind. The very same ones that had been mocking him a few hours earlier that morning, they changed their mind and they said, truly, this was the Son of God. What a reversal that is.

And so there is these two layers, the outer world that is shaking and undergoing this convulsion of the day of the Lord. And then there is the inner turmoil of Christ’s own soul. And here we really go into the Holy of Holies, do not we? And we are peering into the very human soul of Jesus himself. And we hear the words of our Lord in verse 46. At about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

The Cry of Dereliction

This is called the cry of dereliction, meaning the cry of forsakenness, the cry in which he is forsaken, expressing his forsakenness by God the Father. All that is going on outwardly in the world around them, the darkness, the sun and the moon are no longer shining, the earthquake, all these cosmic apocalyptic signs are simply outward manifestations to draw attention like a giant sign saying, alert, alert, something big is happening here. But what is really happening is in the heart of Christ. It is in that intimacy of his relationship with his father, where he is experiencing the father turning aside from him, the father bringing that curse and wrath upon him in judgment.

Perhaps if we had only heard the cry, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Or in Hebrew or Aramaic, If we’d only heard that, perhaps we would have mistaken what was happening. Perhaps we would have been like the bystanders who thought maybe he is calling for Elijah.

But with these added signs in the cosmic realm, it becomes clear that something greater is happening here. These cosmic apocalyptic events were a sign of the inward suffering of his human soul. But before we look at that, before we get into the depths of what does that mean that the son was forsaken by the father, we have to be careful in how we describe that and explain that theologically. But before we do that, let us just remind ourselves that these signs that are happening in the outer world are indeed the signs that accompany the day of the Lord.

And you see this in the Old Testament. For example, in Isaiah, Chapter 13, verses 9 and 10, it says, This is a common motif, a common metaphor that is used throughout the prophetical literature. It is also found in the book of Joel. and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness.

The sun and the moon are darkened. The stars withdraw their shining. The day of the Lord is great and very awesome. Who can endure it? The day of the Lord is God coming in judgment. And so these apocalyptic signs of darkness and the sun no longer shining and so on, these are the evidence of God’s wrath. This is an outward picture in cosmic terms of God’s judgment and wrath coming upon the wicked of the earth.

In the Old Testament, before the prophetical books, we also see this particular emphasis on darkness, do not we? Remember one of the plagues of Egypt, when God was bringing the plagues upon the Egyptians to redeem Israel out of the house of bondage, one of the plagues was darkness.

In Exodus 10, verses 21 through 22, it says it was so dark, It was so dark that it could be felt. Is not that amazing? It was an expression of God’s judgment upon the Egyptians. So dark it could be felt. That was the ninth plague. And then the final plague, of course, the tenth plague was the firstborn in the land of Egypt being put to death. And then we have the Passover and the Exodus and God’s people are brought out. That shows us that the very act of redemption of God redeeming his people was an act of judgment. God was redeeming his people through judgment.

In a sense, we could say that they also experienced the judgment, although vicariously, because when they were in their houses and they put the blood of the Passover lamb upon the doorpost of their houses, and the destroying angel passed by, the destroying angel did not destroy them, but it did destroy all of those who were outside of the houses. And so, in a way, you could say that they too experienced the judgment. in the form of that vicarious substitutionary lamb that was judged in their place.

This idea of darkness also is brought up again later on in Deuteronomy 28 in the list of all the curses of the covenant. Cursed is the one who does not keep all the things written in the book of the law. One of the curses of the covenant is that you shall grope at noonday as the blind grope in darkness.

And of course this then is picked up later on in the New Testament as a description of hell. We think of hell as a place of burning and fire and therefore it seems light. It seems like there is a lot of light there because there is a lot of fire there. But another metaphor for hell is that it is a place of utter darkness. Jude, the epistle of Jude in verse 13 refers to the apostates, to those who were professing to believe in Christ but are being prepared for the day of judgment. Jude says that for them, for those apostates, the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever. The gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever.

What that tells us then is that although fire and burning is another metaphor for hell, it is only a metaphor And the other metaphor that goes with that and seems paradoxically inconsistent with it is the gloom of utter darkness. And that particular metaphor for hell is a more helpful one because it brings out not only God’s active judgment against our sin, the fire, the burning focuses on that, but the darkness focuses on what?

