Jesus. All About Life.Uzorak

Reflection

Where are you, God? Jesus’ cry of dereliction is all too familiar to those of us who have asked raw questions of God amid our suffering. For Jesus, where once light had shone down from above with the Father’s booming voice of affirmation, now the heavens went dark. God was silent as creation mourned its Maker’s suffering.

We can surmise Jesus’ palpable feeling of abandonment by the fact that his utterance remains one of the few untranslated phrases in the New Testament. No doubt, the guttural Aramaic cry from Jesus’ lips was forever seared into the memory of the eyewitnesses to his brutal execution.

Beyond merely embracing our suffering, though, Jesus’ words strike a note of hope. When tempted to believe in our suffering that God either isn’t there or He doesn’t care, Jesus quotes the first verse of David’s crucifixion psalm. This prophetic song reverses our interpretation of divine silence. Psalm 22 opens with questioning God’s hiddenness; it goes on in remarkable detail to predict the sufferings of Christ and closes with the promise that it is through this suffering God will bring about salvation. The darkness of Easter Friday was a costly but necessary precursor to the dawn of Easter Sunday.

Action point

Who can you encourage with the promise of Psalm 22 that God has not abandoned them and that after the darkness, God promises to bring about a dawn?

Prayer

Holy Father, we lament to see the cost of our sin in the suffering of our Saviour, Jesus, who felt Your absence so we could know Your presence. Amid our suffering, would your Holy Spirit teach us to trust You are there, and You do care? In the name of Jesus, Amen.

About the writer

Dan Paterson is the founder of Questioning Christianity, a ministry helping you connect the Christian story to life’s deepest questions. He has experience as a pastor, lecturer, and public speaker, having studied Theology and Apologetics in Australia and Oxford. Dan currently lives in Brisbane with his wife, Erin, and their favourite job is raising three wonderful boys.