It focuses on the fact that hell is the place of being abandoned by God. Hell is where you have no relationship with God. You are utterly cut off from God. In a sense, God is present, actively expressing his wrath, but in another sense, he is utterly forsaking you. He has withdrawn from you, and you are in this place of outer and utter darkness, cast out from the presence of God. that is what explains the words of God to Adam and Eve in the garden before they sinned. Remember those words, what God said to Adam and Eve?

He said, in the day that you eat of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die. And people have often wondered, well, it does not really make sense because when they did eat of the fruit of the tree, They did not die right away. They did not immediately die at that moment. In fact, Adam lived, you know, for hundreds and hundreds of years after that. So what does that mean that in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die?

Well, the answer is that when they sinned, God expelled them from the garden. God expelled Adam and Eve from his presence. And so that is the essence of what death is. Eternal death, spiritual death, is being excluded from the presence of God. Being taken from the place of God’s presence and light and joy and glory and being banished outside of the gates of the city into the place of utter darkness and forsakenness and abandonment by God. where the darkness is so dark it could be felt, where you will grope at noonday as the blind grope in darkness with that sense of utter despair and forsakenness.

And of course we also have, in addition to the darkness and light metaphor, we also have this idea of decreation going on in our text with the earthquake. when the earth shook and the rocks were split in verse 51. Does not that remind us of the old creation being shaken and turned back into chaos as the new creation is dawning in Christ?

It is interesting that in Genesis 1, verses 1 through 3, we have both ideas of from chaos to order, and then now we are seeing from order back to chaos with the shaking, but we also see from darkness to light.? There was darkness over the face of the deep in Genesis 1, 2. But then on the first day of creation, God said, let there be light. But now we see the opposite happening. We are going from light to darkness in our text. There was darkness over all the land, just as the land is returning to chaos with this cosmic earthquake.

It is also referred to in the book of Haggai, in Haggai chapter 2, where God says, yet once again, I will shake the heavens and the earth, implying that he is going to bring out, he is going to judge the old creation and bring out a new creation out of the rubble of the old. All of this then to say that everything that we are seeing on the outward level, before we get to the heart of what Christ is going through in his soul, on the outward level, we are seeing all the evidence that this event, this day, Good Friday, as Christ is hanging upon the cross, this is the end of the world. This is the day of the Lord. This is the day of judgment.

But it is not happening quite in the way that we would expect from the Old Testament. In the Old Testament expectation, we would expect that all the wicked of the earth would be destroyed and cast into hell and everything would be perfect again and restored to the perfection of the new creation. But that is not what happens, at least not yet. In principle, it is happening. In principle, the day of the Lord and the new creation is happening right now, but it will not be revealed in fullness. It will not be manifested in glory until Christ returns.

And incidentally, Jesus himself, just to remind you, uses this same language back in all of that discourse to talk about what his second coming will be like. Remember that? Back in Matthew 24, verse 29, he said, immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened. And the moon will not give its light.

And the stars will fall from heaven using all that same language taken from Isaiah 13 and Joel 2 and so on. And the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man. And then all the tribes of the earth will mourn and they shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with great power and glory. And he will gather his angels from one end of heaven to the other. I think it is significant that you have that passage. It is just a few chapters before. Back in Matthew 24, right during Passion Week, Actually, it is just a few days before our Good Friday here in our text.

And Jesus is looking ahead to that end of the world, to his second coming. But now here in his death, we see the inauguration of that. We see the Day of Judgment happening right now. But not quite yet in that full sense of all the wicked being destroyed. and God’s elect being brought into the new creation. Rather, it is happening in the person of Christ. It is happening for him. The day of the Lord is happening for Christ and for all the elect who are in him.

So that we are being judged, we are passing through the judgment, just like Israel passing through the waters of the Red Sea, even though they are dry, yet they pass through that judgment and they come out on the other side. It is happening for us right now. This is the new exodus that is happening right here in our text. And so all those cosmic apocalyptic signs that are happening in the outer world, are a sign of the inward suffering of Christ’s human soul.

Christ is experiencing the wrath of God. He is experiencing the darkness of being abandoned by God. And yet, interestingly, he is submitting to this. He is submitting to this judgment and this day of the Lord and this wrath of God. He is submitting to it voluntarily in total obedience to God.

And so that means that even though, in one sense, he is abandoned by God, he continues to be well-pleasing to the Father. And so it is very important, as I hinted at before, that we have to be very careful how we define the forsakenness of the Son. The forsakenness of the Son here does not mean that the Father-Son relationship has been ruptured. All throughout the Gospel of Matthew, we have heard about Jesus talking about his intimate relationship with his Father. He says, no one knows the Father but the Son, and no one knows the Son but the Father. And so there is this intimate relationship that he has. He is the well-beloved Son. Remember at the baptism and the transfiguration of Jesus, twice we heard the voice of God the Father saying, this is my beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased.

And so even though we do speak of Christ bearing the wrath of God, of experiencing the abandonment, of being sent into outer darkness, we must not take that so far that we end up denying that the father-son relationship continued. Rather, what we must say is that Christ, in his human nature, and remember to take a human nature to himself means not only a human body, but also a true human soul. And so we see the sufferings of Christ in his body as he is being scourged and nailed to the cross. and treated despicably by his enemies, but we also see the sufferings of Christ in his human soul. Christ in his human soul is enduring the agony of temporary loss of the sense of the Father’s favor. His human soul tasted eternal death in our place. Going back to the garden, and the day that you eat of it you will surely die and the death that is being spoken of there is eternal death that is being expelled from the presence of God. Christ is experiencing or at least tasting eternal death in our place.

He felt the wrath of God. but the wrath of God, not against himself, but against our sin. That is the key thing. The wrath of God was not against himself, but as against our sin, which had been reckoned to his account. 2 Corinthians 5.21, he who knew no sin, became sin for us. That is our sins were imputed to him and he was reckoned as a sinner. He was treated as a sinner in the sight of God. So that in him we might become the righteousness of God. He felt and experienced the wrath of God. He felt and experienced the abandonment of God. not against himself, but against our sin that he took in our place.

And he willingly submitted to experiencing that. He willingly submitted to that darkness and to that forsakenness. And the fact that he willingly submitted to it, that he voluntarily took that upon himself, is a magnificent expression of his perfect obedience to the Father that is the very thing with which the Father is well pleased.

So there is a paradox here. On the one hand, he is abandoned by the Father. He is tasting eternal death for us in his human soul. And yet all the while, even at that very moment, which is the pinnacle of his expression of his obedience to the Father, the Father is well pleased with him for doing this. How glorious that is. The human consciousness of Christ felt the dark pain of hell, of being forsaken by God. He experienced the day of the Lord, the day of judgment. But he did so in perfect obedience and love for his heavenly father.

And therefore, even in that moment, paradoxically, the father was well pleased with him. And so ultimately, we cannot say in some ultimate sense that he was truly and utterly abandoned by the father, the way the reprobate will be in hell forever. He tasted it, he experienced it, but he was not ultimately forsaken in the ultimate sense.

And we know this, we know that it was not a permanent thing because a few verses later, we will turn over to chapter 28, he is going to be raised from the dead and he is even going to speak triumphantly to the disciples and say, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, therefore go and make disciples of all nations and so on. It is such a wonderful vindication of Christ through his resurrection from the dead.

Another thing that supports this idea that his abandonment was not permanent and that he was vindicated on the third day is the fact that the very words that Jesus takes up, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, are from Psalm 22. Psalm 22, which is not only being quoted here in this one cry of dereliction of Christ, but it is also quoted and alluded to in the previous crucifixion narrative. There are five other allusions to Psalm 22 in the crucifixion narrative, including the dividing the garments and the fact that the mockers say, he trusts in God, let him deliver him. That is a quotation from Psalm 22. Psalm 22 is all over the place in the context. And so when Jesus takes up the very first words of Psalm 22, he is not only quoting the words of David himself in Psalm 22, verse one, but he is also alluding to the fact that that cry, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That cry that came out from David’s heart was answered. It is answered if you keep reading in Psalm 22. You go down to verse 24.

It says he was not despised or abhorred. That God the Father has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted. And he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard. when he cried to him. And so that means that the cry of Christ is not a cry of absolute despair, as if he is saying, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And he is completely lost in utter despair. He is taking up that phrase, that line from the first part of the Psalm, in the hope of knowing. that he will be vindicated and heard. Interestingly, he does not say, oh God, why have you forsaken me? He says, my God, why have you forsaken me? That very language of calling him my God indicates that he has hope. He has not been abandoned to utter despair. He is addressing the Father as my God as he awaits the ultimate reversal and vindication that will come on the third day.

And which interestingly in our text is already hinted at even before the third day with the tombs being opened and many of the saints who had fallen asleep are raised and after his resurrection they come out of their tombs and they go about into the holy city and appear to many. The apocalyptic day of the Lord not only includes darkness and wrath and judgment for the wicked, it also includes deliverance, vindication, and resurrection for God’s people. And we already see a little foretaste of that, even though this is still Good Friday, and the first day of the week is still a few days away, but we already see a foretaste of that emerging right here, even in the moment of darkness.

Also the temple curtain being torn in two, that itself has two meanings. On the one hand it implies that the old temple is being judged and it is on the way out, but it also implies that a new temple is emerging because now through this death of Christ, through his bearing this forsakenness and this wrath in our place, we now have unfettered and unlimited access to the presence of God through what he has done. Christ suffered exclusion from the presence of God. He experienced being expelled from the presence of God in order to secure for us resurrection life and unlimited access to the presence of God. As I said, this is the Holy of Holies. I mean, this is the gospel itself. This is the climax of everything. Thanks be to God for giving us such a wonderful Savior.

It is amazing as well to think about from last week when I was preaching on the crucifixion narrative and the emphasis there that this is the king? Over and over again, this language that he is the king of Israel, he is the king of the Jews, even though it is being used mockingly by Pilate or by the Jews, it does reveal the truth that his kingly authority, his kingly office as the king, as the Messiah, the anointed one, is being revealed now in the moment of his suffering and cross.

Up until this point, Jesus had been very sparing and very careful in his messianic claims. He did not want to go out there and publicly say, I am the Messiah, for fear that it would be misunderstood in a political sense. And so when somebody was healed, he said, do not go on, tell anybody about this. Yes, I am the Messiah, but keep it to yourself. But now here at the cross, now here at the climax of his work, as he is coming to the pinnacle of his mission, for the very purpose for which he was born, for the very purpose for which he came into this world, it is finally unveiled, it is finally clear. Yes, he is the king, he is the king, he is the Messiah, but what somewhat a king?

This is a glorious king that nobody’s ever seen before. No one in the history of the world has been a king like this. Most kings are more than happy to send their people to their deaths for them. Most kings are more than happy to let the peons out there in the front row get slaughtered in the battle? But this king, He says, no, you stay here. I am going. I am going into the fray. I am going to lay myself down as that final sacrifice for you to save you. Behold your king. What a glorious king you have. He endured eternal death in your place to deliver you from eternal death.

Heidelberg Catechism, question 44, talks about this. How Christ, my Lord, by suffering unspeakable anguish, pain, and terror of soul on the cross, but also earlier, has delivered me from hellish anguish and torment. He suffered unspeakable anguish, pain, and terror of soul. And you might say, yeah, well, it was only for a few hours while he was on the cross. But think about the person who is experiencing this. This is the divine Son of God, a person of infinite value, infinite weight. And so his sufferings take on a color, take on a weight that is infinitely greater than anything you could ever imagine. He experienced the equivalent of an eternity in hell in those brief hours on the cross. He experienced unspeakable anguish, pain, and terror of soul.

Why? for you so that you would not have to experience that. He experienced it for you so that you would not experience that hellish anguish and torment. He was forsaken by God so that we might never be forsaken by God. He was crushed so that we would never be crushed. He went into the inky darkness, so dark it could be felt, so that we might never be left there.

It is true that sometimes we do experience really, really hard times of agony, depression, sorrow, grief, emotional pain of various kinds. And it may feel like hell for a moment, but in union with Christ, Your sufferings are transformed because now you know that you are united to him in his death and in his resurrection. You are partaking of his suffering, but you will also partake of his deliverance on the third day. And even now, you are experiencing that.

Even now, as the Apostle Paul said, we are a new creation in Christ. Even now, the apocalyptic day of the Lord has already happened for us on the cross. And we have come through on the other side, being raised. Just like those saints, the tombs are opened. And now we have come out into newness of life. And we are experiencing that now, even though it is not.

Unclouded, we still have temptation, we still have doubt and struggles and suffering and difficulty. It is not completely unclouded, we still have our wrestlings in those dark night of the soul. But yet even in the midst of those, we can know the truth, the wonderful promise.

Forsaken for Our Deliverance

As Psalm 30 verse five says, his anger is but for a moment and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning. Thanks be to God for our Lord Jesus Christ, who has forsaken for us. Amen.